This is what a realistic hour of guitar practice looks like. Not a perfect one. I'd slept terribly, I was on a diet and I felt very low on energy, so I just decided to get some practice done and talk through what I was thinking as I went.
I picked pentatonic work and sweep picking, because they're things I don't really practise very much. The point isn't the exercises themselves. It's how I move in and out of different practice modes, when I speed up or slow down, and how I assess my playing as I go.
Make an hour an hour ▶ 1:19
The plan was not to get distracted at all. If the doorbell rang or I needed the toilet, I wasn't going to stop the clock. Otherwise an hour turns into two hours, and that's how you waste time. I got a couple of text messages during the session and didn't reply to them.
You've got to make an hour an hour and make it count.
How I split the hour ▶ 1:32
Half an hour on the pentatonic scale, half an hour on sweep picking, and each half hour split into three 10-minute blocks:
Pentatonic (30 minutes)
- Isolate the left and right hands and work on each.
- Pick through shape one all the way down and back, standard scale work, building some speed.
- Play it in groups of five, because I like how they sound.
Sweep picking (30 minutes)
- Isolate the hands again. I knew my right hand would be the weaker one for both of these.
- Work on C shape arpeggios, a G major and an A minor.
- Sweep through a diatonic chord progression in C, up and down the neck.
Every block was to a timer, and most of it to a metronome.
Pentatonic: working on the weak spot ▶ 2:43
Within a couple of minutes I'd found the bit that wasn't working: the turnaround at the top of the scale. Going up and down with four notes on the high e string just didn't feel comfortable coming back. So I worked on that turnaround on its own.
Coming back down, it felt awkward pulling the arm up, and it was very tempting to turn the wrist instead. So I worked on bringing my arm back properly.
I also tried not to look at my picking hand. When you're actually playing, you're probably not staring at your right hand, so I looked away and tried to feel where each string was and commit to it. Even when the rhythm wasn't as even as I'd like, I nudged the tempo up to build a bit of speed.
Bringing the left hand back in ▶ 12:45
When I added the scale back in, I went slower. The funny thing is that once I was playing the full scale, I was going faster than I'd been picking with the right hand alone, and it felt more comfortable. With the left hand involved, your picking hand has something familiar to work with. On its own it can feel a bit isolated.
As I sped up, I noticed I was picking too gently. You naturally get more gentle as you go faster, but you have to commit. When a section kept giving me trouble, I broke the scale into smaller sections and worked on those.
Groups of five ▶ 23:08
Twenty minutes of concentration is quite a lot, so I had a quick drink and a few seconds to recover before starting the groups of five.
I started without the metronome, a bit slower, just to get the flow of it. I caught myself almost swinging it, so I had to watch that. Then I put the metronome on, and when my brain was struggling to keep up, I went just a hair slower.
Going up in groups of five felt much more comfortable than coming down, because I don't tend to play them that way. So I spent the last few minutes of the block on the descending version only, picking a bit harder. This is the kind of thing that sinks in over a few days, if not weeks. I wasn't expecting loads of progress. I was just giving it a push.
Sweep picking: the picking hand on its own ▶ 33:56
After half an hour of intense practice, I'd honestly have been satisfied if that was my practice for the day. But on to sweep picking. I never sweep pick. It's not really my style, which is exactly why I was working on it.
The things I was conscious of:
- Drop the arm, don't just turn the wrist. It's quite hard to control the speed if it's all in the wrist.
- Even turnarounds. I noticed I was rushing the turnaround at each end. What helped was thinking of a slightly bigger motion at the end of each sweep, down, down, down, then up, up, up. There might not even be a bigger motion. It's just a mental prompt.
- Go slower to find the problems. It's easier to go faster, because speed masks the inconsistencies. Slow down and you can hear them.
Arpeggios and connecting them ▶ 42:44
On the G major arpeggio I kept catching myself relying on the wrist, and had to remind myself to push the arm down to keep it consistent. I was also losing grip of the pick, so I needed to grip it a bit tighter. Then the A minor shape.
Towards the end of that block I worked on some quick runs. They weren't super clean, but I think it's important to get used to cruising at a high speed if you want to be a faster player.
For the last 10 minutes I connected arpeggios through a chord progression in the key of C. It was passable but not great, so with four minutes left I put the metronome back on, slowed it down, and built back up. Speeding up the B diminished arpeggio wasn't worth it at that point. By the end, I didn't consciously know which note was coming next but my fingers were doing it, which is a good sign that it's sinking in.
What to take from it ▶ 62:45
The hour went by pretty quickly, and I wasn't bored. I could probably have done another hour of something different, like working on a song or some improv, with my hands nicely warmed up.
But notice that even within each 10-minute block I got quite a lot done, and improved a bit at each thing. Even 10 or 20 minutes of that would have made me better for the day. So don't fall into the all-or-nothing trap of thinking that if you can't do an hour, there's no point.
If you want to copy this, pick two things you don't normally practise, split your hour into six 10-minute blocks, keep the clock running, and write down what you noticed in each one in your practice log.
