Learn Fingerings
Fast Using Practice Session Plans
One of the most important and sometimes tedious set
of skills required to play guitar is memorizing fingerings. These are
the fretboard scale and chord fingerings that underpin all
the things you can do with a guitar. Without a mastery of the
fretboard, you won't know what to play. The better you know the fretboard, the
easier it is to play, no matter what you are trying to play. Most of
my students have some issues when learning the fretboard and I make
sure they understand how important it is to get the fretboard fingerings
"Off The Paper" and into the fingers.
In Yellow Guitar Books, Volume
I there is a very useful, but sometimes overlooked chapter called
"About Practicing And Time Management: Practice Session Plans".
This one concept alone is worth the price of the book!
Here are a couple of things about practicing you may not
know:
1) Playing things very slow, then bringing them up to speed
a little at a time will get you where you want to be the
fastest.
2) Because your practice time is limited, you need to
spend it doing the things that will produce the best
results.
3) The guitar is so complicated that a good
"Practice Plan" will save you tons of that valuable practice
time.
4) A Metronome is your best friend when
practicing all of the things you need to learn on the
fretboard. The Metronome should be used as much as
possible.
See the Free Lesson: How To Use A Metronome
To create a Practice Plan, DOWNLOAD and PRINT a
PSP blank plan from here: Practice Session Plan Blank
We will use a sample Practice Session Plan
(PSP) as an example. Remember that the idea is for you to zero in on
what YOU think you need to work on and then design a plan for that
purpose.
Click
here to open the example PSP:Practice Session Plan Example
Look over this example as you read the following
steps.
How the practice Session Plan
works:
1) Select a Key Of The Day: this is a key that you
would like to improve in. It is a good idea to stick with one key
for a while when working with new fretboard fingerings.
2) Goal: This is a description of what you want to accomplish.
This should be stated in your own words and should be very clear.
"Short and Sweet".
3) Tasks: These are the specific things
you will be practicing. Tasks are designed to support your stated
goal.
4) Timeframe: You need to set timeframes to make the
most out of your practice time. Timeframes should be rather short for
tasks and longer for application. The total time for all Tasks and
Application would be the amount required to perform the entire
plan.
5) Application: This is
the fun part. It is very powerful to use the newly practiced
material in a real or simulated playing situation.
In Yellow Guitar Books, Volume I we talk
about some of the ways you can do this.
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