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To those that actually practice their instrument for long hours.. how do you do it? Coffee? Medication? Hypnosis?
I've been trying to go at it recentedly but I just couldn't do it. I lose interest quickly or get tired after about 30 minutes to an hour. Granted I did practice around 11-14 hours at some point but that was like 8-9 years ago. I figured there is no point in pursuing a career in music if I can't put in the long hours like I used to, I'm 28 now. I have been taking lexipro for depression recentedly maybe that has something to do with it but I don't know
I'm shooting for at least 9 hours
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12-30-2021 06:39 PM
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Why not start with a really productive 3? Then ramp slowly.
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Here is some advise: Instead of a goal of having to practice a certain number of hours, why not have a goal of practicing a certain "set" of material, with the plan to not stop until you complete this "set": Have this "set" take no longer than 1 hour. I.e. make your motivation completing the "set" and not some length of time.
After you can do this "set" without giving up, then add to the "set". Keep doing this until a "set" takes you no longer than 3 hours. (since I don't recommend practicing longer than that without at least a half-hour break).
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".. at least 9 hours" ..? Wow!
[When do you go to work and sleep?!]
For material to "set in" (meaning: to learn it), you need to take frequent breaks throughout that time frame, so in a given hour, practice 45 min and take a 15-min break. Also, I would recommend having some goals for each practice period to keep your focus. Hal Crook lays out a nice schedule (in his excellent book, "Ready, Aim, Improvise!"), depending on one's skill level (as an instrumentalist and as an improviser), and he also has exercise ideas. (see attached schedule from his book)
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Well there you have it.
Originally Posted by jazznylon
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Agree with those who point out that life at 28 is different than life at 20. First thing you need to figure out is whether 9 hours is a realistic goal given everything else going on in your life. How did you arrive at the figure of 9 hours?
As a university music major, I never played more than 8 hours a day unless I practiced all day and then gigged at night. Those were generally circumstances involving conflicting deadlines that could not be moved, and they were non-routine. Playing 12 hour days puts a lot of wear and tear on your joints, tendons, and back alone, not to mention your psyche. Generally, I would limit playing time to 8 hours max unless circumstances demanded otherwise. The 8 hours was hands-on-the-guitar time. I would typically then spend additional time daily on piano practice, or writing arrangements, or recording other musicians, or just listening to music to understand various styles, players, and concepts. So I did a lot of 12-hour days, but not all of those hours were with instrument in hand.
After college I still managed 3-4 hours on top of a full time day gig. When my parents were ill, I didn't play for months on end. I just did not have the time or the motivation. Sometimes you just have to deal with other things.
When you used to practice 9 hours, did you have a routine or did you just play for 9 hours? My 8 hour routine evolved over the course of several years: as I learned techniques, skills, and repertoire, I made a list of things I wanted to work on daily. Techniques might include picking technique or learning fingerings for scales and arpeggios (all of them, everywhere on the neck), skills might include sight-reading or applying techniques to improvisation, and repertoire would be just learning tunes: memorizing heads, working out chord melodies, and transcribing solos to further refine my conception of jazz. When you are actually playing, all of these things overlap... in the practice room, you can focus on one thing out of context and repeat it till you get it right.
Rather than picking a number of hours out of a hat, figure out what you want to achieve and how to do it, then figure out how to do it in the LEAST amount of time. An hour of efficient practice that shows progress and inspires you is waaaaay better than multiple hours of crappy practice that doesn't improve your musicianship and just demoralizes you.
Above all, keep it fun. Capture the wonder and joy that made you want to be a musician in the first place.
HTH
SJ
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I can see practicing many hours in a day if you're facing a deadline, like getting a call to sub on a gig with unfamiliar material. Otherwise, what's the rush?
Music is a lifelong pursuit and should be a pleasure. Steady, regular practice will get you there, but I think 9 hours a day is excessive and would doubt how much you can really learn in such a long session.
If you can achieve a good balance of music with the rest of your life, it might actually make you a better musician.
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Sounds like you're going through some stuff. Do you have a teacher? Can you take lessons anywhere? I've found zoom helpful for virtual lessons when everything was locked down.
