Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

Do you know how to drive a stick shift car or anything with a manual (normal) transmission? If you at least understand the concept of driving a manual transmission car then you’ll probably understand the following analogy.

My guitar education feels like I’ve been stuck in first gear with my engine over revving to making up for the lack of gears. I’ve occasionally made it to second gear but either way I’ve been pushing hard and I feel like I’m not getting very far. I feel like no matter how hard I push each practice session I can only get so far — never where I want to be…

I’ve got two more prepaid lesson left at The Music Room. While they’ve been great, I’ve decided not to renew with them. It is important for me to mention that my teacher is/has been excellent but I feel like I should have progressed further than I have. I attribute this not to the teaching but my inability to focus as much time on guitar as I’d like. Quite simply, guitar is over-occupying my time (even though I want to put in more time). I figure if I’m not in weekly lessons I can focus a little more on other things (like Design Patterns or how Firefox works)… In addition to guitar…

My guitar studies will continue and I will continue to run Understanding Guitar.  My plan, in regards to The Music Room, is to take the “ad-hoc” options. With this option, I’ll have to call in to schedule an appointment every week or two. I’m considering this plan a half self-study, have lessons plan.

Check out this article: http://www.guitarnoise.com/article.php?id=542

The article covers things like Scales, Power Chords and Double stops.

Are you able to get enough in? I never feel like I can get enough practice in, but on the other hand I also feel like I can only practice so much at once.

I figure that I probably get, on average, about one hour (perhaps one an a half hours) of guitar practice in per day. Some days, I get more, some days I get less.

I just got back from my weekly lessons. We, as always, went over new material. However, before the new material, we went over an old Ionian scale [I found some here: http://gosk.com/scales/major-scale-for-guitar.php – The particular one I was playing through was “Major, sweep pattern ”]. It was one of the first scales that I learned. I couldn’t remember it right away! Even though I had to have practiced that particular scale literally thousands of time.

The problem was that, though I had practiced it thousands of times, I hadn’t recently practiced it. I’ve been (obviously) practicing the newer material that I’ve been given. But because I never have enough time to practice (so I feel), I can never get back to the early, early material.

When my teacher springs “the old stuff” on me, it catches me off guard and I have trouble remembering exactly how it goes.

Does anyone out there have any suggestions? Perhaps patterns to approach fitting old material in to “short” practice sessions?

Aside from getting this blog up and running, my all of my guitar practice sessions have included rhythm practice. After about 5 weeks in to playing, I had realized that I hadn’t been practicing rhythm guitar at all! To no fault of my instructor – He was giving me plenty of chord progressions to practice rhythm, however I ended up focusing on chord forms and ignoring the rhythm aspect of my practice.

As a result, I ended up with very little ability to keep time or rhythm. My pace was set by how fast I could change to specific chords; this is not a good method to practice guitar or music in general.

An Exercise

Here is an example of a simple “chord move” exercise which I’ve been using to practice rhythm [I do this exercise with various chords -- please feel free to use chord you are familiar with but do not forget to "push" yourself a little and try new chords]. This exercise is pretty straight forward.

I feel that it is extremely important to play this against a metronome. I feel that this is the best way to ensure that your timing is consistent and even.

I suggest that you start out slowly. There is no need to rush this at all. Get the feel for the chord change and please keep in mind that part of this exercise is to change to the next chord smoothly and without dropping a beat or rushing a beat (strumming before you are suppose to). Then gradually increase your metronome (perhaps in increments of 10 beats?)

Thus far, I’ve been able to successfully (within correct time, no beats missed, or chord-form mistakes) play through this particular exercise at a 80 BPM — I had started at 40 BPM a day ago.

Also, experiment with different chords – perhaps a couple of new chords that you picked up from a book or your instructor.

As always, I hope that this is a useful piece of information that benefits you in some way. Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, questions, etc!