Tips on How to Effectively Practice Guitar

Don't know what or how to practice guitar? Don't worry. There are easy tips to get started with your guitar practice and I can share it to you if you like. But first, you should have prepared the things you need to play guitar. You can read my previous article to learn what are the things you needed. If you're all set, then you can check the guidelines below.

Know what you want

Everything starts from an idea and you better know what you are getting into before even attempting to practice. You want to visualize what you want to learn for the coming week or for the following months. You might want to go deeper with scales, assuming that you already get a good idea with playing chords. You can learn whatever. The thing is, you just need to know what it is first. That's the first step and some prefer this as planning, it's pretty much the same for me.

Figuring your time

You then have to figure how much time you'll devote to this process. If you are willing to give 3 hours of real guitar practice then that's great. You can also give at least an hour a day or even few minutes a day or a week. It doesn't mean that you give 3 hours of practice, the more skilled you will become. It's about how you manage your time and what kind of "guitar practice" you have inserted into that time allowance. So a fine, specific and complete practice fit in an hour can be better than a disorganized, non-focused 3-hour exercise. Go figure.

Set the schedule and be religious to it

Now you probably have a time allotted for each day, and so you will then need to set a schedule. See, if you have in mind a special skill you want to achieve or a guitar piece perhaps, you should include that 60 percent of your time for practice. For example, you want to learn the piece, "Flight of the Bumble Bee", you will have to give around 40 minutes training that is relevant to that piece, that is if you plan to have an hour a day. Remember that the 60 percent is considered as the meat of the practice. Only do the relevant things and forget about the other things.

The other forty percent is divided into other exercise that are crucial. These are finger and picking exercise. Chromatic scale training is great for hitting finger exercise and picking training at the same time. You can also do other scale forms or dedicated finger and dedicated picking exercises as well.

By the way, it's up to you how much time you give for warm up and cool down stretching. It's highly recommended though for you to avoid injuries.

Of course, you need to be religious with your exercise program. You don't want to end up failing or not progressing at all after a month. Set a strict time. A time where you are not usually disturbed by someone or with your other schedules like school and work. For students, it would be best to have practices on the afternoon or after you're done with your homework. For working people, it will depend on your schedules. No matter what, you should accomplish your practice daily or as you plan it to be. Sticking to the plan will guarantee success. This is also why I prefer having shorter but effective guitar practice schedule. This way, the practice doesn't bore you and it doesn't take much of your day.

Good luck in your guitar training and practice! Don't forget to stay positive and always work on things no matter what.

Learn how to play the guitar and check some more tips regarding the instrument and music in general in my website. Playing guitar has never been as easy. You can do it!

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Guiding Piano Students Towards Effective Practice

Competitions, festivals and music college entrance auditions are just around the corner. This is a time where dedicated students are spending more hours on practice in preparation for these major events. When I was a student, I seldom practice more than 5 hours a day despite eminent deadlines, though many of my fellow classmates claimed that they practiced more than 8 hours a day.

It has been documented in educational and psychological research as in Sloboda et al's (1998) study on musical giftedness that there is positive correlation between hours spent on practice and overall achievement. For instance, to attain international levels of performance requires approximately an accumulation of about 10000 hours of practice.

My question remains - Is it really true that the more hours the better? When does one reach the point of diminishing return - where more practice hours does not equate better results. In fact, over practice may lead to fatigue, loss of perspective towards the music, or even injury.

Practice is an essential part of musical development, and it is important that healthy and efficient practice habits are cultivated from the onset. In my teaching, I help my students develop a keen sense of awareness towards practice from a very young age. I believe that it is very important to have a clear understanding about what is involved in meaningful practice from the very beginning. In practice, efficiency is important as time is a commodity for most students. Skills for practice need to be developed so that the most can be achieved within a limited time frame.