I'm going to assume you have books you haven't worked through yet. Why don't you set a goal for one page, or half a page, or hell even one bar. Set the goal as small as you have to to achieve it. Just get started. I pulled myself out of my last funk by learning the major scale all up the neck, 5 positions. I started in G, I learned the positions one at a time and didn't move on until I had them down, it was something easy that I had never taken the time to do. Usually I'd get through the scales in a given key then feel like playing more, so I would move it a 4th and do it again, I rarely did 3 keys in a row because I'd want to have some fun on the guitar by that time.
It also helped me to post a video here, I got some good advice and I put myself out there a little.
Lastly, don't hesitate to bring it up to your doctor that you've lost your creative spark. Mental health is hard to treat and often times people go through a few medications before they find the right one. Good job taking steps to better yourself, most people just suffer for no reason.
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[/QUOTE]When you used to practice 9 hours, did you have a routine or did you just play for 9 hours? My 8 hour routine evolved over the course of several years: as I learned techniques, skills, and repertoire, I made a list of things I wanted to work on daily. Techniques might include picking technique or learning fingerings for scales and arpeggios (all of them, everywhere on the neck), skills might include sight-reading or applying techniques to improvisation, and repertoire would be just learning tunes: memorizing heads, working out chord melodies, and transcribing solos to further refine my conception of jazz. When you are actually playing, all of these things overlap... in the practice room, you can focus on one thing out of context and repeat it till you get it right.
[/QUOTE]
Its hard to say but I just worked on things that I felt like working on during those long hours so if its repertoire I work on repertoire till get bored. Then something else like technique and fretboard knowledge.
I have a lot of material to work on so thats why I want to go through with this. I also don't have a day job so I want to do something in place of it for the time being and not feel like wasting my life away so therefore the 9 hours thing is a thing I want to go for. If anything if this whole thing doesn't pan out I'll just go get a regular job and move on with my life, I've been considering one anyways. I could take it more easy but then again I'm 28 and I feel like I should be living my life out by 30 so yeah
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For me personally, my own attention span is always the bottleneck.
I will always compromise other "efficiency" aspects in order to maintain interest and joy. A few years ago I workshopped playing everything in 7 positions and found that things such as "inefficiently" cycling material through multiple keys with a single fingering pattern got me to the "single position-all keys" thing faster than practicing that aspect from the start. They're actually 2 different aspects of the same ear/finger training. For me it has to be small enough to feel like woodshedding piano or sax. Teaching the ears and the fingers to hear. Once I get into more nebulous-feeling aspects of guitarist's "all feeling the same", I take it back temporarily smaller and more specific.
Form work and rhythmic variation are also big attention span things for me. Woodshedding dominant lines over a blues form is cool. Then, do the same vocabulary starting on a different beat. I can do that with TV. If I have to think more than that, it's too hard. I view it as a basic ear problem and again get smaller. Most things are ears/fingers IMO, but I'm not an advanced jazzer either.
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Ability to focus is sensitive to mood and medication, among other things.
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Or you can exercise like Coltrane: 25 hours a day.
The effect of the work will surely be heard.
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When was in music school on classical guitar I was practicing all day and developed very bad painful tendonitis in my right shoulder. Had to stop playing for months. So take it easy.
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You know over the past few years I’ve felt frustrated because my practice time has been limited due to other commitments. And I’m earning an income from music, so….
Anyway, I do wonder if I had all the time in the world whether I wouldn’t fritter it away.
Ive often found practice itself to be slightly depressing if I’m not careful. The ways I’ve personally found out to have a healthy relationship with it are having very clear goals (although often deciding what to concentrate on for that week is a hard decision!) and I use interleaved practice of about four or five activities which is flexible and effective.
i might choose like; chord voicings, learn a new tune, some timing exercise and line stuff for example in little 5 minute slots and base it all around one tune for the day, with frequent breaks. This seems to work and if I get more than 30m I repeat with variations. I can always add other things if I get bored and have the time, but it represents something I can usefully do in 30m. Which is not what you asked, but it’s extendable.
