The Practice- Join today! Improve your playing!

[Brewski]

one of our fellow formites has gotten me into some new guit-fiddling markwien.com site is just great.

[Santuzzo]

Oh, hey. My old guitar teacher put up a whole buncha new jazz arrangements. If'n you want some exercise this'll do, methinks: http://www.ralstonguitars.com/vince-lewis-arrangements/

 

Nice

 

Thanks for posting those.

[BydoEmpire]

I try to practice at least a little bit every day, even if it's just 15 minutes, but some days I just can't make it work. Yesterday I got in an hour and a half after the wife & baby went to bed. I have a little Excel spreadsheet to track my practice, and so far this year I'm getting in roughly 5 hours per week. These last couple years is the first time in 20 years I've really focussed on practice instead of just jamming or learning songs.

 

I'm learning to read music on guitar, so that's a big chunk of it. Going through this book: http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Method-Guitar-1/dp/B000E64X7Q/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1265463545&sr=8-2

 

I'm on Chapter 3 right now, it's going well. I've stepped away from the book occasionally this week and tried to read songs from the Real Book, which has been really fun. It's opening a whole new world. I could play the chords in the Real Book, but learning the melodies was just way too time consuming to be practical (Every good boy.. oh, that's a B, etc). With just a few months of reading practice, I can read a lot of the songs without too much trouble - did "Take The A Train" on Thursday. I can't read at a realistic tempo, but I can read enough to figure out the song without having to "figure out" each note individually. Reading rhythm is still tricky, but it's a huge confidence boost and incentive to keep practicing.

 

I'm trying to learn Eugene's Trick Bag (the guitar duel solo at the end of Crossroads) at tempo. I'm up to 88 bpm played cleanly, I want to get to about 120. When I don't have the energy for concentrated practice, I'll put on a metronome and work on that. A fun-to-play, somewhat mindless exercise to help my picking if nothing else.

 

Finally, I've been listening to a ton of Scott Henderson lately, I and I went through this lesson:

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[ArpeggiateTHIS]

Count me in!

 

Today's a Saturday full of relaxation, so I'll switch to clean and practice a few arpeggios (maybe even attempt sweeping).

 

^ Damn, I'm called arpeggiateTHIS, I should be good at this stuff by now.

[Santuzzo]

I'm still practicing more or less the same stuff: alternate picking in 3nps scale patterns (I practice these with playalong tracks/BIAB).

 

I'm also still working on improvising over Night & Day. In addition to that I'm practicing major and minor II-V-I lines that I made and I try to apply them while improvising.

 

I work a little bit every day out of Troy Stetina's Thrash method book, I try to pick 2 or 3 exercises out of that book per week and get them up to a decent speed.