Guitar Practice Sins - Answers

Transcription

1 Guitar Practice Sins - Answers Here are the answers to the guitar practice sins committed in this guitar practice video: Scenario #1 (3:27-3:47) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Not watching the hands at all while practicing. Instead, you see me stare mindlessly out into space, as my hands are going through the motions of playing scales on autopilot. Why this sin is dangerous to your guitar playing: First of all, understand that the process of practicing guitar effectively consists of: identifying and solving your guitar playing problems and training yourself to make your technique better (via applying effective new practice habits). If your eyes are not focused on what the hands are doing, your brain is not getting feedback it needs to understand if you are practicing/training yourself correctly, then you are simply reinforcing the same inefficient and ineffective guitar playing habits that will make it impossible to develop flawless and effortless technique. Guitarists who practice in this way often end up extremely frustrated even if they practice a lot. Practicing without watching your hands is similar to driving blindfolded and hoping to get to where you are going and not get into a horrible accident in the process. What to do instead to make your practicing highly effective: 1. START watching your hands when you practice 2. Learn EXACTLY what you need to pay attention to while practicing so that it becomes totally obvious and natural for you to focus on what your hands are doing (as opposed to going through the motions in a mindless way, wasting time and becoming bored). THIS is what will enable you to start seeing exponentially faster progress in your guitar playing. To learn how to do this, read this page. Scenario #2 (3:54-4:09) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Watching the WRONG hand while practicing. In this scenario, you can see me watching my fretting hand only the entire time. Instead, all my attention should have been focused on the picking hand instead of the fretting hand. Why? 2 reasons:

2 1. It can be seen in the video that the fretting hand had no real problems with it, therefore watching it did nothing to help make the playing better. 2. It s very easy to see that the picking hand is making very huge motions to play each note (way more than necessary) and thus is fatiguing much faster than the fretting hand. So the picking hand needs all the attention in this example, so that its motions could be refined further and progress can be made. Watching the fretting hand (i.e. the wrong hand in this specific case) is just as big of a sin as not watching your hands at all. Guitar Practice Sin #2 (caused by sin #1): Because the eyes were focused on the fretting hand, the picking hand continues to move on autopilot- making WAY bigger motions than necessary to play notes. As mentioned in the video, the first sin was ENSURING the second one would happen also (if you were to practice this way all the time), To make sure that you never unintentionally commit this sin in your practicing (or to become aware whether or not you are committing it now), you must do the following: Understand the EXACT goal/purpose of each exercise you practice. Never practice an exercise just to practice or with a vague goal of improving your speed. You must understand the exact and specific reasons (micro goals) that each exercise is helping you accomplish Train yourself to correctly identify the EXACT causes of your guitar playing problems/mistakes, so that your practicing can be done with a problem-solving, results-oriented mindset instead of in a robotic/mindless way. This is what will enable you to know which hand to pay attention at any given time as you practice. I train guitar players to do exactly this in my Rapid Fire Guitar Practice Training program. To learn how to turbo charge your guitar playing and progress, go to: Scenario #3: (4:22-4:37) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Using phaser effects (or any kind of effects except regular distortion) while practicing for guitar speed, 2 hand synchronization, cleanliness of playing or other elements of technique. Why is this a sin? When you practice using effects, it becomes VERY difficult to hear if you are playing cleanly or if your hands are in sync at faster speeds. The mistakes you are making are not immediately obvious and thus are harder to correct. Because you are making it hard for your ears/brain to get the feedback needed to refine your practicing, your time is being literally wasted - no improvements are taking place in your playing

3 and no mistakes are being identified and corrected. Yes, you are going through the motions of practicing, but you are really just playing, not practicing. To make your practicing highly effective, you must make it as easy as possible for your ears and mind to identify any and all mistakes you are making (and fix them), so do not use any effects while practicing (except distortion). Guitar Practice Sin #2: Not paying attention or playing in time to the metronome In the video I am (intentionally of course) playing completely out of time with the metronome. This not only completely defeats the purpose of using a metronome in the first place, but also creates yet another distraction for your mind brain/mind/ears that prevents you from paying attention to things that you NEED to focus on to improve your playing. When you use a metronome for practicing, it must serve one (or both) of its two primary roles: To test or refine your timing And/or: To test your guitar speed to identify specific mistakes in your technique that occur at or near your top speeds (so you can then fix them). If you are not doing either of the things above, then you are actually HURTING your progress by practicing with a metronome (since it ends up being nothing but a distraction for yourself). If you are NOT able to hear how/why my playing is out of time in the video, this is another problem in and of itself that you must overcome to learn to practice guitar effectively. Get started with overcoming ALL of your guitar practice and playing problems here. Guitar Practice Sin #3: Using way too much excessive tension in the picking hand shoulder (this is very obvious from seeing my shoulder raised up very high in the video). The negative effects of too much tension are well known and obvious - when your body is more tense than necessary, it becomes impossible to play fast and make your guitar playing feel easy. Too much tension in guitar playing is the equivalent of running with your shoelaces tied together What is NOT so obvious is how the tension came to be there in the first place. And this leads me to the next sin of this video clip:

