PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Share your current practice routine - here's mine

Hi all,

Since I've been spending quite a bit of time with the instrument lately, I'd like to share some of what I do, some personal reflections on my own practice, and hear some of the same from you who are willing to share.

Recently retired - I now have no excuse for lack of time...it's exhilerating, other than that I wish I had this kind of time when I was younger - but hey, spilled milk : )

My current goal is to relearn every piece or song (that I still like) that I had spent many hours with in the past....which doesn't mean I ever learned to play them at a performance level....now that crosses a LOT of styles, but most of it involves technically challenging pieces. For some reason my ear went to these types of things, and it may well be because playing technically challenging pieces is one of my relative strengths.

So my morning routine consists of watching Netflix while I work through reading the pieces I'm working on - I started with classical pieces. I know divided attention is less effective - but F#$ it - that's the way I enjoy practicing lol

What I learned - is how hard (that is, how long it takes) for me to memorize a full piece and play it at performance level. The smart thing I've done in my recent years is create a list of songs/pieces that I continually revisit. The pop song list has about 50 songs, and the recent classical list has only 5. My 5 classical pieces are:

1.) Bach - Allemande from 3rd cello suite
2.) Asturias - Albeniz
3.) Variations on a theme of Mozart - Sor
4.) Chopin Prelude op 28 no 20 - as transcribed by Liona Boyd
5.) Romance (anonymous)

It's been 2 months of several hours of morning practice - and I'm still quite far away from playing these 5. I realize also that I learned parts of these pieces well, but never actually learned the whole piece - for example, the beginning of the Asturias is relatively straightforward arpeggios, but the slow part is actually quite beautiful and not so easy (for me) to read. Since my sight reading is poor, quite often it takes me quite a bit of time to get my fingers in the right place and play through even 1 or 2 measures fluently....and then lots more time to combine measures into a fluent line, section etc. I have to annotate my pieces extensively with every position change, fingerings that might be obvious to a good sight reader, and chord diagrams. I'm going to later share an example. I have to do the same for flamenco pieces.

--> I'm wondering if many of you have to perform such labor to learn a new piece, and if you have any tips, shortcuts, etc.
--> Also - are there other more elementary practice exercises/strategies that would speed up my pace at the above ? I don't think so, but I'm open to suggestions.

I can do the above for about 1 to an hour and a half - and then I'm fatigued, usually 'classical-music-outted' for the day.

After that I can move to flamenco for 1/2 hour+, depending, but after that I'm 'nylon-stringed' out.

I do have an end goal (which has been constantly changing lol) - which is being able to confidently perform 45 minutes to an hour of my favorite pieces on a nylon string guitar. You may recall I was looking for easier classical pieces and thought mixing genres would be a bad idea - but all of you convinced me otherwise (thanks for that). I now plan to mix classical, flamenco, and even a few Steve Howe solo pieces. BTW Eddie - I will share a youtube video of 1 or 2 of the above, because I know you're looking forward to it lol

Ah -this post is already longer than I planned - I'll save my pop practice routine for another post (depending on the response to this one).

As I always say - thanks in advance for your friendship, comraderie, and all the advice and sharing you guys generously give.

Best,
Joe

Every so often, I have considered something similar. I knew a lot of songs, many of them note perfect, or close, in the past. But I then thought....what would be the reason to spending the time to relearn it other than the personal achievement. So, I simply write new stuff and don't worry about relearning the old stuff.

But Kudos to you for wanting to achieve this!

In the past I have tried this: I learn the song in bits and pieces. Once I get the intro down, I move on to the next part and so on. Each time I move to the next part I play through what I already leaned which reinforces it and then tackle the new part.

Slow down. Learn to play it slowly, as slow as you can really. Once you have the muscle memory, then start adding speed until you get to performance speed. This to me is vital. I like playing fingerstyle pieces, Chet Atkins, Tommy Emmanuel, Jerry Reed etc. They are best learned slowly. Once you have all the parts working together properly you can speed it up and your fingers know where to go and very soon it is automatic and you can then expand, improvise etc. There are songs I have been playing for 40 years, that I can just play, without even thinking about because the muscle memory is so ingrained.

I think that's great - probably the mark of a more artistic and mature musician. Since I'd like to some day play publicly, and I don't enjoy the act of writing my own stuff I go for the music I really enjoy that will also be more of a crowd pleaser (though that remains to be seen lol)

I learn a new song, good enough to bring on stage, and then practice it there. After all, if you can't practice on stage, where can you practice?

Insights, incites and a bit of humor by Notes ♫

If you can't please your audience then you won't have a gig. I had a wedding band for years and we had more gig offerings then we could play. Why? Because we played what they wanted to hear. It is that simple.

We did the same thing! We also used to jam on stage.

Truer words were never spoken.

Play the songs the people want to hear, and pace the audience so you are playing the right songs at the right time, do a good job at that, and you will get gigs.

Find a good market, country, pop, oldies, hiphop, metal, or whatever and focus on it. Make sure there is a lot of work for the market you choose if you want to work.

I'd love to play jazz, but around here, the only jazz is a weekly 'black box' theater where I believe the house band does it for the love, definitely not the money. I gig for a living, so I play popular music. To me, a day job is a bigger sell-out than playing Mustang Sally again.

Mrs. Notes and I chose the retirement market. Here in Florida it is a big market and they prefer small but live bands. We learned the songs they wanted to hear. We did them to the best of our ability and paced the crowds, giving them soft music when they needed it and dance music when they needed that. Through the years we keep learning what is requested and the only time we were out of work was during the COVID pandemic's dark days.

When you practice, if you intend to gig, learn the songs people want to hear. Listen to your competition and watch what is working for them. Learn them at least as good as your competitors, and if you can, learn them better.

Then, when you are on stage, you aren't done practicing. You watch the audience, try different things, see how they react, and refine, refine, refine.

Sorry about drifting a bit off-topic.

Notes ♫