Things to add to your Guitar practice routine
Aditya Balani
Practicing is something every musician inevitably has to tackle with, some hardly get to it and some spend hours in the woodshed.
A lot of guitarists just noodle on the guitar for hours and feel like they are not making much progress. I personally feel that quality of practice is far more valuable than quantity in terms of hours. So don’ t count the hours in your work, count the work in your hours! A good way to ensure productivity is to list out the things you’ d like to work on and allot a specific percentage of time to each item. I’ d like to share with you some important areas to focus on to better your guitar playing skills.
Warm up
Warming up is very crucial. I’ ve seen many guitarists pick up the guitar and play lightning speed licks right off the bat. Even though that may sound really cool, you are at the risk of injuring yourself. So before you set the fretboard on fire, loosen up your body, your neck, shoulders and arms. Stretch out the fingers of both hands and start playing some chords at a very slow tempo. Then you can move on to simple fingering patterns and run them across the neck gradually increasing the tempo.
Technical exercises
I usually break this down into 2 sections.
The Right hand: alternate picking, sweep or rest stroke picking, string skipping, strumming, finger style exercises
The Left hand: Legato playing with hammer-ons and pull-offs, trills, playing more than one note with one finger and chordal playing.
Make sure there is no unnecessary tension in any part of your body. Check your neck, shoulders and jaw periodically.
Also remember to mute the unwanted string noise from the strings that are not being played. Always strive for a clean sound with each note ringing clearly.
Linear Ideas
This constitutes scales, modes, arpeggios, lines, licks and any melodic device you’ re working on. Play your scales in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths and 7ths to help you get out of the scalar sounding ideas and get more contour in your lines.
Try to learn the same line in different positions and octaves. Also learn your scales on single strings- most guitarists learn two octave patterns in vertical positions but ignore the horizontal dimension on the guitar. Try it, it will open up a world of ideas!
Harmonic Ideas
In general guitarists have very limited harmonic knowledge. Once we’ ve learned our open chords, learning those ripping solos becomes our top priority! But believe me, if you are serious about learning the guitar there is no way around knowing your fretboard harmony well.
Learn your triads across the fingerboard and inversions on each string set. Learn Drop 2 and Drop 3 voicings and their inversions for 7th chords. Explore the idea of adding tensions to chords while removing the Root and 5th. Take a tune you already know and see if you can play the chords in different areas of the fretboard while voice leading. This will help you discover more voicings and chord shapes rather than feeling stuck in the same area of the freeboard.
Rhythmic Ideas
We all aspire to improve our time feel and add interesting rhythmic ideas to our playing. First off, practice with a metronome, your foot tapping skills may not be as great and as reliable as you may believe them to be. Work on different tempos subdividing the beat and making sure each subdivision is even. The goal is to sound clean( even more so with drive or distortion) and feel no effort while playing. Let’ s say you’ re learning a line and want to play it at a desired speed. Work with it slowly at first and keep increasing the tempo in small increments, while making sure you sound good and there is absolutely no tension in any part of your body.
A good way to learn new rhythmic ideas is studying new styles. Explore Brazillian, Afro-Cuban, Indian Classical, African, Middle- Eastern music and see how they interpret time feel and pulse.
For more tips on how to make your guitar practising more productive. please visit www. skore. in
The Score Magazine
42 www. thescoremagazine. com