Fellow players, I thought I’d write this up this Friday evening, my sporadic contribution to the online guitar community about effective training tips that continue to work for me.

One of the things I came across to improve my playing through practicing is something I called blind practice. Some time ago, I was thinking about improving my creativity or improvisational playing but I constantly found myself always ending up playing the same 12 bar blues with the same fills and riffs coming to a frustrating cul-de-sac.

I watched many videos (http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/ is one of my favourite sites btw because they’ve got everything you really need), learned jazz progressions, practiced some major and pentatonic scales and that was about it.

I thought I needed ways to broaden my skills and repertoire just in case I came across an opportunity to play with other musicians. I could play (and I did) Saturday nights with friends (my friend Dan could sing anything I played) and I played a lot of rhythm based stuff on my Parkwood. But I didn’t good enough.

I made a lot of progress when I started practicing with a metronome. At this point I realized my timing needed improvement and I tackled this successfully in about five hours over the course of a week. I was especially driven because I had remembered reading that Joe Satriani practiced a lot with a metronome and admitted that it was a crucial part of his training.

One of my best discoveries though is trying to learn to play a song from memory that I didn’t know then listen to it on my jukebox. During my first attempts at this feat, I humbly acknowledged that I had misjudged the tempo, the rhythm, and the overall feel, pocket, or groove of the song. After re-learning the song, I sensitized myself to where I had misinterpreted it in the first place. Then I practiced it correctly but diligently for about two weeks. I did this about four subsequent songs. I always made sure to learn a song with new chords every time. It took about a month before I found myself rejoicing in having learned and memorized about eight new cool, jazzy chords.

My reward to this was allowing myself “free practice”. Free practice to me is when I play nothing but everything for about forty minutes to my jukebox or with Mr. Firebull (my eldest son) on drums with the metronome set to 130.

I then, with the right attitude and approach, figured out another way to literally double the capacity at which I could learn. I took the same approach of learning a song I didn’t know, but actually learning a second and sometimes even a third song that I had never listened to. One of my favourite sources for these kinds of songs are Readers Digest songbooks featuring forties or fifties piano songs adapted to guitar (they mostly have the guitar parts includes so make sure to play these with your uncle on piano). You can usually find these or old guitar magazines at garage or yard sales, flea markets, and even eBay.

Happy practicing and don’t forget to sign in backstage and post videos of your practices! Later.

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