-
Background: As of August, I have been playing guitar for 30 years! It has been a great activity and hope to do it for many years to come. Unfortunately, like many guitarists out there, I have a lot of technical facility on the guitar but seriously lack in musicianship skills. I went through a bluegrass phase where I jammed with others, but mostly I know fragments and snippits of songs. I am actually fairly adept at arranging chord melodies. This skill is a result of neglecting the other musicianship skills needed to play others. In the last 10 years, as my career and financial maturity has progressed, I have been overly focused on gear. No longer! Time to fill in holes and tackle material that I have wanted to master for years but have not been disciplined enough to do it!
Following is my initial practice plan. I see it as organic and fluid, but the disciplined practice with a specific goal is something I am pledging to do! I plan to use this site as a resource and I have an excellent local teacher who I will take a lesson from now and again for inspiration and fresh ideas. So time to grab my old Gibson ES-175 and Cube 80GX and get started!!
Ideas and comments are welcome, however, keep in mind that the world of music is too large to master in one lifetime. The following is just the little corner I have decided to commit to until the end of the year where I will reevaluate and adjust goals and practice routines.
___________________________
Every two weeks I will work on a new song from The Real Book (until I get more proficient at the fundamentals and hope to do 1 per week.) I will begin with songs I already have chord melodies for. During the two weeks I will listen to as many versions of the song as I can find.
I am already pretty proficient with pentatonic scales in 5 positions and major scales in 5 positions and know quite a few chords and arpeggios so sight reading is the "elephant in the room" as far as weaknesses go.
Practice a new position each day Monday through Friday.
LUNCH TIME – 30 minutes
Tune guitar – (important, time to start actively training my ear!)
Metronome – Slow! Be as exact as possible.
Block 1 – 5 minutes sight reading Leavitt Method. Sight reading is the priority, do this first!
Block 2 – 5 minutes chords. Work through chords trying to keep time. Learn new chords as necessary. 1 of 5 positions daily. Once chord progression can be played at tempo 4 to a bar, learn a relevant comping pattern. Memorization is not the focus, “lifting” off the page is.
Block 3 – 5 minutes melody. Learn melody (sight reading as much as possible) in 1 of 5 positions.
Block 4 – 5 minutes scales. Practice relevant major, minor scales and pentatonic in 1 of 5 positions.
Block 5 – 5 minutes arpeggios. Practice arpeggios to the song in 1 of 5 positions. Learn new arpeggios as encountered.
Block 6 – 5 minutes practice chords, melody, scales and arpeggios against backing track. Start slow and stay in the position of the day!
EVENING – whatever time is available.
Log days practice and plan for next days practice. Analyze tune for theory and scales to use over changes. Arrange chord melody for current song. Practice repertoire. PLAY FOR FUN!
WEEKEND – whatever time is available
Clean up. Work on anything that did not get enough attention. Arrange new Christmas chord melody. Play for fun! Find some folks to jam with this fall.
-
07-27-2015 01:13 PM
-
From a teacher I had a long time ago. Imo, this really makes sense:
Originally Posted by Ken Olmstead
And this...
Last edited by fep; 07-27-2015 at 02:27 PM.
-
Sage advice by Mr. Thrasher, thanks fep!
-
Love Bill Thrasher's thoughts on these and many other topics.
fep, I seem to recall that some other Thrasher printouts I have came from you, and weren't you
offering to post or otherwise share them with the group?
Oh ....and I forgot to thank you for these new [to me] dispatches.
A practical guy Bill, it seems...a great wit too.
I for one would be happy to pitch in to help with expenses if you'd be prepared to
make these treasures available ....perhaps via scribd....or maybe that's where I got the few
items in my collection from.
BTW .... For those that aren't familiar with the name Bill Thrasher ....he is probably best known on
a world wide basis to guitarists as the guy who played an important role in making the the wonderful Joe Pass
Guitar method book come to fruition. [The Gwynn Publishing one]
...Although to those of us who weren't lucky enough to have lessons with him, he seems quite the all round character.
It'd be a shame for these bits of jazz guitar lore to be lost.
-
Happy Anniversary, Don't Ever Stop & Cheers to 30 more!
-
Thanks JP! Originally Posted by JPP65
-
Ugg, I just found this post and here it is more than a year later!! I have made some progress but I abandoned regular practice withing a couple of weeks after writing this. I did learn maj7, min7 and dom7 arpeggios last year and can sorta solo with them. I know my pentatonic scales in 5 positions and and see them over the entire fretboard. I can now play 3 note per string major scales in all 7 positions but this is fairly recent.
However, NO, NONE, ZERO work on timing, tunes, sight reading or chord knowledge! I may need to go back to my old guitar teacher (very accomplished jazz guitarist) and pay for the accountability.
Some progress but this was kind of discouraging finding this post.
If I am ever going to get this done, I have to really dig in and do it!!!
Last edited by Ken Olmstead; 08-29-2016 at 06:49 PM.
-
Better to see the glass half full. Originally Posted by Ken Olmstead
Ugg, I just found this post and here it is more than a year later!! I have made some progress but I abandoned regular practice withing a couple of weeks after writing this. I did learn maj7, min7 and dom7 arpeggios last year and can sorta solo with them. I know my pentatonic scales in 5 positions and and see them over the entire fretboard. I can now play 3 note per string major scales in all 7 positions but this is fairly recent.
However, NO, NONE, ZERO work on timing, tunes, sight reading or chord knowledge! I may need to go back to my old guitar teacher (very accomplished jazz guitarist) and pay for the accountability.
Some progress but this was kind of discouraging finding this post. If I am ever going to get this done, I have to really dig in and do it!!!
