Schedule your practice routine

One mistake I think a lot of people make when it comes to practicing is to not practice efficiently. They just start playing along to a song they want to learn, or grab a tab and try to learn the a song, or just go through some exercises. Although every bit of practice helps, you are not getting as much out of your time as the effort you are putting in. This is why you should schedule your practice routine.

As an example, here is a good one hour routine and I'll show you how I apply it.

• 0-10 mins - Warm Up
• 10-20 mins - Fingering Drills
• 20-40 mins - Playing Skills
• 40-60 mins - Fun Time

So with this plan in mind I am now practicing like this:

• 0-10 mins - My Super-Duper secret warm up exercises*
• 10-20 mins - 2 x exercises from the 30 Day Guitar Workout
• 20-40 mins - Lesson from Blues You Can Use Book 1
• 40-60 mins - Work on one of the songs I want to learn

In 1 hour, I get to cover all the areas I want to work on. The beauty of this is if you have more time (which I normally don't) you can just extend out all the periods and still get a balanced workout.

I'd love to hear how others break up their practice time and what they find useful.

* My Super-Duper warm up routine won't be secret for long. I'll be sharing that shortly. It's a killer.

Instructional videos thought.

I am definitely the sort of person that can pick up how to do almost anything very quickly if you show me. So you would think that I would love instructional guitar DVD's and be the worlds best guitarist. But alas no, and I'll explain why. The clip below is from the upcoming Robert Johnson DVD from Note4Note.

I just can't following it. When each note is played individually I get lost, musically, on where I am up to. For some reason with guitar I work best with the tab and the licks and phrases separated, rather than note for note. I get much more out of a lesson when I'm "why" something is played a certain way. See this clip below of the great Stevie Ray Vaughan:

I get much more out of video like that. What about you?