Practice Advice

A reader of How to Practice Guitar and Train Your Creativity recently emailed me asking about how to apply some metronome exercises from my book to Piedmont style fingerpicking (often referred to as Travis Picking).

His Question

Considering your advice below, how would you apply it to songs?

I am learning to fingerpick blues, mostly Piedmont style (often erroneously called “Travis picking”).

The bass alternates between two bottom strings, usually either six and four or five and four, and are almost always quarter notes. Melody notes are on the top three strings, either played as quarter notes by pinches or eighth notes in between the bass notes.

Note: This article is entirely focussed on songs that you can play, but can’t play at the required tempo. We’ll cover what it means to “play” in the Pre-Routine section below.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a baroque keyboard piece, which I’ve transcribed for two guitars - hopefully I’ll have it released on my Youtube channel soon.

Being baroque, it’s quite intricate - lots of 16th notes, stretches and large jumps and transitions.

Recently a reader asked, “Why is it when I’m playing guitar to myself and practising I sound fine, but when I record it sounds awful?”.

This is a very common experience for beginner-intermediate guitarists, and there are a couple of reasons for this, so let’s look into them and what we can do about it.

Limited attention

When we are practising guitar, we are working on something new (remember the distinction between playing and practising that we discuss in the book.

Over the last couple of weeks a couple of readers have emailed to ask about finding motivation. One reader asked for tips on finding motivation when the more youthful goals of attracting girls and being a rockstar no longer apply.

So in this weeks post we’ll look at motivation, what it is and how to find it.

What is motivation?

Motivation is defined as:

a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way

A reader recently emailed me asking for some advice. He has suffered from a stroke and lost use of a couple of his fingers in his left hand. I’ve got his original email and my response response (with some editing to make more sense in a blog format and fixed typos).

Here is the original email:

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Hello Sam. I dont know if you or anyone can advise me. Earlier in my life. I self taught to play guitar. I managed to supplement my income playing in pub rock bands. I never regarded myself as a pro player, I enjoyed playing. Fast forward to 2010. I suffered a major stroke that paralysed my left side. I had treatment to help regain my ability to walk and do stuff, but my cording hand is all but useless for playing. I can use first and second fingers. My ring finger and pinkie are useless. The movement of my hand is slow and takes effort. I do try to learn to play again just using open G and 2 fingers. Is there anything I can learn to improve my playing. I don’t want to be a pro

I recently received a message from someone lamenting that they felt like they hadn’t improved much over the last thirty years. We had a bit of a back and forth and hopefully he’s got a path to improve. The conversation was one I could imagine a lot of guitarists benefitting from, so I’ve put it out here.

I started off asking a few questions:

1. What do you want to be able to do on guitar? What sorts of music, songs etc do you want to play?
2. How have you been working on your playing?
3. When you practice, what do you do?
4. How much time do you practice for?

With the following replies, I’ve corrected a few typos, removed names and added the occasional note to clarify a misconception.

A former student recently emailed me with the following question:

Hey Sam,

In one month we´ll be playing the final concert for this semester. We´re doing one song that has a rather tricky Intro Riff.

The target BPM for the riff are about 90 to 93. I can play it reliably at about 80 Bpm. That means at 80bpm I´m not making any mistakes. As soon as I crank it up to the target speed I´m starting to struggle and mistakes start to occur.