Practice Routine – Week 7

After failing miserably at completing last weeks practice routine I have decided to pull back on how much I am going to commit to practice for each days exercises.

I was finding myself becoming increasingly bored with playing so many scales over and over each night without having any time to have some fun and actually play any music.

I was going to send Barrett an email asking him what would be a good practice routine, but I saw that someone had already done that, there is a post on Barrett’s blog titled Avoid Guitar Practice Overload which kinda helped me decide on what I should be concentrating on in my practice time, well worth the read, I suggest you look at it.

So this week I am going to concentrate on just two of Barrett’s books, the Guitar Reading Workbook and the Guitar Fretboard Workbook

I really want to continue with the Guitar Fretboard Workbook because I have already learn’t so much from it, but I also want to start on the Guitar Reading Workbook, because I believe that learning how to read music is another one of those fundamental skills that I will be able to take into every area of music, not just learning to play the guitar.

I have always wanted to learn how to read music, but have so far gotten bye without it, so have never really bothered, but I recently read a post from the Carl Verheyen Report titled MUSIC: To Read or Not To Read? That’s the Question, after reading Carl’s post I can now see the importance of knowing how to read music will be for my development as a guitarist.

Hence the start of a new project. Now the trick is to make sure I stick with the book until it’s finished, and only spend enough time on it each day to allow some time to have some fun.

I am still continuing with the major scale exercises as in the previous weeks, but instead of drawing out and playing each one of the five scale shapes every day, I am going to limit it to one scale shape per day. This week’s natural note will be F.

I will make sure that I commit the scale shape to memory, basically play the scale until I can play it without looking at the scale diagram. I will also play it with different timing, 4 note, 8 note, 16 note and triplet rhythms and recite both the scale degrees and the notes that make up the scale as I play it.

I am not sure how I will plan out the exercises in the Guitar Reading Workbook yet, it could be a time bracket, say for example spend 20 minutes each day until the book is completed or do X number of pages per day, I think that may have to evolve over the course of the next few weeks.

To start with, I will spend the twenty minutes each day on the book and see how that pans out.

You can see my progress for each day as I log in and mark the exercise completed in the table below.

• Exercise 1: Write out each day, one of the five major scale patterns, play the scale with different timing and recite both the scale degrees and notes of the scale.
• Exercise 2: Spend twenty minutes studying and completing the exercises in the Guitar Reading Workbook.