I often stress the difference between "Quality versus Quantity" in practice. By that, I am referring to two modes of working - working hard and working smart. Working hard is a given, but that in itself does not guarantee positive results. On the contrary, working smart will ensure that one paves the way for optimal results. Coupled with dedication, clarity of mind and self control, students are likely to achieve their goals much more effectively without having to suffer the consequences of inefficient practice. It takes much more time and effort in back tracking and rectifying mistakes that were incorporated into practice. Time misspent is in essence time wasted.

I give my students very clear goals for their practice, and I specify to young students the goals they need to achieve from one lesson to the next. Ultimately, it is the results that count.

Musical practice is both a cognitive and physical process. It involves troubleshooting and problem solving. Once a problem has been identified, one needs to strategize for a course of action to rectify the problem. This is a reflective and introspective process that requires active listening, sensitivity and awareness of the physical body. Repetition will only be fruitful when a solution has been found for a specific technical or musical problem. The danger in many instances is that students repeat passages before they have found any solutions to their problems. In which case, repetition is done haphazardly, and as a consequence, becomes counterproductive.

I have identified three stages of practice for my students:

(1) Problem identification - This is a phase where problems and difficulties are identified. It is only after isolating the specific problems and difficulties can one effectively strategize for a solution - whether it is technical or musical.

(2) Problem solving - This involves a level of experimentation, cognitive judgment, active listening and making adaptive physical adjustments. In this process, one has to be mindful, as one needs to continuously make dynamic auditory, visual, physical and aesthetic judgments as to whether certain choices or approaches are appropriate and effective.

(3) Reinforcement- The actual process of physical reinforcement of motor co-ordination through repetition in order to reach a level of physical automatization. This will only be useful when a proper solution has been identified.

Musical practice is a re-iterative process. Once a level of automatization has been achieved, the student may wish re-evaluate their performance goals for the next level. In so doing, steps 1 to 3 will be re-iterated multiple times for further refinement.

Cultivation of healthy and effective habits needs to start from a very young age. Many teachers find it effective to write down practice goals for elementary students, so that they will be reminded of the content covered in the lesson. This also provides a clearly pre-defined structure for students to adhere to during their practice. While this prescriptive approach may be effective in the short term, it does not necessarily cultivate introspection and nor help students make dynamic judgments during practice. Once students have developed a certain level of musical awareness, it is important to teach them to learn on their own. They should develop the ability to critique their own performances, seek their own musical voice and to find solutions in achieving their goals.

During lessons, I ask my students a lot of questions with regard to their playing. The purpose is to encourage them to evaluate their own performances, identify problematic areas and propose suggestions towards artistic refinement. This training also sensitizes students towards becoming an objective and critical listener, so that they become better able to evaluate weaknesses in their playing. In this process, they also learn to become more resourceful in devising solutions to rectify problems. This engages students fully into an active and self-motivated learning process. They also become less reliant upon external feedback. Rather, they develop a level of astute musical awareness from within, which accelerates the learning process.

I like to use this analogy with my students. The painter uses paint as his medium, and artistic expression is recorded on canvas. In photography, light is the medium and film is the canvas. For musicians, sound is our medium, and time is our canvas. Musicians are sculptors of sound in time - creating the intangible while shaping the invisible. As Michelangelo said, his artistic process involves chiseling away the excess in order to reveal the statue hidden within the marble block. In the process of musical practice, likewise, we are continuously crafting out the excess in order to unleash the true image of sound from within ourselves. Practice remains a life-long process of discovery...

Reference:

Howe, M. J. A., Davidson, J. W., and Sloboda, J. A. "Innate talents: Reality or myth?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 399-442 (1998).

By Angela Po Yiu Chan

Website to contact author: http://lambdaarts.ca/

Email to contact author: angelachan@LambdaArts.ca

Author: Angela Po Yiu Chan

Biographical Information:
Dr. Chan has given solo and duo piano performances in Canada, Europe, the USA and Asia, and has been featured on the Discovery Channel (Canada), Global TV, PBS, CJNT, Australian Television Network, Maclean's magazine, the Gazette as well as various radio stations.

