Creating a Practice Schedule

Practice is an essential part of any musician’s life. I remember reading an interview with Pat Metheny in which he explained that he practiced for four hours to prepare to play “Happy Birthday” at a party for his son.

Practicing is what you do when you’re not working. I recently performed in the pit orchestra for “Tom Sawyer: The Musical.” During the month of rehearsal and performance, I spent my normal practice period learning and perfecting the songs for the show. When I was done with the show I found that my normal practice routine was wrecked. I couldn’t remember what I’d been working on, and as a result, I didn’t practice at all. In fact, I didn’t pick up a guitar for weeks at a time. This was not good for me. I was more anxious and less focused throughout the day. For me, playing guitar is my Zen practice. Some people meditate. Some people do Tai Chi. I play guitar. (Actually, I also meditate and do Tai Chi, but not with the same regularity as I practice guitar.)

Some of the reason my practice suffered was because I was worn out from the performance schedule, but the primary reason was because I hadn’t documented my routine in advance. So when I came back to my practice, I didn’t know what to do. I’d lost touch with my aim.

In preparing for the show, I had a strict schedule for myself. There were approximately 24 songs in the show. I had a four-day rotation where I would work on six songs a day. This kept me from getting overloaded with too many new things to learn and ensured that I spent enough time with each song to master it.

When the show was over, there was a hole where my highly structured practice had been. I had a two-hour slot of time to fill and didn’t know what to do with it. It was too much to fill on the spur of the moment when I sat down, and it took me several months to get back on track.

Here’s the problem: When you sit down to practice, you have to have an aim or an intention. Once you have your intention in mind, you have to actually practice during your practice time.  We’ve all had the experience where we sat down to practice a scale or chord progression and ended up noodling on something else for an hour or practicing something we’d already mastered and never getting to what we intended to do.

It’s okay to play for fun but don’t do it at the expense of the goal you want to achieve.

What I suggest is that you plan your practice sessions and organize your materials in advance so that when you sit down you’re ready to go. Next assign times for each item. Here’s an example of my current schedule.

A	Time (min)	B	Time (min)	C	Time (min)
Warm up	5	Warm up	5	Warm up	5
Etude 1	10	Etude 1	10	Etude 1	10
Scale study 1 – 2	15	Scale study 3 – 4	15	Scale study 5 – 6	15
Finger Style	30	DADGAD	15	Finger Style	15
When I’m 64	30	When I’m 64	30	DADGAD	30

I usually do a schedule of five or seven practice sessions. I don’t necessarily do them on consecutive days. For example, I might do practice A on Monday and practice B on Tuesday, but then I might work on my repertoire or just play for fun on Wednesday and Thursday and pick up with session C on Friday. The important thing is that when I come back on Friday, I know what I’m going to do.

Notice that each practice session starts with about 15 minutes of warm ups, something most guitarists over look. The remainder of the session rotates to help battle boredom. The sessions are made up of skills or techniques that support a goal. Currently, I’m working on a solo guitar version of “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles. The finger style and alternate tuning (DADGAD) exercises help support that goal.

You can make the sessions shorter or longer or increase the number of sessions if necessary to offer more variety. The important thing is to write them down in advance. If you’ve made a commitment to practice, then honor that as a gift to yourself.

Don’t Fret About It: A Statement of Intent

When starting a new project, I find that defining why I’m undertaking the task and exploring what I hope to achieve helps clarify my actions. In this case, if you just happened on this blog, what follows may help you answer the question: “What was this guy thinking?”

The internet is replete with guitar resources: lessons on technique, tab transcriptions of songs and solos, videos on everything from shredding to guitar repair. There is no need for another site to address guitar technique. And you will find little of that here. At least, that is my intent.

It’s not that I don’t think technique is important, or that there is no value in learning from other musicians. On the contrary, those activities are essential to any guitar practice and you will never be able to play guitar if you don’t undertake those tasks and many others.

However, once you acquire a modicum of skill on the instrument, you will experience something wonderful. You will play something you didn’t intend. When you first begin playing, those unintended sounds will be described as mistakes. I think that’s an unfortunately negative term for them, but that’s a bigger topic for another time. As your skills improve and muscle memory develops, these unintentional sounds will become more interesting. Both “mistakes” and advanced unintentional sounds are examples of things I’ll explore in this blog. When you’re playing and you play something you weren’t expecting, where did that come from?

If you’ve ever sat down to play, only to look at the clock and realize that an hour has passed and you don’t know where it went, you understand what I’m talking about. The intent of this blog is to investigate those indefinable element of playing, the component of music that takes us out of our individual existence to something else. For a lack of a better word, call it transcendence.

The word transcendence has become hopelessly linked with religion or spirituality. But the definition is a state of being or existence above and beyond the limits of material experience. That definition can be taken to mean a spiritual experience but spirituality is not integral to it. If you play the instrument long enough, I guarantee that you will have a transcendent experience regardless of your spiritual beliefs.

My aim as a musician is to access that transcendent element of music as much as possible, and how to achieve that goal is the intent of this blog. One caveat: transcendent experiences are not limited to musicians or other artists. What you learn through guitar practice should influence your life, and conversely, what you learn through life should influence your practice.

While my primary topic will be guitar as a practice, that doesn’t mean non-guitarists won’t be interested in the blog. Much of what can be learned through guitar practice or any practice can be applied to life. If you’re a non-guitarist, try substituting the name of your vocation for the references to guitar, and you may see ways to apply the discussions to your activities.

Note that I said discussions. My other intent is to build a community of like-minded individuals. Being a lone voice screaming in the wilderness is hard on your voice. I look forward to your comments.

So those are my intentions. I hope you join me and that you enjoy the topics here. Remember: Don’t fret about it.  Your guitar still loves you.