My practice routine is 3-hours. I’ve been having a hard time staying consistent. Some days I feel like playing for less. I can stick to my 3-hour routine for two or three days at a time, but that’s when I lose some motivation. Even when I stick to my practice routine, I find it easy to leave one or three longer practice items undone. Should I reduce my practice to something easier to stick to (2-hour or 1-hour and 30-minutes)? Or make a separate shorter practice routine.
Wow, that is a long practice. Awesome if you can do it, but what stage are you learning at?
If I have 3 hours to practice, and occasionally I do, even more on some weekends days, I break it up into smaller segments throughout the day. 1 or so hours multiple times.
Also, I would spend a lot of that time just playing or learning songs and having fun, rather than trying to fill it all with specific practice routine stuff.
I guess that I am wondering if you are doing enough of what you enjoy in order to practice that long. You sound like it may be burning you out a bit.
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Be sure to find things to do in your session that are genuinely fun for you. And that should be a significant part of your session.
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Vincenzo, sounds like maybe your routine makes the learning an practicing into ‘work’, something that ‘must’ be done. You didn’t go in to detail, so I may be off the mark. That said, my suggestion would be to reduce the number of things you are focusing on from a learning and practice perspective and spend a little more time just playing, having fun with songs or improv.
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Hey Vincenzo,
Yep 3 hours seems like its giving you some grief. It is a longish session. I’d be interested to know what you’re packing into those 3 hrs, and how you’re structuring it all. You will likely get some more detailed and helpful tips.
Cheers,
Shane.
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Hi Vinzenco.
I think you should at least break it up, if you are playing that much every day.
I usually play 2-3 hours a day, most of the days. But i dont do it in one go. I dont «excersise» that long either, most of the time i just play songs and practise those.
I would find it boring and pretty repetitve if i would spend that much time just doing chord changes and such.
Most important, it needs to be fun, as soon as i dont enjoy it, ill just leave my guitar. Usually takes just a few minutes before i really want to pick it up again.
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Hi Vincenzo.
3 hours is a big chunk of practice time.
You need to vary it, shake it up and make it interesting for yourself.
It is hard to advise without knowing your level and the type of practice exercises you do within that time. Also, knowing your short / long term aims would help.
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I want to start a band and make music seriously, so I practice longer. The routine itself depends on the song, but what stays concrete: 10-minutes of ear training, 15-minutes of music theory, 25-minutes of scales, 25-minutes of practice stuff from grade 3 (my current level is module 16), 40-minutes of song work (this varies), 10-minutes on improv, 10-minutes transcribing, and 30-minutes on songwriting (I find this the easiest to skip). I do chord work, but that depends on the song (i always do 5-minutes of F chord work because I still struggle with that). None of these things feel like straight-up work. I moderately enjoy scales and stuff, and sometimes song work can be frustrating or fun. What makes consistency hard is that I have a short attention span, and focusing on anything for long periods is pretty hard for me. Like I said in my post, after the third or second day in a row of doing this, I lose some motivation, only getting half or none of this stuff done. I split it up throughout the day, but that doesn’t always help. I’ve been having another problem with wanting to go on social media or listen to a song while practicing because of my short attention span. I also want to mention the hardest things to get done are transcribing, improv, songwriting, and chord work. I can finish everything else most days. Sorry, the reply was long, but thank you to everyone for feedback on my post. EDIT: I forgot to mention that the grade 3 practice stuff can vary depending on what items I need or not. Practice time can also increase if I want to revisit a previous technique. I hope I went in-depth enough with this reply. Thanks for reading.
Thanks for the details on your routine, Vincenzo. Being able to concentrate, maintain attention, I guess is a personal issue influenced by many factors.
Perhaps an option to consider is to split the routine up and execute the entire programme over more than one day. Some of the items, transcribing in particular might be more effective if given a longer time period. So as an idea one could do transcribing on one day and song-writing on another.
You have clear direction, a band and serious music making. Maybe you can set yourself some short term goals to work towards that make use of what you are practicing to make it less long-term. For example, maybe work on being able to produce an original song, or just record performance of songs, which you could share here in #record-yourself-progress-performance:audio-video-of-you-playing. The feedback and encouragement in doing that may help with the energy and motivation.
Not much more I can suggest. Wish you well in the ongoing adventure.
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My best suggestion would be to break your 3-hour session up into 30-minite chunks, with a break between segments. That should help both the monotony and the consistency. Also, change the order of practice items every now and then.
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From someone who’s been there done that. I’d combine this 45 minute chunk into
dissecting solos. If your practicing scales that mean you already know them.
Playing scale faster doesn’t really help your over all playing.
Find solos by artist you like and spend this time figuring out how they are using scales
what make their playing appealing to you.
You don’t need to learn their work note for note but you will learn more by using scales
to make music than you will practicing scales and scale patterns.
You can go a long way learning to combine the major and minor pentatonic scales
and by adding notes from the Major and Minor scale over different chord it endless.
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I Never thought of scales that way. I thought since I was in grade 3 I had to stay in boxes of scale patterns, and anything outside of that would be too advanced. I will try this next practice.
All those boxes join together to make one big scale. its good to know your scales in every
pattern but you don’t need to play them at blistering speed. just correctly.
Check this lesson out. It’s played in one box the BB King Box which is neither major or
minor and both.
the only reason I can see that Justin has it at grade 6 level is because of the emotion put
into the bends.
Take that 45 minutes in your next practice and spend it learning as best you can this solo.
Doesn’t need to be perfect, doesn’t need to be note for note. Just see how much you can
learn from this 45 second solo.
I know Justin says to try and transcribe it your self so spend your 10-minutes of ear training
10-minutes on improv, 10-minutes transcribing listening and trying to transcribe it.
You probably won’t get it done in that time but that’s OK you will have learnt something.
It’s OK to cheat a little and what the lesson.
Remember you’re not concentrating on how to play the solo you concentrating how to solo
in general so people want to listen. Even if all you learn is how to do 1 bend with emotion
your on the winning side. If you like the solo spend every second day on the solo and the
other days on your regular lessons,
Good Luck Have fun let us know how it turns out. I’m assuming your playing an electric guitar.
If not you can still learn a lot from this solo. The bends will be impossible so you can subsitute
slides
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Hello Rick,
This is a great lesson when it comes to bending, simple notes but indeed that’s not the difficulty…it was time I started doing something more with this and also something with sustain…because @adi_mrok gave me stepped on my tail, and that puts some kind of pressure on 
And fast on with practice…
And Vincenzo, i hear people yelling at the screen…3 hours guitar time,…and not happy??? 
This morning I’ve already had 2 hours and a little bit of it…I wish you lots of fun…
And I hope to hear from you soon in the video section of the community.
Greetings,Rogier
Greetings
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