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.

Open Strings Pt. 2

So, as promised in last month's post, some exercises to help overcome “open string blindness” and incorporate this incredibly simple yet powerful tool into your playing.

One of the real cornerstones of the guitar is it's reliance on movable shapes, be they chords, scales, arpeggios etc. By combining movable shapes with open strings, we can easily create very interesting harmonies. Let's start with a simple C chord – shifting the entire chord up by two frets results in a D chord(D – F#- A), but removing the barre and letting the E and G strings ring open we add a 2^nd and 4^th to the basic R-3-5 harmony. It's still essentially major but with an added depth and colour. By finding a basic R-3-5 pattern that these open E and G notes will harmonise with, it's very easy to transform basic rhythm parts into something really quite special.

For example, moving the C up 5 semitones would normally give us a straight F chord, but letting the E and G ring out now adds a 2^nd (the G) and a 7^th (the E) creating a major 9^th chord (R-3-5-7-9). Moving the chord shape up a tone to G, the G will now be doubling the root note and the E functioning as a 6^th, creating a major 6^th chord (R-3-5-6). The E shape is another good candidate – play an E-shape A barre chord at the 5^th fret, arch your fingers to let the E and B strings ring out and you get a gorgeous Aadd9 (R-3-5-9) as the B string functions as the 9^th, the open E doubling the 5^th. Experiment and see what you can find!

Moving to lead patterns, the obvious candidate for experimentation is E minor pentatonic – as the observant of you have probably already noted, the guitar is effectively tuned to E minor pentatonic (E, G, A, B, D = E minor pentatonic, E, A, D, G, B, E = open string notes). A simple exercise to get you started – sequence the old favourite box pattern 1 at the twelfth fret, but this time replace the twelfth fret notes with open strings. It takes a little effort to get the tone even, but the pay off is well worth it, the quirky octave-jumping effect is very ear-catching!

Open string pedal notes are also a great way of connecting arpeggios. The AC/DC classic “Thunderstruck” intro revolves around two arpeggios, B (B root, D# 3^rd, F# 5^th) and E minor (E root, G minor 3^rd and B 5^th). Both contain the B note and Angus Young uses this common tone to connect up the two arpeggios, producing a root position (Root,3^rd ,5^th) B and a second inversion (5^th, root, 3^rd) E minor. Look for other ways to develop this idea – for example, B is the 3^rd of a G chord or the minor 3^rd of a G# minor chord, try experimenting with these arpeggios, or moving them onto different strings.

This post has really just scratched the surface of what's possible with the use of open string notes and a little creativity. Open strings are one of the most unique and natural guitar sounds available, so don't shy away from using these simple but powerful ideas in your playing!

Training vs Teaching

Blimey, March already? At this rate I'm going to have to get everyone started on their Christmas compositions before long..

Now, in my last post I mentioned the aspect of training your fingers in the same way that an athlete trains their muscles, and I'd like to try and expand on that a little this month and talk about the difference as I see it between teaching and training.

Teaching is all about introducing the student to new concepts, and helping them to understand those concepts by connecting them to information the student already knows. Whether that be a new chord shape, or a theory idea or a scale pattern – teaching is all about imparting that information to the conscious, rational part of the brain, ensuring that the rationale behind the new idea is understood and makes sense.

Training, on the other hand, is all about finessing those movements via repetition and attention to form, until the student is able to call upon these responses instinctively. Using the same athletics parallel we looked at last month, this is similar to a training session in the gym – you may not necessarily learn any new exercises you didn't know before, but by repetition and attention to the detail of what you're doing, you're able to make incremental improvements simply by gradual progressive steps. For example, playing the same scale sequence, but 1-2 bpm quicker, or with a slightly more defined dynamic difference between piano and forte, or just playing the same notes with increased clarity as the pick and fret hands learn better how to mute out unwanted string noise.

Many psychologists view the brain on two levels – system 1, the rational conscious part of our brain that considers things logically and in depth, and system 2, which is the intuitive “subconscious” part of the mind. Both parts are necessary – can you imagine, for example, all the decisions that have to be taken in order to take a breath, or blink an eye? Without the intuitive system 2 which lets us “just do it”, we'd never be able to cope.

Teaching places the information we need in system 1. But without the training aspect, the understanding and the movements we need will never make it into the instinctive system 2 part which allows us to immediately call upon the licks, phrases, scale patterns that we need to improvise in the heat of the moment. Training groups these ideas together into system 2 which allows us to call on them much more quickly, without consciously thinking (often referred to as “muscle memory”).

There are many everyday examples of this duality in action – driving, for example. The processes all have to be learned painstakingly at first, but with experience and practice – training – they become grouped together in the instinctive realm of system 2. An example I use with my students – I have no idea how to to my shoelaces. I just tie them. If I stop to think about it – can't do it. For the first time in a good long while, one of my schools started requiring their peripatetic teachers to wear a tie. I haven't worn a tie in many, many years.. the movements were there, buried deep in system 2, but in order to access them I had to focus my conscious mind on something else completely and do it without thinking about it – effectively taking my own brain by surprise!

Of course, this makes it extremely important that at the first stages of training your fingers to accept new movements, chord shapes etc., you have to pay very close attention to training the right thing into your fingers. Otherwise all you practice is playing badly, and all you will get better at is playing badly. So 10-15 minutes spent focusing intently on your playing can have far greater impact than four hours splitting concentration between guitar and computer, guitar and TV, guitar and Xbox...