“Everything, All The Time” - Or, Bad Practice Habits and How To Get Out Of Them.

Time. Contrary to the Rolling Stones' classic song, in the real world it's never on your side. Or certainly never seems to be- there's always something demanding your attention. Certainly, it's a rare lesson that doesn't begin with a student apologising because they've not had much time to practoce – pressures of work, education, family etc. all combine to make it difficult to find half an hour a day to put in to playing guitar at all, let alone practicing and concentrating on new stuff.

I have actually done a video and article on “pitstop practicing”  - short but intense bursts where you focus in n just one thing, whether that's a new lick, a chord change that's been giving you trouble or whatever – but this month I want to focus on something that more experienced players often fall foul of.

As your skills improve, and you're able to do more things, that of course means you have more stuff you need to practice to simply maintain those skills, let alone learn any new ones. So a practice session can seem like a mountain to climb, working through all the stuff you know before you can start on something new- a perfect example of this was a student of mine a few years ago, who was struggling to combine his Grade 5 with the demands of a regularly gigging band. Although he was diligently setting a couple of hours a day aside for practice, he would play through the band's entire set before trying anything new. Every time, This meant that over ¾ of his practice session was running over the same things, keeping them fresh – or so his thinking was. To be fair, I can completely understand where he was coming from, as when I joined my first semi pro band back in (gasp) the 90s, I thought and did exactly the same thing.

Problem is, by the time you come to try anything new, your concentration is shot, and if you've been playing for over an hour you probably want a bit of a break – cup of tea, check your emails – and that further eats into the tiny bit of time you've left yourself for learning anything new. So this way, things very quickly become stale. Add to this the pressure of an exam and it's quite natural to start thinking “Sod it, I'm going to play something I want to play, not something I'm supposed to play”. Of course, the problem for me as a teacher is I'm trying to get this student through their Grade 5, as that's what they've told me their goal for the year is. It doesn't take a genius to see how this can potentially lead to friction, despite the student in question being talented, diligent and hard working. And of course at that point, the whole thing is going to nose dive.

However, as I have made virtually every mistake it is possible to make on my journey learning the guitar- although I'm sure there's a few out there I'm yet to discover – I recognised where he was coming from, and we sat down to talk about practice habits and came up with a plan. If you have an hour a day, five days a week (because you're off gigging at weekends) as an example, and you're trying to balance a set and a grade exam, try this approach:

5 minutes – technical exercises from grade book. 1-2 scales, 1-2 arpeggios, 1-2 chords, style study. Rotate the scales/ arpeggios/ chords – eg Monday, major scale & major pentatonic, Tuesday natural minor scale and minor pentatonic.

5 minutes – sight reading/ improv & interpretation/ melodic recall/ harmonic recall/ general musicianship. Pick a different one each day.

20 minutes – grade repertoire. MAXIMUM two tracks – play through, look for mistakes. Spend a minute on each mistake, then play through the track again. Rotate so that every track is played over the week.

Remaining 30 minutes – band repertoire. A good trick here is to put all the songs into an iTunes (or equivalent – I've now switched to Music Bee) playlist, hit shuffle, and see what it throws at you. But, here's a twist – if the song has a solo, or a particularly noticeable guitar part (for instance, the Sweet Child O'Mine intro), before you play along with the whole song, play that part on your own as slowly as you possibly can. Yes, you read that right – the challenge is to really control the notes, the string noise, the vibrato. Take everything out of the instinctive 90% of your brain and back into the conscious 10% so you can look for bad habits and work your way out of them.

Result? You're spending less time but achieving a great deal more progress than simply being stuck in a rut and thinking that you've got to practice everything you know every time you pick up the guitar for a practice session. Practice therefore becomes much less of a slog and much more enjoyable – with the result that you do more of it and engage with it a lot more, leading to more progress!

So that's this month's thought, hope it helps some of you out there who feel a little overwhelmed or frustrated. Drop a comment to let me know your thoughts, and happy practicing!

Sdrawkcab!

No, it's ok, I haven't had a stroke. This month I thought I'd share a handy little tip which is brilliantly simple for getting you out of a rut, particularly if you're hitting that plateau (which we all hit at some point or another) where you just find yourself playing the same thing every time you solo.

