Well, what happened?
Perhaps more than’s indicated in this blog.
Quite a lot, actually.
Quite a lot of learning new music, investigating new information, chatting to new people, and of course “investing” in new kit. All in the name of the guitar.
What hasn’t happened is me nailing down what you might call a proper practice routine. A regular routine, yes: but not one that’s set up to get maximum benefit from the time I spend with a guitar in my hand.
It seems to be a common question, or a series of questions: “how should I practice?”, “what should I practice?” being the most pressing two. It seems to me that the key to answering those is first to understand what you’re looking to achieve, that is to set out some achievable goals. When you know that, you can work out the steps that you need to progress through to meet those goals.
Write them down
Make them specific. Make them achievable, and make them achievable in a way that fits the amount of time you have (per day, per week) and the amount of time before you want to be able to tick off that achievement.
It’s a much better feeling to have goals that feel achievable, that you can feel yourself moving closer towards achieving, than something that sits on your mental horizon like a particularly-grumpy teenager, scowling at you from a distance.
To take an extreme example, “learn the main guitar solo from Comfortably Numb and be able to play along with the record” is more achievable than “learn the main guitar solo from Comfortably Numb, record it over a home-made backing track including bass and drum parts and upload to Soundcloud”. The first one is focussed on learning a specific section of a piece of music, and that itself is likely to be challenging and stretching. The second relies on a series of complimentary but separate skills across different disciplines which if you try and combine is likely to lead to failure.
It should be something that you know will fill you with a sense of achievement when you achieve it.
It should be possible to achieve within a defined amount of time, say four weeks. That means that when you achieve it, you can look back over a recent period and see that the effort and focus has paid off.
Above all, write the goal down. Write it on a post it. Tape it to the fridge, or your amp, or stick it on your laptop. Have it somewhere you can see it everyday. Tell people what your goal is to bring it to life and to help you be accountable for working towards achieving it.
Having talked about goals for a little bit, I’m going to go away now and write some down. My first goal is to be back within three days (rather than three years), to talk about a couple of guitar-related goals that I’ll have written down, and perhaps to talk a little bit about how I’m going to achieve them.
Have a happy Monday.