Learn Guitar Online – Practice Traps & How to Escape Them

By Mike P Hayes

Over practicing for your next performance can be a trap because it can lead to information overload, physical burnout and decreased performance. Practice makes perfect right? We’ve all heard that phrase before from music teachers, parents etc., with so many people telling us it’s got to be correct.

Actually, that popular phrase is only half true. To achieve our performance goals we need to make an important distinction. Instead of that phrase.

Here is what we need to know …

“Perfect practice makes perfect.”

You see, that’s an important distinction, simply practicing for the sake of practicing won’t cut it! You need to make practice time a time where you eliminate errors and fine tune your skills.

Remember, your fingers are not the thinking part of your body, they are the doing part … and they will keep on “doing it” the way they always have done (even it’s incorrect) until you make a conscious effort to correct the error.

Have you ever practiced relentlessly fifteen hours a day, day after day, driving yourself and your neighbors silly, only to totally botch things up on the day of the performance?

Well, you are not on your own, 85% of guitarists find themselves in the same situation! And, we all know how that feels, our confidence shot to pieces, all you want to do at the end of the night is crawl inside your guitar case and hope nobody notices you.

And so you begin a never ending cycle, poor performance means back to the practice room for more relentless practice, more “over practicing” to compensate for last performance disastrous results, burnout, and the inevitable … another poor performance and further loss of motivation and enthusiasm.

Here’s your escape plan:

Correctly diagnose the problem.

(a) Firstly determine in general terms if it is a motor skill issue or data memory problem?

(b) Then, dig deeper into the problem to find out specifically how we can overcome this glitch.

Let’s say, when you really get down to it, you find that it’s not a case of having fat, dumb, slow or old fingers (physical motor skills), it’s simply that you can’t seem to remember the chords for the songs (data memory issue).

Now, we are starting to get somewhere and you can probably begin to see why it’s essential to continually review the quality of your practice and the results you are achieving.

To give you an analogy, let’s image for a moment you were driving down the highway without a map and suppose you had to turn right to reach your intended destination, simply turning left and going as fast won’t get you there.

You need to focus on your prime objective and constantly design practice sessions that will achieve your goals.

Now, back to our problem of forgetting the chords for our songs, simply practicing writing the chords down on a data memory card.

Write the chords four bars to a line as follows:

C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |

There’s two reasons for this (a) firstly, it gives you clarity and it allows you to remember small amounts of information, (b) with only four bars per line many repetitious phrases become obvious where you can immediately recognize and associate current material with information you have already learnt.

For example let’s say the following 16 bars where from a new composition by your bass player, your problem is you have to learn the chord sequence for a performance tomorrow.

C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |

F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// ||

At first glance this looks tricky, when you split the project down into four bar units it becomes clear the there are sections that are repeated.

line 1:

C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |

Line 2:

F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |

Line 3: (same as line 2)

F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |

Line 4: (same as line 1)

F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |

I know this looks simple, and it is, but you would be surprised to know just how many practice hours can be saved by breaking things down to very do-able pieces of information.

Never get caught again …

In a nutshell, it’s the quality of your practice sessions not the sheer quantity of practice time. Remember before you sit down for your next practice session, decide whether the problem is motor

skill problem or data memory problem.

Mike Hayes is a teacher, author, speaker and consultant. Get his tips and tested strategies proven to boost your guitar playing his membership site at http://www.guitarcoaching.com today.

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