The thing is if you do this for an hour or two, timing each activity for 5m and taking a short break between activities it is actually properly tiring. While I have the capacity to noodle on the guitar all day, I think my capacity to really practice is pretty limited. Otoh I know for sure some people have greater powers of concentration than me; Barry Harris at age 90 for instance! So maybe I’m just a bit rubbish haha.
And I’m always trying to work on new stuff that I can ‘measure’- that has an discernible outcome. If I don’t this I go a bit mad.
The main problem is I find it’s very easy to get distracted these days.
The other thing is practice can seem like the be all and end all sometimes, but it’s really important to have actual musical things to do even if they are self-generated, like making a video of a tune or transcription or something. Gigs and projects are really important for keeping practice focussed and non-neurotic for me.
Hope that’s helpful in some way.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-31-2021 at 06:19 AM.
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Perhaps the cause of your injury was your stiffened arms. Originally Posted by Woody Sound
I am constantly working on exercising with relaxed hands.
Currently, however, it is so that I listen to more records than I practice.
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ive had run ins with injury too; Classical guitar too. Originally Posted by Woody Sound
anyway there’s so much stuff you can do away from the guitar too…. Sightsinging, ear training, Konnakol, learning to sing standards, rhythm reading, singing solos aka Tristano, transcribing direct to notation etc etc
Sometimes it can be easy to forget you do actually need to practice the instrument when you get into that stuff lol.
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I played a lot of classical guitar in music school and I had no injuries, I just broke my nails a lot. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Interestingly, I played classical at school and jazz in jazz clubs...without the pick.
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My advice is if you want to be a pro musician, focus on what you need to do to be pro instead of painfully locking yourself in the woodshed. There are many aspects to being pro, too. You don't necessarily have to kill yourself and your hands in the practice room. There's composing, teaching, recording, etc. Even if your goal is to be a performer, focusing on goals of scaled magnitude will help you rather than only locking yourself in the woodshed.
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It all depends on your talent.
One person may be making much more progress in a short amount of time and the other person may not be making progress at all.
One thing is for sure, being a jazz musician is hard work.
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My technique was terrible is what did it. I fixed it and the problem went away. Originally Posted by kris
I played a lot of classical guitar in music school and I had no injuries, I just broke my nails a lot.
Interestingly, I played classical at school and jazz in jazz clubs...without the pick.
Moral of the story; if you want to play Classical pay attention to posture and the minutiae of technique. I mean, obviously lol.
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Its amazing how guitarists don’t practice stuff that they are going play on gigs lol. That used to be me. Originally Posted by Clint 55
Obviously tricky corners, tough charts etc but also: How about practicing rhythm guitar parts and comping? On tunes that might get called at a pickup or bar gig?
took me an embarrassingly long time to work that out and even now I forget sometimes lol.
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Well, I do think people who make progress quickly have a knack for practicing effectively. Originally Posted by kris
That’s things like; knowing how to practice, how to break things down, where to start, reflecting realistically on the results of their work, have a growth mindset and an enjoyment of the process and I think quite importantly later on, how to choose practice activities that will stretch but not defeat them - what educationalists call ‘the zone of proximal development’
Segovia once said ‘my hours are not like your hours’ IIRC he only practiced for a couple of hours a day and had a nice bath in the middle lol.
You can noodle away for hours and play stuff you can already play in some rigid routine and that stuff won’t necessarily be real practice.
‘Talented’ people I think are more often than not those that grasp these principles right away, without being told. Good teachers are those that communicate them to less ‘talented’ students.
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I watched Mike Stern at the guitar workshop few years ago.
A very hardworking person.A short vegetarian meal and a return to the guitar.
He gave the impression that he could not live without a guitar...like me.
A very nice man and an excellent musician.
Happy New Year 2022
Attachment 87369
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Golden rule: real practice hurts your head and often sounds bad
If you can do 8 hours of that a day you’re a stronger person than me haha
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What a legend! Originally Posted by kris
I watched Mike Stern at the guitar workshop few years ago.
A very hardworking person.A short vegetarian meal and a return to the guitar.
He gave the impression that he could not live without a guitar...like me.
A very nice man and an excellent musician.
Happy New Year 2022
Attachment 87369
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