| | | Hey Friend,
Happy Friday!
Well, what a week. As most of you know, I started a new job on Monday. Making the transition from a professional unemployed guy back to a professional IT guy has been a challenge, to say the least.
I'm doing my best to handle the change, keeping in line with last week's message. It's tough, though. With my extracurricular interests and all the repairs going on at the house, going to a j.o.b. every day is a real downer - especially since I can't wear shorts!
All this to say, I need to get real creative with my guitar practice time. Due to the schedule I have to follow, guitar time is becoming priceless.
I've got some suggestions to help you when you find yourself in a similar predicament.
Block It
When you're short on time but want to ensure you continue improving your skills, I've got some ideas for exercises you can do. These are easily fit into five minute blocks of time. As long as you have your guitar handy, you can get a lot done in five minutes. That makes it harder to use lack of time as an excuse, but hey, no judgement here!
One little caveat: make sure you decide on which skill and exercise you'll practice before you pick up your guitar. Five minutes goes quickly, and if you have to think about what you're going to practice, that five minutes will be gone before you start!
So here you go:
- scale patterns
- rhythm
- timing
- picking
There are tons of other things you can do as well, but it's better to start with a short list so you don't get overwhelmed. Frankly, this list is enough to take someone to pro status if they so choose.
Scale Patterns
If you're like me, my beginner scale pattern was the minor pentatonic (A minor, to be exact). That's the go-to scale for rockers. But there are so many other scales available that you should consider. How about the major pentatonic? What about the major and minor scales? Or the various modes of each scale?
There are many applications for the various scale patterns. Obviously playing lead guitar tops the list, but scales can help you understand music theory and chord construction. And of course there's melody creation.
Once you have a scale pattern learned, there are infinite pattern variations you can use to help solidify the scale in your brain and fingers. I swear, you could literally spend weeks practicing just one scale in its various modes before it got tiring. And you can learn each of them within five minutes.
Rhythm
How is your sense of rhythm? If you have any background with percussion, your rhythm is probably stellar, but most of us guitarists don't (have the background, that is). Without rhythm, you'll have a hard time playing along with songs and strumming.
Rhythm will allow your playing to have a nice flow to its sound. If your rhythm is off or too rigid, it can wreak havoc on the overall song experience.
A great exercise to help solidify your strum (and sense of rhythm) is to grab your metronome and set it up to 4/4 time. Keep the tempo (speed) below 80 BPM (beats per minute) . Without actually hitting the strings, start moving your strumming hand up and down in a smooth, consistent motion, using your elbow as the primary joint. Make sure the down/up motion occurs within each beat.
Then pick out a favorite chord or chord progression and begin strumming to the beat. Keeping the down/up motion going, strike the strings on the downward strum for each beat. Do this for a minute.
Then add an upstroke to the strum as your hand moves back up. Keep a nice consistent strum going. Does it feel easy and relaxed? Does it feel like it flows with the beat. If so, you can begin to try different strum patterns that feel natural or that work well with songs.
If your strums feel forced and stiff, try relaxing your hand a bit. Strumming comes more from the elbow, but there should be some flexibility in the wrist as you strum.
Timing
Timing ties in nicely with rhythm. Timing is the accuracy of your picking hand in relation to the beat.
It's very important to have a good sense of timing and to practice it regularly because it affects whether your playing sounds clean or sloppy. If your timing is off, you will play notes or strums in front of or behind the beat rather than on the beat. The faster the music, the sloppier it sounds if timing is bad.
You can work on timing in your five minute block by setting your metronome to a comfortable speed (between 60BPM and 80BPM) and strum a chord on each beat. Try to play the chord so you can't hear the metronome beep. If you don't have a guitar handy, simply clap to the beat, again trying to drown out the sound of the metronome with your clap.
You can work on this at varying speeds, but the main importance is to train your muscles to anticipate and react immediately when the beat comes.
Now clearly not every strum or note comes on the beat in a song, but this training allows you to solidify your timing. Once timing is strong you gain a better feel for injecting emotion into how the notes are played. But you have to get the timing down solid before your own feel and style can come out.
Picking Skills
Something that few guitar players focus enough on are picking skills, but these are a critical technique that will help you play better, faster and more smoothly.
By picking skills I mean how you use the pick to produce each sound coming from the guitar, particularly when you play individual notes versus full chord strums.
The default motion when plucking and strumming is downward. But clearly this is only half the motion. To make picking more efficient we add the up stroke. With this up motion added you literally increase your picking productivity 100 percent!
There are many picking techniques you can practice in your five minute block of time, but you'll get the most traction from using alternate picking. This means you alternate the pick direction for each note played - down, up, down, up, and so on.
Pick (sorry for the bad pun!) out a scale and run through the scale with only up strokes. Then run through and alternate between down and up picking for each bar (four beats). So you'd pluck downward for four beats, the upward for four beats. Then a full exercise using two down, two up and finally practice through the scale alternating between down and up strokes.
Again, there are many ways to practice picking skills and patterns, but working on alternate picking give you a solid foundation to work on more advanced techniques (like hybrid or directional picking, or sweep picking)
One Week At A Time
Clearly these are just a few ideas of how to get the most out of short practice windows. You got to be a bit creative to make guitar a priority when life throws a bunch of stuff at you. It's the only way you can continue to maintain as well as grow your current level.
Hope these ideas help. Maybe next week I can throw some exercises at you to go along with these ideas.
With that, it's back to the grind for me... Rock on, good peeps!
Peace~
Dave
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