Let's say you're primarily a blues rock pentatonic based player. Alot of people's first instinct is to go and learn some exotic sounding scales, and while this is never exactly bad for you, the simple fact is there really isn't much call for the Phrygian Dominant over the rock & roll 12 bars most of us bang out at the local open mic night. So while learning exotic scales can be fun, it can also be very tricky to integrate them into your “everyday” pentatonic playing (I'll be doing some more posts on this over the next few months, so stay tuned).

Maybe some new techniques? Tapping is often something that I get asked about, and again, it's a fun, cool-sounding technique, looks flash, but the same problem applies – just how are you going to take that jaw droppng tapped septuplet Steve Vai lick you've been working on for the last two months and apply it to “Route 66”? Again, I'll come back to ways to integrate different techniques too over the next few months, but the simple fact is it's going to sound weird in that context. Like taking a cheese sandwich and adding blackcurrent jam – neither is bad in it's own right, but they don't exactly gel together.

So it can be diffiicult to know where to go to get off this plateau. Typically though, as musicians we strive for the most difficult, demanding solution to a problem and completely ignore the one that has been right under our noses the whole time.

Retrograde.

From Wikipedia:

“A musical line which is the reverse of a previously or simultaneously stated line is said to be its retrograde or cancrizans ("walking backward", medieval Latin, from cancer, crab). An exact retrograde includes both the pitches and rhythms in reverse. An even more exact retrograde reverses the physical contour of the notes themselves, though this is possible only in electronic music. Some composers choose to subject just the pitches of a musical line to retrograde, or just the rhythms. In twelve-tone music, reversal of the pitch classesalone—regardless of the melodic contour created by their registral placement—is regarded as a retrograde. “

So basically, taking something you already know and playing it backwards (yeah, title making more sense now?)

This has been used as a compositional aid for composers working in classical music for centuries, and will have been used many times by songwriters in the pop/rock field, but somehow we never seem to use it when improvising. Here's an example – a stock E minor pentatonic blues/ rock lick we've all used a billion times:

We all know that, we all know how to make it fit – so what happens when we flip it around?

Ooh.

Now try practicing it in context – 2 bars on/ 2 bars off is perfect for this.

NB - for those unfamiliar with this exercise, it's incredibly useful and because I nicked the idea from a drum teacher friend of mine, incredibly simple too:

1 – tap foot to beat, using metronome or drum machine if available

2 – play 2 bars of appropriate chord backing – so for this lick, 2 bars of chugging E5 power chord, or funking things up with an E7#9.. your choice

3 – this is the clever bit: without breaking rhythm, keep tapping your foot and improvise for 2 bars. In this instance you're aiming to develop ideas based off our new backwards blues lick, but you can adapt this exercise to anything.

All of a sudden – brand new lick. Except that you already intuitively understand it, as it's the same scale, and has the same rhythmic properties, so it will very quickly start working it's way into your vocabulary. Try it with every lick you can, you will be amazed by the results, and all of a sudden you'll feel yourself improving again.

Till next time, happy jamming and nuf evah!

#Motivation!

Well, I was hoping to be writing this month's entry basking in the glory if a fairytale victory for a much maligned England squad.. alas it was not to be. But this latest “oh so near” did get me thinking about motivation, and how it relates to our development as musicians.

Right now, the England squad have two ways to view their situation. They can either a) rue a potential victory lost, one that could have propelled them to being only the second England team in history to reach the world cup finals.. what if they'd stayed more on the offensive after the first goal, maybe been able to score a second or at least keep the Croatians too busy defending to equalise? Or b) reflect on the fact that a squad nobody expected much of, which had no “celebrities” of the likes of Beckham and Rooney, was able to pull off their best result in 28 years – longer than most of them have been alive.

How does this relate to us jobbing musicians? Well, a few years ago, I was having a conversation with a drummer friend of mine who was at least a sheet and a half to the wind and bemoaning his lack of commercial success.

“I've been doing this for twenty years and where's it got me?”

Now, this seemed to me to be missing the point somewhat.

“Don't you enjoy it any more?” I asked.

“Yeah, 'course I do, I love it.” he answered.

“So – isn't that the point?”

He shut up after that, I'm pleased to say.

So what connects these two situations? Well, neither the England team or my drummer mate had achieved everything they wanted – winning the World Cup/ fame, fortune, hot and cold running groupies – but both have still managed to accomplish something impressive, 4^th place in the World Cup and a pastime that has given twenty plus years of fulfilment, led to friendships and adventures with people you'd never otherwise have met, not to mention the simple satisfaction of getting good at something (don't tell him, but he is a spectacularly good drummer).

