• What is Practicing?
• New and Interesting at GuitarPrinciples.com

You know, you can't get someone to take their medicine if they don't know they have the disease! So I wrote this essay, "What is Practicing?" to get players to begin to get an awareness of what REAL PRACTICING is, and compare it to what they are presently doing.

There is a good reason many guitar players don't get results from their practicing: they don't know what practicing is! Many players think that opening up the guitar case, taking out the guitar, and playing through their lesson material is practicing. If you are one of these people, I want you to stand up, look in the mirror, and say, "Oh, what a fool I have been! No wonder I have these problems in my playing! I now make the solemn vow to finish reading Jamey's essay, and finally understand what practicing really is."

Okay, good. Now we can talk. Believe me, you will be a much happier guitar player when you outgrow the ignorance that so many players suffer from.

Here is a good analogy for you to think of, in order to understand what practicing the guitar really is. Think of it this way: your playing ability (what we usually call your technique) is like a vehicle you drive. In the beginning, when you first pick up the guitar, you have no ability. You have no vehicle to drive. You must start to build it right at that moment. Every time you pick up the guitar to practice, you are building your vehicle. After awhile, if you haven't given up, you have a little something to drive. Maybe it's not much at first, maybe it's like a little tricycle. It only goes about 5 miles an hour, but you're having fun, so you ride it around the block everyday.

Now, this level of technique is like being able to strum a few chords, and change them fast enough to make your way through a song. But you are not good enough yet to play scales fast, and know your way around the neck. Going to that level requires more than the little tricycle you have managed to put together. You must have a racing bike for that. So there is a lot more work to be done to upgrade your tricycle to a racing bike. But you would really like to do that, because you see all the big guys out there on their bikes going real fast, riding the trails in all those cool places, and you are starting to feel like a jerk on your little tricycle!

The person who knows how to practice is the person who knows how to go to the store, buy the necessary parts, and then go home and work on his tricycle, turning it into (eventually) a racing bike.

The person who doesn't know how to practice is the person who gets on his tricycle, and charges out in to the street, pedals real hard, and tries to catch up with the big guys on their racing bikes. It's pretty impossible to get that kind of performance out of a tricycle, it' s just not built for that kind of speed. Some of the guys on the racing bikes might see the tricycle rider and think "oh, isn't that cute, maybe I'll slow down and pat the little fellow on the head", but that is about as good as it gets.

When you know how to use "The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar", you are like a person with a magic toolkit: you can always reach in and pull out the tools to upgrade your vehicle in order to get increased performance out of it. If you have an old jalopy that has a top speed of 25 miles per hour, you know how to turn it into a racing car. Every time you practice, it is like putting the car up on the lift, and doing the necessary work to create a change for the better in your playing.

Without knowing how to practice, you are like the person who takes his old jalopy out on the highway, and tries to get it to perform like a racecar. The old clunker would start shaking at fast speeds, and then start falling apart, that is what happens to players who try to play things that are way beyond their ACTUAL technique (the level their technique REALLY is, not what they "imagine" it to be, or wish it were). These players fall apart when the going gets tough, when the playing gets fast, for example.

Many guitar players hear someone play something amazing that they would like to play. They find the music or the tab, and they have a go at it. Whether they become able to play it well is a very hit or miss affair. This is because they have no idea of what level of technique may be ACTUALLY required to play the music they are trying to play, and also because they have no realistic idea of what level of technique THEY actually have achieved at the present time.
So what they do is try to play the new music with whatever level of technique they have, close their eyes, and hope for the best! Needless to say, this is not the best approach. Very very often, the technique a player has is NOT up to a lot of the music they will try to play, and they claw their way through the music every time they sit down with it. They never know they are doing nothing but "locking in" more muscle tension, and keeping their playing ability stuck at it's present level. They are keeping their tricycle a tricycle, and trying to ride with the big boys!

Learn "The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar". Learn how to put your vehicle up on the lift and upgrade it to it's next higher level of functioning. Turn your tricycle into a racing bike. Turn your racing bike into a car, and then in to a racing car, and then a rocket ship, and then an intergalactic space/time transporter, and then………..I think I'll go now……………

Well, I know everything is new, and I hope you will find a lot of it interesting! This is my first newsletter for my new site, GuitarPrinciples.com. I have created this site in order to focus exclusively on the teaching aspect of my work, and I will use my old site, jandreas.com
to take care of my own artistic output, my music and other personal writings which I will be adding to the old site as time goes on.

Because of the response of players around the world to my book "The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar", and my writings associated with the book, I felt it necessary to have a place to concentrate on matters solely dealing with the core of my teaching approach: learning how to practice effectively, so that anyone can make continuous progress as they put in their daily practice time, instead of just "treading water" and creating the illusion of progress, simply because they move their fingers around the frets everyday!

Here are some things you will find there now to help you out in this regard:

If you haven't done so yet, make sure you read Discover Your Discomfort , and The Secret
of Speed. These two essays will give you some very practical steps for starting to practice effectively.

I also highly recommend you check out my replies to a students questions about Practice Organization. It is a vital area of concern for those wishing to get to their next level of ability as guitarists, and it is rarely addressed in books or by teachers. Highly Recommended to your attention!

For those who want something they can use right away, here is a Technical Tip that will improve your playing as soon as you start to use it. It is used by all good players as part of their basic approach to left hand technique.

One of the things I want to accomplish at GuitarPrinciples.com is to educate players and would-be players concerning what "taking guitar lessons" is all about. I will be talking about everything from "should I take lessons" to "what should I expect if I do take lessons."

All material copyright © 2003 by Jamey Andreas, GuitarPrinciples.com