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Adam thanks for sharing your routine, that's crazy man. Wow what stuff are you working on and do you measure your progress?
It's all technique. The vast majority of my practice has been technique orientated - most of the focus has been on alternate picking, 2nps and 3nps major scales, modes and harmonic minor, and then learning difficult phrases from songs by malmsteen, paul gilbert, vai etc. Occasionally it culminates in learning a whole song and I did the odd video of that, I recorded maybe 5 or 6 videos over the 7 years.
Then at one point I spent 3 months doing sweep picking for 3 hours a day, which helped that develop a lot. And on/off developing basic taping skills.
Currently, I just started switching over to economy picking, like in the last couple of weeks, learning some eric johnson style runs with it, and also running the 3nps scale shapes with it. The idea is that I want to be able to both alternate and economy pick fast and fluidly. I've also been having massive difficulty with outside picking - which I am focussing on currently, but eco picking will give me another option if it never improves - but I also never appreciated until recently how economy picking sounds different to alternate picking, and I regret neglecting it.
I don't have a strict 'hit list' of stuff to work on at this moment, the ~7 years so far have been a general work towards getting fast and accurate, but it's not really happening. As I've said in another thread, my main issue is consistency of playing. I'll play the same song 50 times, and of those only 1 will come out acceptable. The other 49 will have massive glaring errors, where I hit a bum note, forget a section entirely or mess up a passage (which doesn't seem related to speed, I mess up slow/easy and fast/difficult sections just as much). Though, speed is still an issue - I can play 'fast', but only if I taylor it to fit my strengths with picking (inside picking - ascending runs, certain shapes etc.). But regardless of the speed - the number of mistakes per min are very high - and I can't pin down a pattern to it. Everything I've read about improving says 'identify the problem, isolate it, practice it'. But when you can't identify the problem because the problem is in a completely different place every time, what do you do?
To date, as I say most of it is technique that I've done, however I have spent a short while writing, working on ear training and sheet reading. I'm at a level where I can sheet read to the point that I can work out sheet music on guitar - I recognise key signatures and know the sharps/flats they represent, I know then how to find the scales for that on the fretboard. I can read basic rhythms and pitches in both treble and bass clef. But it's nowhere near fast enough to sight read.
Ear training wise, I can recognise intervals between unison and major 10th, played either ascending or descending and harmonically - but only if they're played on a piano, and only if they're isolated (if you play 2 intervals back to back I have no idea what it is - for some reason I can't identify either interval). I cannot transcribe at all, even learning simple pop songs by ear is a real challenge for me, so I need to figure out a way to learn that.
Currently I write my practice out each morning in a book - so far I've filled like 4 or 5 books. I just write out a list of what I'm doing with a little checkbox next to it to check it off as I go, and a number to represent the number of mins I'm doing that thing for, usually in multiples of 15 mins. Occasionally it also includes a metronome speed, though most of the time I just set the metronome somewhere approximately right from memory and work from there. I can trace it all the way back to when I started (or re-started, after the computer nightmare of loosing at least a good couple years of it), with the running total of hours practiced written at the top of each page.
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That would be really interesting to read. The whole plan to do this is actually really ballsy
Haha, thanks.
Part of the reason for doing it is to make weekly/monthly videos, and blog, and show people what it's like to do it. What works out and what doesn't, and to at least make 1 case study people can see where a guy actually does sit and just work at music, from a point where he wasn't particularly special - I'm a heavily average guitarist - and to see whether just working on it made him great or not. I find that really interesting. My thought on it is that anyone can put in the effort and make themselves awesome - and as I'm anyone and I love playing guitar so much, I figure it'd be stupid of me not to do it. However, I don't really know if that's the case - I may end up proving myself wrong and spending 2 years showing people that sometimes it doesn't matter how much effort is applied - it's just not gonna happen. We'll see which way it goes, and whatever ends up happening, document it.
My general plan for the 2 years is to a) Hammer this technique stuff with a ridiculous amount of time and effort so that if it's possible for it to happen for me, it will. And then
to generally improve aspects I've neglected such as ear training, sheet reading, theory, improvising, writing, transcribing. There is a hit list for this - I have this vague plan to break it into 3 month periods where I give a lot of time to each thing in turn - so doing like 5 hours of sheet reading a day for 3 months. I like the idea of being overly focussed on what I'm trying to achieve, for a fixed amount of time. It'll also make blogging about each section easier, as I can show at the end of 3 months what has/hasn't been achieved. I will make a more detailed plan before I begin, which will be published on the web.
On a side note, if you check out my 'date joined' on GMC, you'll find it was about 7 years ago. That's because it was GMC that made me start this journey. In fact, it remember it very clearly, it was one of Kris' videos on alternate picking that made me realise that the reason I suck is because I never, ever practiced. Which sounds stupid and obvious to say like that, but I had just always sort of told myself I was better than I was and sort of never put 2 and 2 together and realised that if I practice a lot, I'll improve accordingly. So, I started practicing about 5 hours a day then, and saved up for 6 months to afford a membership (I was a really poor student at the time) and that's how it began.
I'm almost at a point where I have the means to do the 2 year experiment, I can't really talk openly about the exact timing as there are still variables involved in it. But, so long as I don't die in a freak accident or something catastrophic happens in my life, it's going to happen.
'Soon'.
-Adam
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