4 Guitar Practice Sin #4: Using a very bad sitting position (with the guitar on the right leg). Why is this sitting position a guitar practice sin? Here are a few obvious reasons: You are forced to play with your picking hand s shoulder raised in an awkward position (leading to excessive tension identified in Sin #3 of this scenario). The guitar feels unstable against your body and moves around too much while playing (making it more difficult to play). The fretting hand fingers cannot be stretched as easily to play chords/scales/licks that require wider stretches (without greater risk of injury). Your fretting hand wrist has to bend a lot more while playing, putting greater strain on your muscles and tendons. This position is totally different from how your guitar is positioned when you play standing up. This makes it much more difficult to transition from playing guitar sitting down to playing standing up. Solution: Position your guitar on your LEFT leg (if you are right handed) and elevate your left foot with a footstool or some books. This position fixes ALL of the above problems and makes your guitar playing feel much easier. Note: Yes, of course there are some truly great/virtuoso players who sit with the guitar on their right leg and play amazingly well. However, these exceptions do not change the facts that the sitting position itself is simply inferior. Those great players who use the inferior position are able to play well in spite of its limitations, not because of them. If you are not yet a great guitar player yourself (and REALLY want to become one as quickly as possible), you should maximize every element you can to your advantage to make your practicing as efficient and effective as possible. Scenario #4: (4:45-5:14) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Inconsistent way of forming the second chord of the chord change (a BIG problem!) Sometimes you can see me forming the second chord while transitioning from the first chord, and other times I was moving my hand to the position where the new chord was to be played and only THEN started forming the shape of the new chord at the last minute. Why this sin is dangerous for your guitar playing: This inconsistency confuses the hands (and mind) and prevents you from training your hands effectively to overcome challenges in your guitar playing. When practicing to master something, you must know exactly what specific motions you need to be training and then drill just THOSE motions into your technique to make them automatic. Any inconsistency in this process makes improving your technique MUCH more difficult and infinitely more frustrating. Any inconsistency in practicing also means that you are either: not paying full attention to

5 what you are doing or you are not fully conscious of the correct technical motions to use while practicing (usually both). Solution: Identify EXACTLY how you need to practice any challenging element of your technique and pay attention to being perfectly consistent in the technical motions you use while practicing. This applies to ALL techniques of course, not only to chord changes (the chord change in this video example is merely a single context that demonstrates the issue). If you don t know how to do this, you need to get training on how to practice guitar rand how to train yourself to overcome your guitar playing challenges/problems. Guitar Practice Sin #2: Wrapping thumb over the top of the neck for playing chords (you can see the first knuckle of my thumb sticking up over the fretboard when playing the chord change). Why this is a sin in THIS scenario (of playing chords): Having the thumb over the top of the fretboard creates 2 general problems: 1. It makes it much harder to stretch the fingers of the fretting hand while playing. 2. It forces the inside of your palm to touch the high E string, muting it (which is what you DON T want when playing chords that require the high E string to ring). To be clear, having the thumb over the top of the neck is NOT bad in every case. For bends and vibrato and certain guitar licks, you actually WANT to have the thumb wrapped around like this, to make playing easier. The goal is to identify when having the thumb over the top of the neck IS a problem and practice in the correct way (with the thumb behind the neck) consistently to make sure the correct technical habits are being trained. Guitar Practice Sin #3: Making small, last-minute adjustments in the hands when playing. You can see me sometimes adjusting the positions of the fingers on the frets after the new chord is already being played. This is a mistake for a few reasons: 1. It indicates that the motions for playing the chord change perfectly and consistently have not been mastered. 2. It requires more concentration to perform the chord change in real life guitar playing (such as while performing) making your guitar playing less reliable and making mistakes more likely to happen. 3. It causes sloppy noises in your playing that make the notes/chords sound sloppy.