So next time your motivation drops and you wonder why you're bothering – remember, you're not playing music for fame, fortune and glory (and if you are, you're a moron) – you're doing it for yourself. We do what we do while other people sit in front of the TV.

Think about it this way – if you spend an hour practicing and you're 0.001% better at the end of that hour, that's still an improvement. If you spend an hour watching The Kardashians – well, you've spent an hour watching the Kardashians. Compare and contrast.

No Fear

How does Bob Marley like his doughnuts? With jammin'.

Right, having thus established the baseline for this month's post, things can only improve...

I've been pushing improvisation as big deal with by late-beginner early-intermediate students a lot so far this year, and there's a strong reason why. Thinking back to the early stages of my journey as a guitarist, it really was at first a case of following the tab (bought from a guitar magazine – no internets back in the 90's) and trying to get it to sound vaguely like the song. If I didn't know the song, it was a case of searching for it on cassette (and for those of you young enough to think cassettes are retro-cool, I was there and they were NOT, awful things) or just guessing. At this stage I wasn't really a musician because I had no understanding of what I was doing, I was just following what the book or magazine said.

However, curiosity would periodically get the better of me, and I would take a chord sequence and try putting them in a different order, take a riff I 'd learned (or thought I'd learned) and change the rhythm, fiddle with the chords and find suspensions (not that I knew what they were at that point) – change things around a little to come up with something that was at least partly original.

Motivated by the fact that I found stuff I liked the sound of, I started noticing patterns in the tabs I was trying to pick out – things like the faithful minor pentatonic, and how it would move around the fretboard to match the key of the song (not that I really understood what that was at this point). And I started to try learning the solos – the first one I really got stuck into was “Live Forever” by Oasis, Noel Gallagher's soaring major pentatonic phrases seemed enticingly close but frustratingly out of reach. So I would try and play his solo, and I'd fail. So I'd make a rough stab at making one up using similar notes (which I would later come to realise was the G major pentatonic, although at that point I hadn't really grasped how E minor and G major pentatonic were the same thing seen from different angles).

Here's the thing though – by making up my own solo, I started getting better. MUCH better. Jamming along to first Oasis and Nirvana, then discovering the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin the Eagles Hendrix, Guns 'n' Roses – I began to get a feel for how to use the simple minor and major pentatonic patterns. I discovered the three-frets-back hack (and subsequently had it confirmed by a guitar magazine article). I discovered that even if I couldn't match a Slash solo note for note (and I couldn't), I could still fill the space with something that sounded OK. I developed an intuitive feel for rhythm. I got good enough, in fact, to be accepted for the Access To Music course within 18 months of getting started – and from there, things would never be the same again.

But what got me started? Jamming along. Making mistakes and gradually figuring out ways not to make them again. Taking the riffs and licks of my heroes and bastardising them to match my ability level. What is heartbreaking and frustrating for me as a teacher now is to see students who can't or won't make the leap to just playing, who forget that the process of an instrument is a learning curve- which by definition involves making mistakes because those mistakes themselves are an essential part of the learning process.

So if you're sitting there listening to a song and thinking “I'd love to be able to play that”, then just try – there are only twelve notes, pick a start note that sounds about right and slap a pentatonic pattern across it. You may have to tweak some notes, avoid some others, but it gets you started and that's what's so crucial.

So till next month, good luck and happy jamming!

Happy Birthday!

So, really, this post is about a month late... I hope you can forgive me, internet.

2007 began for me on a cruise ship in the middle of the Carribean Sea, wearing an ill fitting tuxedo and playing a version of Celebration by Kool and The Gang that I could have sworn had lasted at least three lifetimes. At that point I was well into my fourth contract with pro showband Fifth Element and was getting a handle on the reality of what being a professional guitar player actually meant in the real world.

What it meant, largely, was disco. Lots and LOTS of disco.

Still, it beat working in a coal mine.

However, less than two months in our contract would end early due to a tragic loss on behalf of one of our members, and with no contracts waiting the band quickly disintegrated as everyone started grabbing whatever job they could in order to tide them over. In my case, I found myself back where I started - part time back at dear old Loughborough stalwart Just Music, and teaching lessons on the side as I had done since the late 90s. Meanwhile, I divided my time between hunting for a "real" job and trying to set up my own band to head back out to sea with.

