Tag: practice

Running Out of Time – How To Maximise Time with Your Guitar

Nicole NealLeave a comment

One of the recurring themes that I often hear from students and fellow guitarists is that they often find difficulty in finding the time to spend with the guitar.

This actual (or sometimes perceived) lack of time can then impact on achieving what you want to achieve, like ironing out trouble spots. I say as you may be surprised at what can be achieved in a relatively short space of time with the right kind of approach.

I thought I’d share a couple of ideas that I frequently put into practice. Hopefully they can help.

Make a bit of a plan
Yes, making a plan sounds as dull as dishwater and I’m not suggesting that you sit down and write out a full-on strategy for your practice session (although if this floats your boat, feel free to go for it!), but try and approach each of your practice sessions with some kind of a goal in mind. As I’ve said in a previous post, intention counts for A LOT in music and your approach to playing and making that music.

Go bite sized with it
You’ll probably have some larger goal such as learning a particular piece, preparing for an exam or putting a programme together. That big “end goal” can seem pretty overwhelming at times. As such, I find it helps to chop that larger goal up into smaller, bite-sized pieces.

The bite-sized pieces might be things you think you could reasonably achieve in one or to of your practice sessions. This could be memorising a phrase, deciding on a favoured phrasing or coloring for a section, getting your fingers mechanically around a new section or a seemingly tricky section (whilst also working in the musciality of what you’re trying to play, of course!).

Resistance is not useless!
Really try to resist the temptation to play through a difficult, tricky or “fluffy” section. I, of all people, know how difficult this can be. Believe me! I am soooo guilty of playing through, but this year I made a New Years resolution to do a favour to myself and not just play through, but stop and work it out; perhaps not to 100% perfection, but a considerable degree towards solving the issue, making it easier to play the next time.

You can play that “easy” stuff already, so this is about maximizing your time with the stuff you really need to focus on.

Of course the earlier on in learning a piece that you can address those tricky bits, the less likely they are to become embedded in the brain as “tricky”. 

Take Five

 For those times, when you’re really stuck for time, and it does happen, 5 or 10 minutes is better than no minutes at all. You might be surprised at what can be achieved in a wee block of time like this – reaffirming a scale pattern or your muscle memory for a  scale pattern (very, very useful), working out a tricky left or right hand movement, testing your memorization of a piece or part of a piece.

 

What tactics do you use to maximise the time you have available to practice?

Feel free to comment below.

So, how do you practice when you can’t practice?

Nicole NealLeave a comment

I’ve recently been called away off and on a work project, oftentimes meaning I’m either unable to take my guitar or finding little time to physically practice. It has been reasonably annoying, but these things happen from time to time.

 

During time such as these I have been managing to “practice” in a few different ways away from the guitar, so I thought I’d share some….

 

Travel Guitars

O.K., so this first one is not strictly “away” from a guitar, but there is an option which allows you to tangibly practice guitar whilst not having your usual guitar around – investing in a travel guitar, such as the Yamaha silent guitar or SoloEtte guitar. These guitars either fold up or disassemble in someway, allowing you to pack it down into a smaller, more portable size to travel around with, fling in the back of the car or take as carry-on on most interstate and international flights. The sound quality of these type of guitars isn’t going to set the world alight, but does most definitely give you an option of physically playing a guitar and practicing.

 

I personally have one of the Yamaha Silent Guitars and it does the job reasonably well in allowing me to physically practice if in a situation where I can’t take the Allan Bull.

 

Travel_guitar
Bob_n_case

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The Yamaha Silent Guitar is also excellent for practicing in situations where you’re not able to make too much noise. And folds down into a case which Bob The Dog greatly approves of. 

 

They are an investment to a degree though and although not ridiculously expensive there are further options for practicing away from the guitar, which actually may put a different spin on things for you (well, they do for me anyway).

 

Sing It Back

Singing the music in your head (or out loud if the neighbours don’t mind… Mine would, as my singing voice is terrible!) is a great way of keeping in touch with a piece, with it’s melody, flow, rhythm and general outline. It’s also good for highlighting where you may be unsure of certain elements, perhaps melodically or rhythmically.

 

Can you hear the melody line of a piece you’re learning at the moment? Can you sing/hear the whole thing? Are there gaps? If so, go back to the sheet music (you can pretty much take that wherever you go, right?) and remind yourself of the bit that’s not quite lodged in the memory yet.

 

One of the things I do is sing the melody line of a piece whilst walking the dog or walking to my office. I actually discovered I was doing this by accident, not really tuned into my inner voice, then realizing my walking tempo was creating a metronomic beat which my brain picked up on and apparently said to itself “ooh, that’s a bit like Variation No 4 of those Sor Variations on a Theme of Mozart! Let’s play it!”. Cool.

 

Visualisation

Along with singing the main melody, can you also see in your mind’s eye how your left and right hand fingers move to create those sounds? I, more often than not, focus more on the shapes and movements my left hand needs to make to create the music.

 

But don’t forget about your right hand movements either – which strings are you touching? I’m talking from the perspective of a right-handed guitarist here, so swap it all round if you’re a Southpaw, of course.

 

Are we playing lightly, piano or with more gusto, a bit more forte? Are you playing tirando (free stroke) or apoyando (rest stroke) or a mix of the two? What kind of sounds are you wanting to produce? What angle of attack are you going at with the fingers? Are you playing a sweeter, rounder, dolce sound, so playing over or the nearer the fingerboard? Or are you after a brighter, zingier sound, so playing more ponticello, nearer the bridge of the guitar?

 

I think this kind of technique is akin to what top athletes do when they visualise themselves crossing the finish line first or making the killer move, rehearsing in their minds how the game or race is going to play out for them. Same applies here, just that we’re rehearsing how a piece of music is going to play out. 

 

Score and Musical Structure – Visualisation, Memorisation and Recall

In addition to singing and visualising you movements, you can also try out memorising and visualising the written music itself. Think about the shape of the music on the page – arpeggios, chords, shape of 

phrases and melody lines.

 

Have a think about the the musical structure too –  what key is the piece in? Where are there any modulations? What is the harmonic landscape (ooh, that sounds fancy doesn’t it?) – what are the main “signposts” or features in that landscape, I.e. main chords, key notes, landing points?

 

One big test is to see if you can actually rewrite out on stave paper the piece itself – that’s an excellent test of whether you know the piece inside out! 

 

O.K., so the whole thing might be a bit of a challenge initially, but see if you can commit to memory and write out the first few bars or first phrase, and build it out from there. You might find you pick up on some subtleties in the harmonies, themes and the structure of the music that you’d not noticed or thought about before. This is in turn will help give you greater understanding of the music, helping you to better perform it and remember it when committing to memory.