How do u practice?

I've fallen into the rut of always practiceing the same chords, scale, and riff! :( I'm trying to get out of that!

We all do that from time to time. Just the nature of humans, path of least resistance and all that. What you need to do is sit down and figure out:

A. What do I want to learn
B. What techniques, exercises, songs will get me to A.
C. Then practice those things.
D. Reward yourself at the end of your practice by allowing yourself to play the same old stuff or a favorite song that you know etc.

Get a notebook, or something and log what you do and how long you do it. As time goes by you'll have a better picture of what your strong points are, what your weak points are and what you need to do next.

It can be as simple as learning a new chord, or a new scale, or postion of a scale or as hard as you want to make it. :D

Just to add to that, there's a great article on the difference between plans and goals on guitarnoise, really a great read if you're thinking about re-evaluating your guitar playing.

I have a list of things to work through:

It's quite long, so I won't type it all out, but it includes scales, note recognition (written and heard), voice exercises, some exercises to improve my accuracy and some for speed, and so on....

But I always start with a bit of noodling, just to warm the fingers up and get in the mood.

Then I stare out the window, drift off into a daydream, keep noodling...
.. and then I just lie about how much I practice.... :twisted:

But NEXT week, I'm going to get stuck into those exercises...... for sure... :wink:

(Actually I do have some sheets I've put together to help me work on practice, and I might post them here in a few days when I get round to putting them on my web space.)

Cheers, Chris

wow, thats good advice, something I had seriously had'nt thought about, here I was kicken' myself in the but for not doing more!! I like the notebook Idea to, would work great for when your learning ten MILLION things at one