She has adjudicated a number of competitions including the Concours de Jeunesses Quebec- Ontario, the Young Music Explorers Videotape Piano Competition and the Young Music Explorers Piano Scholarship Competition. Dr. Chan has led numerous workshops and masterclasses in Quebec and Ontario and hosts a column on piano pedagogy in Musifax, a publication of the Quebec Registered Music Teachers' Association.

Dr. Chan is founder and director of Lambda School of Music and Fine Arts in Montreal, where she also heads the Lambda Piano Teacher Accreditation Program. Since 2008, Chan has formed a joint piano studio with renowned Montreal-Korean concert pianist Wonny Song with whom she is also co-authoring a new piano method book series. Dr. Chan also belongs to many music associations such as the Quebec Registered Music Teachers' Association, the National Music Teachers' Association and the American Liszt Society.

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Learn guitar: 7 tips to optimize the time practice

Learning guitar on an exclusive basis differs not to study sport games, practice is very important and essential part of the process. Whether learning guitar online or with the dominant factor and docent in common denominator here to determine your progress is practice. Regular daily work the material which you can learn from its lessons is the only and best way to ensure ongoing progress and improvement.

How long you spend, the practice.How long the practice every day, it is entirely up to you, and it totally depends on how serious and committed you are ... 1 hour? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? 2 hours? How busy is the schedule? How much time are you interested in available-for-customer practices? If you fit a 20 to 30 minutes of practice, to the day, will improve continuously and become very intelligent player who can always already dreamed of being.

Obligations Of. You just need to make a commitment and keep it. Even if it is only 15 minutes a day, you can zdziwisz the results that can be achieved only in a few months of regular practice.

Choose the best time. Remember that this is the time that expenditures achieve its goal, so it must be time for private. Must be a focus and without interruption. Select the most appropriate time of day, away from all distractions. Turn off your mobile phone, let people know what we do and have no means of disruption. The time has come to allow focus to learn guitar.

,To plan your practice. For your practice efficiency must be well planned and organised. This means that, if practice for 30 minutes every day, these 30 minutes had fully optimized from effective exercises to ensure steady progress. An example might be to divide the 30-minute practice on the two parts of 15 minutes. Spend the first half of the scale of the exercises and the other half working on chords and learning new song.

-Focus. Do not cut corners and move to something new if it has not been completed somewhere you can been working. This will be the extremely slow progress and only to make Your playing Sloppy. You need patience and take it one step at a time. Just do the lessons given by the user in the order in which they are organized and move as you realize comfortable and ready for the new medium. Move in his own pace that is Comfortable, that comes with online guitar lessons.

Fun. Enjoy customer practices at all times. -We will never feel like work if you have fun while you are practicing. Remember, examining how to provide feedback on guitar music. How can you enjoy that? Is the joy and blessing.

Look at the big picture of. Every time I stumble in road block and method of operation, such as not having anywhere, just look at the big picture. Visualize yourself, are able to play this chord progression, which you can already have trouble with or that it will get the starting scale. All I get these moments, and the best way to navigate between them is by not focusing on the side of the negative things. Relax, take a deep breath, visualize, break it down, step-by-step and will you play this right.

If you use these tips and focus on Your daily, you'll have large benefits coming Your way. It will be hard to find words to describe the feeling you get when you start to hear the song come together and when you see the fingers, transfer it to the shapes on the Fretboard and reconstruct these beautiful sounds that can be played only on guitar. This is only the beginning of the present shapes and many benefits that you are going to get during the voyage to learn guitar. You'll change the world where you live by discovering a new way to tell us what you think.

And now I'd like to invite to Your free access to a ton of quality information on learning how to play the guitar and electric guitar, 6-part E-course. Your free access at: http://www.learnhowtoplayguitarnow.com/

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