Before too long, though, I found myself with a goodly number of guitar students, and courtesy of a good friend my first peripatetic teaching position.. and from there things spiralled. So I'd like to take a moment to think back over the last ten years, some of the good, the bad and the... improbable moments of this job.

The Good:

Finishing and publishing my Zero Point series of guitar, bass and keyboard books . This was a huge undertaking, over two years from start to finish, but seeing them in the hands of students and finally being able to hand on heart recommend a book which gives aspiring musicians everything they need and nothing they don't.

Bumping into some old students and discovering they've become a fantastic band - The Bench That Rocked!

Seeing one of my bass students get the highest Rockschool Grade 3 mark I've ever seen- 93%!

Watching a student grow from learning Smoke On The Water in 2009 to being able to play prog metal riffs I can't even comprehend in 2017!!

Songs for Syria 2013, which then morphed into the Winter Wonderland Charoty Album 2014, and subsequently  TUNEICEF from 2015 onwards.

A student in their 60's with wrist and finger issues, who's been told they'll never play chords... playing chords.

The Bad:

On a snowy day in late 2010, being unable to make into school on time because I couldn't get into my car through any other method than the boot.. which then closed on my legs and trapped me...

The student who couldn't, despite every method I could think of, distinguish a B from a C on the piano keyboard

The student who claimed they didn't really need lessons as they could play "Crazy Train" flawlessly and then proved over the course of the next painful 15 minutes that... no, they couldn't... worse was the fact that they couldn't accept this... I think they wound up as a contestant on X-Factor...

The Improbable:

An 11-year old student with Asperger's who's mum was late picking him up, decided that rather than wait he would try to walk home... Cue the police searching my house (and me missing dinner)!! Thankfully he was found 10 minutes afterward and showed up with an apologetic card next lesson...

But most importantly - Being able to make a living doing what I love, 24/7, for the last decade. Here's to many more, and I promise to keep trying to get better and better at it. 

Short But Sweet - Pitstop Practicing

OK, so last time I waxed lyrical about the importance of committing oneself to a regular and structured practice session – and make no mistake, that is the best way to ensure progress on the instrument (any instrument). But we live in a hectic, chaotic 24/7 world where there's always something competing for our attention, and that can mean that a structured practice routine is simply impossible to adhere to. That in turn becomes a demotivational force, as the student feels himself slipping further and further behind schedule. Inevitably the temptation grows to simply jack the whole the thing in.

So, what's the alternative? Well, I always stress the idea of little and often in practice sessions. 10-15 minutes each day will prove a whole lot more valuable than trying to crank in a three-hour marathon at the weekend.

A lot of players get intimidated by the idea of having to get the guitar out, tune it, set up the amp and practice rig- when you're pushed for time, all this seems like something of a mountain to climb. So the answer is to have the guitar always there, always ready, always to hand. Don't pakc it away in it's case, keep it out on a stand in the living room, in the dining room. Don't worry about setting up a practice rig, just play acoustically (a neat trick is to press the headstock against a large piece of wooden furniture like a coffee table or book case – the extra mass of wood serves as a makeshift amplifier). Use the metronome in your head, or any of the excellent guitar apps available for your phone. Don't make playing the guitar an occasion you have to get ready for, make it something you do naturally.

What to practice? Well, you can make progress in just two or three minutes if you focus on the trouble spots. Rhythm and timing is always something that any guitar player can work on – a great (and simple) exercise is to simply play muted strings to pick up the rhythm and improve your sense of pulse. This translates to a much more solid foundation for anything else you want to play.

Let's also not forget simple mechanics – usually the co-ordination between fingers 3 and 4 is the weakest, so a simple finger pair exercise is a useful thing to warm up and practice a weak spot. Learning a song? Struggling with a specific chord change? Focus on just that change. Set yourself a stopwatch and hammer that one chord change until your fingers accept it and it's no longer a problem. Brief, focused bursts on problem areas can bring real results quickly.

Want to keep motivated? Go back and try old material that you used to struggle with. It's a great feeling tackling a song that's proved out of reach in the past and being able to grab it by the scruff of the neck.

So, even if you can't commit to a regular and scheduled practice routine, if trying to commit is causing you stress and sapping your enjoyment... then this is the alternative. Dive in, grab a couple of minutes of focused, “burst” practice when you can over the day, and you will find you make improvement. Don't let the guitar become another chore – let's face it, life throws us all plenty of them. Guitar is what we reward ourselves with when they're all done.