March 28, 2018

Practicing One Thing Is Practicing Everything

If you know how to learn one thing really well on guitar, you know how to learn anything. If you cannot learn one thing well, you cannot learn anything well. Correct practice for guitar changes everything!

 Anyone who knows how to get really good on guitar knows that the most important thing is to practice new movements SLOWLY. Whatever you think this means, and however slow you think slow practice is, make it ten times slower!

 "The Principles of Correct Practice For Guitar" teaches you what slow practice really means, and how to use it to achieve excellence on guitar. As we begin to practice correctly, we soon realize that every time we practice something, we are not just learning that particular set of movements, we are actually improving all our playing. The essence of the movements of the particular passage of music we are working will show up in other music we are playing.

If you work correctly on that scale passage from one song or piece you are working on, you will see all your scale work improve. You will find yourself playing an old song that you haven't even practiced for awhile, and discover that it has improved, even though you have not played or practiced it for a year. 

Yes, it improved because of the correct practice you did on the other song. That is one of the magical benefits of correct practice on guitar. 

When we practice correctly, we are not just improving our fingers, we are improving our entire playing mechanism, arms, shoulders, in fact, our control over our whole body while playing.

 

One Scale = All Scales

Please realize this. If you can’t play one scale correctly and cleanly, then, you can’t play ANY scale correctly and cleanly. So, if this is the way it is for you, there isn’t much use, from the point of view of technique, to practicing a ton of scales. It would be a much better use of your time to pick one scale and examine it minutely, and practice it correctly and intensely until you begin to get it clean. Then, you will see ALL your scales improve.

This is the meaning of “practicing one thing is practicing everything”. Correct practice opens the door, slowly, one inch at a time to the world of music you want to play. Please realize that the opposite is true as well. Bad practice closes the door, slowly, one inch at a time, to the world of music you want to play.

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"The Informed Guitar Student"



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