6 Solution: You need to learn how to practice chord changes effectively (and what to pay attention o while doing so), so that they become super easy to play, clean and reliable every single time. Scenario #5: (5:23-5:38) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Inconsistent picking articulation. You can hear that I start picking the notes very loudly, with great articulation, but the power becomes weaker and weaker as I play on the higher strings and descend the scale sequence. Why this sin is dangerous to your guitar playing: Having your picking articulation become weaker as you play is a sign of excessive tension in your picking hand. It is usually caused by starting to play in a relaxed way, but not releasing the tension from playing notes and letting it accumulate in your arm and shoulder. As you keep playing, the excessive tension builds up, making it harder and harder to articulate the notes. As a result, your articulation becomes progressively weaker and weaker and the arm becomes more and more fatigued. This continues until the pick no longer makes contact with the string and you are forced to stop playing to relax. Solution: You must learn the most effective (and simple) ways to release all excessive tension from your guitar playing. This will not only make your guitar playing feel much easier and help you to increase your top speed, but will also make your guitar playing sound MUCH better at every speed. To learn how to make your guitar playing feel very effortless and easy, read this page. Scenario #6: (5:47-5:58) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Using inefficient fingering in the fretting hand. In the scale you can see me play on the video, I am using fingers 1 3 and 4 to play finger shapes that span two whole steps. Why this sin is dangerous to your guitar playing: It s much more difficult to stretch between fingers 3 and 4 (compared to stretching with other fingers when playing guitar), so using this inefficient fingering will make it much harder to play guitar fast and clean. Solution: Fortunately, the solution for this specific sin is very easy: start using fingers for finger patterns that span 2 whole steps no the guitar - problem solved

7 Scenario #7: (6:07-6:17) Guitar Practice Sin # 1: Making huge (swooping) motions with the picking hand for every note (instead of picking the strings with a much more efficient straight up and down motion). Note: I'm NOT saying to make the smallest motions possible - I'm simply saying to : eliminate WASTED motion. Why this sin is dangerous to your guitar playing: This problem is a symptom of not being able to correctly identify and diagnose your guitar playing problems on a larger scale. And even if you don t have THIS problem in your guitar technique, if you couldn t identify it instantly by watching me play on video means that there are likely other guitar technique issues present in your playing that are holding you back every time you practice, staring you in the face and begging you to solve them This specific problem (and its solution) is similar to the guitar practice sin #2 in Scenario 2 of this video. Scenario #8: (6:28-6:44) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Using alternate picking instead of directional picking. Why this sin is dangerous to your guitar playing: The answer to this is thoroughly described in this video: (watch that video before sending me angry messages defending alternate picking ) Solution: Learn how to adopt directional picking into your guitar playing quickly and easily, so that your guitar playing feels and sounds WAY easier, faster and cleaner than ever before. I will walk you through the exact process of doing so in my Rapid Fire Guitar Practice Training course: Scenario #9: (6:55-7:19) Guitar Practice Sin #1: Using incorrect picking motions for sweep picking arpeggios. In the video, you can see me picking each note with a separate pick stroke instead of using ONE very smooth and continuous downstroke to ascend the arpeggio and one smooth upstroke to descend the arpeggio.

8 Why this sin is dangerous to your guitar playing: Reason #1: By not using the most efficient motions for sweep picking (and not realizing that the motions you are using ARE inefficient), you will NEVER sweep pick fast and clean. Instead, you will end up doing what most guitarists do: browse the web for more sweep picking exercises, try to practice to a metronome by starting slow and gradually speeding up the tempo, etc not realizing that the solution to your problem is a whole lot easier and it is staring you right in the face every time you practice. Reason #2: (Similar to other problems/sins explained earlier) If you are not able to identify this flaw instantly when you saw me doing it in the video, it is a symptom of a much more serious problem: your general inability to diagnose your guitar practice problems and solve them. Solution: To improve this area of your sweep picking technique, focus on pushing the hand through the strings when ascending an arpeggio with sweep picking (so that all notes are hit with one pick stroke) and pull your hand back when descending the arpeggio to ensure that all the notes are hit with one continuous upstroke motion. So how many from the 15 sins did you identify correctly? If you found less than 5, don t worry - you are NOT alone! The vast majority of guitar players are stumped by this test and years ago I would have scored the same (or even worse) than most. It was exactly this frustration with my lack of results from practicing that lead me to invest thousands of hours into learning the most effective guitar practice methods and applying, testing, refining and perfecting them. After many years of trying to master my guitar technique and learning to get superior results from practicing I now train other guitarists how to practice guitar effectively to get HUGE results in their playing quickly. I want to help you stop being frustrated with your guitar practicing, learn how to identify and overcome every single one of your guitar playing problems and make your guitar playing feel effortless and sound awesome. To get started, go to this page right now: