Why I'll NEVER Play Guitar Again Before Doing This!
In this lesson, I’m going to show you how good advice applied at the wrong time can become bad advice. If you are not developing your guitar skills as fast as you would like to, it is probably because you aren’t focusing on the right things.
This is a VERY important post for any guitar player who is still studying how to develop their playing skills because despite all the great advice you’ve been given, you may still be in a place where you’re not progressing enough in your practice.
When it comes to developing your “feel and your skill for music,” there is a powerful approach that you really need to look into. And, I’m going to start into this topic with a pretty profound statement and that is, “Good Practice done in the Wrong Way Becomes Poor Practice.”
If you sit down to practice guitar and you go over ideas that you are familiar with – especially ideas that are either really easy or ideas that never make you feel like you’re stretching your ability, then I need to introduce you to a way that will help you to fix that!
What often happens is you’ll hear one teacher tell you that you need to work on rhythm, rhythm is the most important. Then, another teacher might say; you need to study scale and arpeggios - that’s what is really the most important. Then, some other teacher say’s no, no, no the most important thing is composing - you need to always be composing.
Those things individually are not what’s keeping you down. It’s focusing on things “isolated.” The bottom line is that, isolation is not the best way to get your skills together fast. Rather, spending the time to blend a group of ideas into a system will end up working wonders!
THE ULTIMATE PRACTICE SYSTEM:
Before you sit down to play or practice guitar again, I want you to learn how to integrate a powerful practice system. The system uses five PHASES in its development.
Phase 1 of the “System” involves rhythm. And, to keep it simple, I’d suggest just grabbing a drum clip, or creating a loop that’s maybe 4-bars in length. Ultimately, a drum machine is great for this stuff.
Phase 1).
Find and begin playback of the Drum Loop.
Phase two involves selecting a key to work in and then choosing a group of
chords to play over the drum beat! So, let’s get into the first two
phases right now.
Phase 2).
Choose the key that you will work in (we’ll choose C Minor).
Phase 3).
Select a group of chord voicings on the neck to work with from within the chosen key signature.Review the group of selected chords (shown below):
Practice the chords
Coming up next, I’m going to start moving through the next phases of the exercise... But, before we head into that, I want to tell you about a special promotional offer that’s related to my; Handouts Collection eBook.
I wanted to take a minute to let you know, that if you want to learn even more about scales and theory I have a great offer for you.
With any donation over $5, or any merchandise purchase from my Tee-Spring store, I’ll send you free copies of THREE of my most popular digital handouts.
One is called, “Harmonized Arpeggio Drills” (it’ll train you on developing your diatonic arpeggios).
Another one is my “Barre Chord” Handout which includes a page showing all the key signatures along with a chord progression that applies barre chords.
Plus, you’ll get my Notation Pack! It has 8 pages of important guitar worksheets for notating anything related to; music charts, guitar chord diagrams, and TAB.
As a BONUS, (from my "Over 40 and Still Can't Play a Scale" video), I'll also throw in a breakdown of all of the chords that are diatonic to the "F Major" scale.
As an EXTRA BONUS for my Phrygian Dominant video, I'll also throw in a breakdown featuring all of the chords that are diatonic to the Phrygian Dominant scale.
Just send me an email off of the contact page of CreativeGuitarStudio.com to let me know about either your donation or your Merchandise purchase and I’ll email you those digital handouts within 24 hrs.
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The next phase involves recording the chord changes. This will give us the backdrop that is so important for being able to dig in a lot deeper and start practicing the use of the key.
Phase 4).
With the drum beat as your backing track, let’s get the chord changes recorded so that there is a solid jam progression established.
Now, that we have our drum loop, our key is established and the recording of the practice track is all taken care of, we can start into the next phase of practice which involves establishing the scale on the fret-board.
Once you have a scale pattern to work with, you can get into the actual study of improvising and ultimately afterward that will lead us into the world of composing.
So, let’s get started right now on learning our scale shape.
Phase 5).
The “Upper and Lower” scale shapes and their application…
Upper Scale Shape (C Minor):
Lower Scale Shape (C Minor):
