It’s another new year. Did you make any resolutions? As musicians we should constantly strive to become better players. In my opinion, this is the fruit that constantly propels one forward in their musical journey–you can always get better at what you do! The new year is a great time to take stock of your talent and make a game plan moving forward to increase your potential. Here’s a few thoughts on good ways to get started.

Music is such a diverse pursuit. Often some of the most sensible things needed to get better are overlooked. I think every musician should make a point to work on at least three things this upcoming year: 1) Resolve to practice more often and more consistently, 2) Improve your music reading ability 3) Make sure to spend more time listening to music!

For part one of this series, we’re going to look at cultivating a regular practice regimen. Practice makes perfect, right? I suppose more correctly, perfect practice improves. Don’t get hung up on what is “practice”. Really, any time that you spend with your instrument of choice will improve your ability. However, there are more specific ideas that you can bring to the table with regard to practice that will add some diversity to your efforts, make it more fun and improve your overall ability faster. As a guitarist, I am going to focus on “guitar practice” but certainly many of these elements translate over to other instruments.

First of all, how much practice is enough? Well, what are you going for? Most of us local guys don’t have the time to shed all day, a la John Coltrane. But most of us can likely find at least an hour plus per day to spend with our instrument. Start here, at least 4-5x/week. How much more or less you practice will often depend on the gig regimen you have and/or the difficulty level of the material and of course, your other life–wife, kids, job, etc. Pinning down a regular time will help a lot. Personally, I enjoy breaking up the workday by settling down with my guitar around 4:30-5pm. Depending on how things go, I might practice until 6-6:30pm.

There are a few different ways to structure your practice. Warming up is great and you should always stretch your fingers, tendons, forearms, etc. before you start. However, playing scales and/or finger exercises for an hour or more is no fun–unless you like that kind of thing. Best to set aside 10-15 minutes at the front of each practice session to get those fingers moving. Scales are great, but make sure to vary the amount of notes/fingers per string so you don’t get too used to specific runs. Also, do exercises that switch up your fingers, so that movement is less linear. For example, numbering your digits 1-4 (on guitar), play your scales or exercises alternating fingers–like 1-3-2-4. Play your scales in different ways–backwards, in sequences (2, 3 and 4 note), in different orders and AT ALL FRETS–DON’T FORGET TO PRACTICE WITH OPEN STRINGS TOO! This will increase your fluidity over time and keep you from falling into those typical major or pentatonic scale ruts that you hear amongst so many players.

Over time you can add even more technical stuff to your regimen. Staccato picking is great, but there are so many different techniques to practice in addition to this. Try doing all your scale notes as hammer-ons or pull-offs. Alternate strings with both! Trill each two notes of a scale as you move up the fret board. Tremolo pick the entire scale! When your fingers are ready, work on your sweeps and arpeggios. Start with small movements, perhaps 3-4 note chord arpeggios and slowly move to the point where you can sweep the entire fret board from 6th string to 1st and back again. Don’t forget about harmonics either! You can tap these at various places on the string (depending on where you finger your note) to add some color. You can also pinch these out with your picking fingers. From there, why not tap some stuff? You can start with simpler EVH techniques and then move up to more advanced Steve Vai type of stuff. The guitar is your oyster. Go for it!

Now that your fingers are warm, choose some good material to practice with. Often, with gigs on the plate a really easy idea is just to work with the material that you need to play. In my humble opinion, it’s the quality of practice done over less material versus trying to maximize the amount of practice material for diversity sake. In other words, get really, really good over less diverse material rather than trying to play great over everything, at least at first. The “everything” stuff will come over time, but start with more simple concepts in the beginning and move forward as you begin to master these.

For example, in the jazz world there are so many chord progressions. However, these is also SO MUCH blues–both major and minor. Almost any jazz jam or show will have at least a few blues numbers. How good are you at shedding over a minor blues? Interestingly enough, the more you play over a minor blues progression (which do have some fun and different turnaround ideas from time to time) the more you unlock different note ideas to play (over what started out as a simple 1-4-5 minor progression). Whole tone scales, super-locrian scales, half-diminished and diminished scales are all hiding in between those chords. Find them! Work on them and get really good here first; then move on. Same thing goes for a regular 12-bar dominant blues (which have even more scale and turnaround ideas, imo).

At least a few times a week, pick some of your favorite artists (from your collection or on Pandora) and jam to them. One of my favorite things to do is to set Pandora to the Pat Martino station (or other jazz guitarist) and just jam. It’s amazing how many standards one comes to know over time, but in general the material isn’t too exceedingly heavy or modern–you can just listen and find your way around the melody. This will really help to improve your ears over time as well. If you’re already an incredible player, up the anti–try the Robert Glasper or Chick Corea stations! Keep in mind that you don’t always have to jam over guitar players. Listening and jamming to other instruments will improve your aural ability in addition to your technique. Every instrument tends to have it’s own unique phrasing and intervals due to the way it is played. Try to change it up and emulate the trumpet or saxophone for a session.

As you progress with your practice sessions, continue to add new material to work with at least once per week. This will keep your ears open and keep you from falling in the familiar ruts that always seem to sneak up on us. Push yourself. At first, that particular session may be a struggle–especially if you’re working with a new and/or difficult chord harmony. However, over time you will become more familiar and your fluidity will improve. Even though there are 1000’s of different chord harmonies in jazz, often chords that are located right next to each other (in a chart) will be found again in similar fashion with different tunes. For example playing over a 1m-2mb5-5alt progression will unlock many ideas that are ubiquitous over so many jazz compositions, especially Latin jazz. The better you get at playing from chord to chord, the easier it becomes as you find these chords in new tunes. As diverse as jazz is, the chord harmonies often repeat, even if only a smaller fractalized version within another tune. The longer you push yourself to learn new chord harmony, the more note ideas you will add to your library over time and you will find it gets much easier to play over these same harmonies in the future.

A final thought for guitar players. Do you play only one guitar or do you like to play several? Most gigging players know the power of having multiple axes in their quiver. Sure, there’s always those cats that you see with just one guitar, but most pros keep a myriad of different guitars available to get that right sound needed for a particular genre, song or specific guitar tone. As such, make sure to always practice with different guitars. In addition to the various scaling of guitars, the fret wire and spacing is always different as are the tones and feels. Maple, ebony and rosewood feel and sound quite a bit different if you’re not used to playing them. Even the string action tends to change depending on whether the bridge is fixed or has a tremolo. Even a fixed bridge has different options that change up the action.

So that’s it for this part.  Practice is important, but good practice is paramount to getting better!  Tune in next time for Part Two: Improving your reading ability.  And don’t forget to make this a great year!