Adam Rafferty: This is how I practice guitar

Thanks to my friend  Anton Emery , I just read fingerstyle guitarist Adam Rafferty's nice blog post about how he practices guitar , in w...

Playing on the beat

I've been working recently on learning to play 'drums' on a midi keyboard, for a recording project. I haven't seriously play...

More thoughts on Effortless Mastery

Life has been busy recently, unfortunately full of real-world work, and not a whole lot of time for music. As I often do in these times, I...

Making changes

After giving a house concert in Seattle a few weeks ago (big thanks to Rich for hosting!), once of the audience members said to me, "t...

Trust yourself

Peter Mitchell commented on my "You have to really listen" post : I think this is related to the discussion around "multitask...

Wooten's metronome games

Philip Hii's been writing about rhythm a lot on his blog lately, and so I feel like it's a good time to work on my rhythm (it's...

Always have a positive musical intent

Philip Hii has been putting up a series of posts about speed and fluidity on his "Art of Virtuosity" blog recently. They're a...

Louis Drouët: On the Method of Finishing a Piece

Some food for thought today culled from Louis Drouët's 1830 method for playing the flute. I left the pre-Victorian ESL wording alone, be...

Measuring progress

Tracking progress is a popular topic on guitar blogs I read. With all the day-to-day ups and downs, the best advice is to measure progress o...

How to practice things that need a lot of repetition

Some things you practice may require a lot of repetition to train your muscle memory. It's tempting to just keep repeating an exercise t...

How to divide up practice time

Dividing up practice time Teachers usually recommend dividing up your practice time between technique, studies, and repertoire. Since there...

What is efficient?

"When working on the exercises, the guitarist must keep in mind the fact that mechanical repetition is worthless. Every time an exerci...

exploring a piece

I'm hanging out in Montana right now, visiting Glacier NP and hanging out with my parents. I brought my guitar, but I've got a lot o...

Things that bear repeating...

I just read a nice blog post from Bob Wooldridge about a concert and workshop given by Jorge Caballero at the GFA convention. There was a...

Conflicting advice

This is a tricky one. I have a moderate-sized collection of guitar method books, which I like because there's always something interesti...

Visualization followup

I think that unless I have the time to devote my full undivided attention to this process, it's probably best to work in small chunks, p...

Visualization

This topic comes up an awful lot, and I'm not going to go into too much detail about the process, per se. Here is a good article on it ...

Coordination vs control

Today I managed to increase my scale speed by nearly 20%. I've done a lot of right hand work lately, but what seems to have done it toda...