The Principles of effective practice

To prepare for learning new skills, it is essential that that you know and understand how to practice efficiently and manage your goals.

Here are a few of the topics that I cover with my students;

Warming up

Whenever I pick up my guitar or sit at my keys with the intention of having a good practice session, I will always warm up for about 5 minutes. This can be anything from playing a few chord progressions, maybe some II V I’s or even just going through a scale. A good warm up I often do on the guitar is to go through the major scale in 3rds, this gets my hands warm and is great ear training also. But whatever works for you, experiment and always make sure that even though you are warming up, its not mindless ‘noodling’.

Mental Approach and Focus

Making sure that when you do sit down to practice, you have a clear path of what you want to achieve. Write down exactly what you want to practice, for me this helped allot. When I first started I often found myself getting distracted and losing my focus. 

Don’t be afraid to be conservative with your time. Practice, especially when you are first starting out can be a daunting task. You don’t have to spend 7 hours a day practicing sight reading or playing scales over and over. Infact, setting short dedicated practice time out- say 15 minutes is usually much more beneficial in the long run. 

Setting Goals

I touched on this earlier, but something as simple as setting out goals before practice can really help you improve. Knowing what you want to achieve within the next 30 mins by writing it down can help you accurately measure your improvement. Write out 3 things that you want to achieve within the next 30 minutes of practice. This could be, play in all positions of the A minor pentatonic scale, Play the A minor chord in all positions and then spend a few minutes deciding what your favourite position was and what chords fit around that. 

This is just an example but you can literally do anything you want!

Balancing Material

In order to master any subject- it is important to study every aspect. In music, this can mean different genres, different instruments and even different cultures. For example, classical music uses allot of arpeggios, Metal music also uses the same arpeggios just in a different context. Therefor you will benefit by learning some classical approaches that can be easily transferred to a very different genre.

I often found that when I started playing jazz, and understanding jazz I began to enjoy it much more. It even helped my phrasing and was a transferable skill I could use in other contexts.

Environment

Something that’s often overlooked is your environment. A footballer would practice and train on a football pitch, this would help them then ‘perform’ when it came to a match. All of my students lessons take place in a studio environment and when possible a stage too. You should always try and practice in the environment that makes sense.

Repetition based Learning

The aim is to develop your understanding of music so it becomes second nature, to not actually think about what you are playing or what you want to play but still have the ability to pull it off. This is only achieved by repetition. 

This is one of the most important aspects of your learning, to repeat until muscle memory takes over and you are no longer consciously thinking about what you are doing. This will allow you to express yourself freely and truly unlock new skills and open up a world of opportunities for your mind to explore on your instrument. 

Tune up!

Always ensure that before you even start to play anything, you are in tune. This might sound obvious but the amount of players that forget to tune up before a performance or before a practice can waste time, affect your performance and just sounds bad!

Heres a website you can use to tune your guitar, just tune each string to match the pitch you hear. 

https://www.fender.com/online-guitar-tuner/electric-guitar-tuning/

On my pedal board, I use TC electronics PolyTune. Once I press the pedal on, it cuts the signal to my amp ( I also hate the sound of someone tuning a guitar!) so no sound comes from my amp, and then match the note to turn green on my pedal. This, in my opinion is one of the best tuners on the market and recommend this pedal to all of my students. For the gear heads out there it also acts as a buffer, so no signal is lost in your chain!

Just remember, TUNE UP!