#Daily guitar practice schedule pdf how to#

Now, how would you practice all this? Here are actions steps to get these into your playing: All this is to support the music, whatever song I want to play. Jamming provides the context for all the material practiced.In addition to all this, the core glue is the song, the repertoire. Everything in the end should fit in a context. It’s precedes the actual performance situation and in a way simulates the environment. Jamming is a way to experiment and have fun with the material I worked on. Anyone can practice all of the above but still not be able to apply it in context. This is part of the process to develop my musicality. Write melodies – I write melodies, transcribe solos and licks and write etudes to challenge my ears and my fingers. For arranging, scales can be the source of creating different elements in the music. I view this as an extension of the chord and not the primary element, at least in improvisation. Arpeggios are great for clearly stating the harmony and as a skeletal structure for all the melodies that happen in between.īeyond the arpeggios, scales provide the extended colors of the chord. It’s not enough to just know the chords in a vertical manner (stacked notes), it’s also essential to be able outline the harmony in a linear melodic fashion. Practice new chords – find interesting voicings, expand my guitar fretboard awareness and most importantly: develop my ears. It can be overwhelming and intense to digest so here’s a little diagram to help you out. Over the years of learning jazz, I’ve formulated a way of practicing and organizing the mass amount of information out there. The best part was that I had to understand how everything worked.

#Daily guitar practice schedule pdf how to#

The best part of this is that I had to figure out how to learn. Music was a very challenging thing to me & I still feel the challenge daily. I’m not what people might call ‘gifted’ or ‘talented’. I didn’t know how to connect them to music. I for one, knew it didn’t sound like real music yet. Then, my friend Rithan asked me what was I doing.

There I was in the hallways of the college, sitting on the floor staring at the book. I played the notes so stiffly and I had no idea how everything was supposed to work. If you do, your devotion will pay off in a remarkable way in just a short period of time.I remember the first time I learned jazz arpeggios from the Jerry Coker Patterns For Jazz book when I was studying in International College of Music, Kuala Lumpur in 1998. As you can see, there's no limit to the way you can mold these categories to your satisfaction-the key is that you commit to the schedule once you’ve built it. For the scales category, you might want to focus on the Mixolydian and symmetrical diminished scales for blues, but harmonic minor for hard rock. If you want to become a better funk player, you could add rhythmic chord vamps over drum loop exercises, among many others. There are plenty of these types of exercises on Guitar World to choose from. If you want to be come a better metal player, insert sweeping, tapping and alternate picking exercises here. The exercises category can consist of any exercises that will help you achieve your desired results. THE THIRD AND FINAL STEP is to customize the categories to your guitar goals. The customization continues in the last step. So if one day I exclude Theory and Improvisation, I’ll be required to practice those categories the following day. The next day, however, I have to be sure to hit those categories. I’ll throw out two categories per session, meaning I won’t practice two of the eight categories on a given day. I’ve chosen to spend 15 minutes on each category per practice session, which of course would give us two hours of potential practice, going over the hour and a half timeframe I decided in. The categories are: Exercises, Scales, Chords, Ear Training, Sight Reading, Theory, Songwriting, and Improvisation. I’ll outline the categories I recommend, as they’re pretty universal and will be customized in the next step. STEP TWO is to then break that time into categories of practice.