practice?

Practice works best when it is crafted with your goals in mind. You may consider two hours of noodling to be practice, but it's for damned sure you ain't accomplishing anything. That said, results in music are slow to come by, will creep up on you, and you will probably be moving on to other things before you even realize what you achieved.

Kind of like losing/gaining weight.

Practice is very important to achieve the goal. You have to do more practice.

You know guys I've basically practice for an hour and a half but lately that doesn't seem to be enough for me, So whats wrong with me?

I've practice 2 hours this morning when it was cool and I feel like i didn't practice at all..

Any of you feel like this once in a while?

Yep, and some days you'l practise for ten minutes and you'll be flying.

Where a lot of people go wrong is thinking that playing through their whole repertoire is practising it. It isn't - practise is a controlled workthrough making sure you get each note correct, each chord change in the right place, correct fingering and so on.

A :-)

I'm learning all my chords, I'm polishing up my song, I'm polishing up crossroads, I'm getting my right hand stronger and so on.

but as of late I practice 1 and a half hour doesn't seem a enough anymore.

Enough for what?

What expectation are you failing to meet with your current practice regime?

just be careful you don't burn out with so much practice daily. It's happened to me before.

Tom

Enough for what?

What expectation are you failing to meet with your current practice regime?My right hand techniques, muting.

I've been practicing a hell of a lot lately so my right hand can be as good as my left hand and I'm almost there.

Hopefully another 2-3 months and I will be there.....

That's what you're working on. But why do you feel that your practice session is not enough. When you say "it doesn't feel like I've practiced at all," tell us why. What do you think it should feel like? What do you expect to see that would indicate for you that you've practiced enough?

If your thought is that you should see improvement day-to-day, you have a false expectation. You won't. Or you rarely will anyway. It doesn't matter if you practice 14 hours a day.

Indeed, there's such a thing as over-practicing, not so much related to time as to informational volume -- if you're trying to do too much neither your fingers nor your brain will process the information and you'll improve slower.

Cast your mind back to when you first started playing - you couldn't do very much at all, right? Now make a list of what you CAN do - then you'll see how much you've improved.

Playing guitar's a steep learning curve at first - you learn a lot of new information very quickly. It takes time to assimilate. Now most people, once they've got over that initial burst of enthusiasm, will hit a plateau where that learning curve flattens out - and they don't realise, they're not actually standing still, they're improving the skills they now posess before moving on to something new.

Derek, you're fairly new here, but you have posted quite a few questions already. The question you have to ask yourself is, have I learned anything from them? Yes, you have, haven't you! Therefore you ARE improving, even if that improvement isn't translated to a daily I-can-see-progress basis. Like Kingpatzer said, that kind of expectation isn't realisitic.

Guitar's like anything else - apart from the knowledge you consciously acquire, there will be all kinds of stuff you pick up and don't even realise it. Take the time to make a list of what you can do, and then work out where you want to go next.

:D :D :D

Vic

King,

is right you have to know where you think you are failing but improvements don't come in giant leaps on a daily basis, sometimes it may take months before you achieve what you are striving or at least be able to realize you have improved.

I'm not sure exactly what you meant by your original post but I have felt the same why. I wake up early usually on the weekends and play for a couple hours from say 6 - 8 am then I might go back t sleep whatever. But I almost always feel like I've done noting and end up playing more throughout the day.

I wil admit that my practice is not totally structured and sometimes is really just going through material I'm not as polished on, but when I do this I do try and make sure I slow things down and concentrate on fingering, getting the notes correct etc.

Perhaps try some different styles, stuff you normally wouldn't be into.

In another post you said you were into blues... Try jazz, bluegrass, punk, country...
Just a bit, maybe 15-20 min of your practice time.
You'll be starting at square 1 on those, and will see some quick improvement. Good for the motivation.

And you might find something cool that you never thought about before. Something you can incorporate into your "normal" playing.

Observations about practice:

Your left hand will learn quicker than the right one. Although it seems more difficult to manipulate all the fingers on the left hand to learn different chords, it is really more difficult to pick the correct string with a flatpick. I don't know why, but I guess it is because your focus is on your left hand (I do think a guitar is a left-handed instrument - but that's another topic). Fortunately, little by little, your right hand will learn.

At first, I anchored my right hand with my pinky at the bottom of the bridge pickup on my Casino or ES-330 guitars (any fixed place to anchor it will do). It made it much easier to pick the correct string. Then later, without my realizing it, I started picking up my pinky and had no more use for the anchor. I don't know if this is a "correct" method or not, but it worked for me.

Another practice method I learned long ago, it was suggested while I was in high school. If faced with a difficult passage, I practice the passage for two minutes as fast as I can without making a mistake (even if the fastest I can play it is at a snail's pace). Then I put the instrument down for two minutes and do something else (like type on the Internet). Then I pick up the instrument for two minutes and put it down for another two minutes. I am certain that I learn things much quicker that way. I don't know why.

I don't know if that will work for everybody, but you might want to try it.

Notes

I can relate, I have always been a practice freak. I still practice 2-3 hours everyday or more with few exceptions. To me, practice has always been fun, never work. :D

I do believe there are better ways to practice. For all the practicing I've done, I should be a much better player than I am. It is only in the past few years that I have developed a more disciplined practice, and I have seen greater improvement this way.

I have especially been working on improving my picking speed and accuracy over the past few years. I have a book by Troy Stentina called Speed Mechanics for Lead guitar. I will practice exercises out of this book every day. Troy writes about how to practice and I have found it helpful. He says to identify your weaknesses and analyze why they are a problem for you, practice them slowly with a metronome and gradually speed up. He says if you cannot seem to play fast with the metronome, but you can play fast without a metronome, then you are fast, but not musical. I have found this the case sometimes. So I have worked on being able to play along with the metronome (drum machine actually).

I think books like this are very helpful, if only because you are shown exercises that would never occur to you on your own.

You have to learn to be patient with practice. Sometimes you think you will never improve, but you are, it is just so slow you do not notice. This week I practiced a particular exercise in Troy's book that I could never play cleanly above about 90 beats per minute. To my surprise I could play it easily (and well) up to about 110 BPM. So, just stay at it and you will improve.

But I think you have to have a little fun too. I will also play through songs our band is learning. I will just play them over and over again. If I sing, I practice that and try to improve my vocals.

And a little bit of noodling is good too. I will often just play leads to a simple progression. I try to come up with good leads that have some melody to them. I hate when my solos all sound the same, so I am always experimenting on how to play a solo over the same progression and make it sound completely different, and at the same time sounding good. I try to always put melody in my leads and also focus on "target notes", notes that lead the listener to hear the chord progression I am playing over.

But just like you, no matter how much I practice, I always want to practice more. I just love it. This can really drive people around you insane, most do not share this love of endless practice. :roll:

Keep Rockin'

Glad to see your making progress.

Tom

Glad to see your making progress.

TomI'm but very slowly compared to some of you guys, but it's cool.

Idoubt anyone's progress is slower than mine, but I'm OK with that.

Everyone progresses at their own speed, don't be too obsessed with how you are doing compared to someone else.