-
Just spitballin' here, but maybe the 'dig in and do it' attitude isn't for you? That is, maybe the whole hyperplanning, laying out practice schedules in 5 minute blocks, listing all of the areas that need to be comprehensively covered, etc., etc. thing is putting pressure on you and holding you back. Originally Posted by Ken Olmstead
Some progress but this was kind of discouraging finding this post. If I am ever going to get this done, I have to really dig in and do it!!!
And relevant to the Bill Thrasher wisdom above, what I don't see much of in your schedule is 'Play'. I bring this up, because it is my problem as well. I have done a LOT of practicing. It is what I'm comfortable with: sitting down and playing a scale for 25 minutes and then cooking dinner. But what I've discovered is that if I want to actually play, I need to play.
So what I have begun to do is spend as much of my guitar time just sitting down and playing; that is, improvising in various ways over the form of a tune, using the tools that I currently have. And curiously, I think I have improved more in a short time doing that than in years of 'practicing'. Once things start getting stale and I find I'm playing the same stuff in the same situations, I then try to add something new to the mix. Wasn't it Jim Hall that said something along the lines of, "I don't practice, every now and then I just open my case and throw in a piece of meat"? Maybe this is what he was getting at.
Sure, I do other things as well, like learning and playing along with Jimmy Raney solos. But that's just good clean fun. I'm sure some people will argue that it is not a good way to learn jazz, and that I should be practicing solfege whilst balancing on a goat.
Anyway, take it or leave it... there are much better players here that will give you good advice.
-
Oh, I "Play" a lot. Unfortunately I'm not working on the stuff that I would like to be able to do. That was the idea behind the structured approach. However, your point is taken, I think I can can make progress in areas that I would like to improve in but make it more fun so I will actually do it!
OK, whining is over...it's "half full" time!
-
I haven't found super organised practice schedules super useful. Originally Posted by Ken Olmstead
In general, I find I can work on one or two things in any given week - maybe a new voicing, scale or rhythmic exercise (this is aside from learning music for gigs.) This reminds me of what Lage Lund said when he said that he has one thing that he's working on at any time and just works on that every time he picks up the guitar. And Lage is a player who knows a lot of things.
One of the big things as well is not to learn loads of things but learn ways of applying things. If I were teaching you, I would ask you to show me a line or pattern that you have learned, and then I would get you to apply it in as many different harmonic contexts as possible. I would then get you to practice a tune all the way through just using that line.
-
I've decided to simply build a repertoire of tunes and practice my weaker skills within the context of the tune I am learning at the time. So I'll learn the chord progression and analyse the harmonic changes. Use the tune to dictate what scales and arpeggios I will practice and then apply them over a jam track to be sure I am making music and not just being mechanical.Then of course sight read the melody, my weakest area, and I may have to supplement a bit on this one. Ultimately, the final vision is to learn new songs from lead sheets quickly and "lift them from the page" while jamming with others. This should be a lot more fun, less rigid and certainly more productive.
Thanks for the input guys!
-
Further suggestion - record everything you play and listen back to it.
-
Me neither. I tend to work on one thing at a time, and try to get it into my playing. Right now, I'm all about comping. I've decided I'm not going to try to learn any new chord forms. I'm just going to work on getting nice comping patterns with the forms I already know, and expand my vocabulary with substitutions, etc. Originally Posted by christianm77
-
This is critical (something I've known intellectually for a while, but only come to understand on a gut level fairly recently). The one jazz skill you can't practice on your own is listening and responding to others. And that's pretty important. And of course, being exposed to other musicians means you get to check out their bag of tricks as well. I've been in an ensemble for a few months, and I think I've learned more in that time than I had in the few years previous. Originally Posted by Ken Olmstead
-
Way too painful! LOL! Of course your right. Originally Posted by christianm77
Finding a jazz situation to play in may be difficult but I will. Plenty of folkies here, but not a lot of jazz! Originally Posted by Boston Joe
-
Pain is just weakness leaving the body ;-)
-
Where are you? You might be surprised. There might not be much of a jazz scene, but there might be a lot of folks playing in their basements. Originally Posted by Ken Olmstead
Finding a jazz situation to play in may be difficult but I will. Plenty of folkies here, but not a lot of jazz!
-
Classic!! Originally Posted by christianm77
Anchorage, Alaska. There are a couple, I'm just not "plugged" in. Another reason to get back with my teacher, he may know of a situation that would be good for me! Originally Posted by Boston Joe
-
Not exactly New Orleans, I can imagine! Originally Posted by Ken Olmstead
-
Goodness what a piece of sage advice . Taking a simple phrase/lick/arp/triad/interval pattern etc that resonates and working it through various permutations has been a wonderful gateway to a broader vocabulary for me .christianm77-One of the big things as well is not to learn loads of things but learn ways of applying things
-
OK, well just talked with my old guitar teacher. I am going to do an every other week lesson. However, it will be more of a structured jam with critique. I will pick a song from the real book, spend a couple weeks analyzing and learning the progression, melody and applying some scales and arpeggios and other devices to get a handle on improvising over the piece. Then we will jam it together for awhile and he will offer up some suggestions to try and apply. Then I will pick a new song to work up for the next two weeks.
This plan has a lot going for it and I am quite excited about the possibilities!!
I'm having a bit of a musical identity crisis and I think this will be good for me while I pass to the next phase of my musical life!Last edited by Ken Olmstead; 08-31-2016 at 01:23 PM.
Reply With Quote
Playing live and getting the best sound from the...
Today, 02:08 PM in Guitar, Amps & Gizmos