Hi, everybody! I want to talk to you a little bit about practice. I'm active in a lot of music discussion groups, guitar discussion groups especially, and one thing that always drives me crazy is somebody will post something about how they're struggling with something that they're working on in learning guitar and the comments very often are like, "dude you just got to practice more." That's not wrong but it's really not helpful, either. It makes me think of those joke about somebody's asking for directions and they say how do I get to Carnegie hall, and the tongue-in-cheek answer is practice, practice, practice. Or, maybe you've heard people say oh no, practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. I always kind of roll my eyes at that too, because really, if you could practice perfectly, you wouldn't really need to practice at all would you? So, what's a better way to look at it?

It comes down to this: it's not enough just to practice more; in your practice, you need two things. You need specificity, and you need mindfulness.

What I mean by specificity is, you have to be working on specific skills for whatever you're trying to improve. Now, if you're more at the beginning level, you should be doing a little bit of everything. (And really, at all points in the journey you want to be doing a little bit of everything.)

When you're at the beginning level, you should be working on your strumming, you should be maybe practicing a scale or two, if you've chosen to learn to read traditional notation, which I think is a very good idea, you'd spend a little bit of time on that - again, you want to do a little bit of everything to get a good firm foundation.

But when you're more experienced guitar player, you want to work very specific things, and really, the more specific the better. As an example, it's not enough to just say, “I want my solos to be better; I want to work on improvising.” You might think that's specific, but it's actually not.

Rather, we could break down where you're coming up short with your solos - is your left and right hand synchronization off, is your picking sloppy, do you know your scales well enough to really apply them in a creative manner? Are you able to move those scales up and down the neck comfortably to play a lead in a variety of keys? Is your phrasing tasteful and rhythmic, or is it kind of robotic? Obviously, these are all very different things.

A quality guitar instructor will have a good, structured curriculum, and an attentive instructor will be able to help you identify where you should be focusing your efforts. But again, it's not just that you need to practice more; you really need to identify with the greatest specificity possible exactly on what you want to focus.

The second component of quality practice is, once so you have something specific to practice, you need to be mindful in your practice. You need to be fully focused, fully present on what you're doing, and what benefit you're trying to get from it.

Here’s an example of what notto do: During a private lesson with a student who is a fingerstyle guitarist, one of the things that I noticed when he was playing is that when he played an alternate bass note kind of finger-picking pattern, his right hand thumb was having a difficult time accurately finding the correct strings.

So, I identified specifically that he needed to make his thumb more accurate - reflexively accurate, what I call "smart hands" in fingerstyle guitar playing, and so I created for him an exercise that would help him specifically build up accuracy in his right hand thumb. And he said to me, "oh, this is great, I can definitely see how this is going to really help my thumb be more accurate. I love this exercise; I can do this in front of the TV."

Well, no. Again, you need to be mindful about your practice. You need to be fully present for your practice. You need to be focused on the task at hand, focused on what you're trying to accomplish your practice.

I sometimes hear stories about some guitarist, how they used to practice for even 12 hours a day (!), and I just can't help wondering, did they really sit there fully focused, fully present, practicing for 12 hours a day, or did they get some real practicing, and then just kind of walk around with the guitar slung over their shoulder, noodling around a little bit here or there?

And people say, "Oh, I never saw her that she didn't have a guitar in her hands." Well, it’s wonderful that learning music was a huge part of her life, but again, was she really fully present, fully mindful, for those 12 hours a day? My guess is that in most cases the answer is no.

Remember, you need to be really present, really mindful about what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish. That's where the neuromuscular programming, which is the real benefit, comes in. And the good news is that if you are fully mindful and fully present, and you're working on specific skills, you don't need to be doing that 12 hours a day. You can accomplish a lot in just 30 minutes a day of really good, high quality practice.

You need to be specific about what you're going to work on, the skill you're trying to enhance, and the exercise or the practice that you're going to do to enhance that skill, and you need to be fully mindful, fully present, when you do your practice.

Best,

Damian