In this video, I will share with you my ultimate guitar practice routine.
With this video, I am sharing the things I am currently practicing; however, that doesn’t mean you should follow the same routine. Remember that you are the only one who should plan your guitar practice routine as you are the only one who truly knows which guitar player you want to become.
At the moment, I can practice between 90 to 120 minutes a day (usually five times a week), so my guitar routine is based on three categories only:
Scales.
Chords.
Songwriting.
I hope you find this video interesting, guys.
Plan your guitar practice routine! Keep yourself motivated, and have fun playing music.
Repetition is the number one of the things that will make your guitar play better. If you repeat the same chord progression repeatedly, you will inevitably become good at it (unless you practice the exercise wrong).
The only problem with repetition is that after a while, it makes whatever it is that you are practicing repetitive and boring. If you can find a way to make repetition exciting and musical, practicing the same exercises for hours will not be a problem anymore.
In this lesson, I want to show you how to improve your fingerpicking technique by practicing a simple melody. The goal is to make this melody enjoyable to play so that you get bored quickly.
But how can you make a melody more interesting?
First of all, we will be playing the melody in four different positions. Each position will have a different left-hand fingering. This approach keeps you engaged with the exercise.
We will also pluck the melody with the alternate fingering pattern “Index-middle” or “Middle-index.”
The melody is in the key of G major. It’s a lovely classical motif that you will easily recognize.
I played the melody at 95Bpm. The melody is played with four semiquavers per beat; therefore, it can be quite fast at first.
You don’t have to get to this speed. I recommend that you start without the metronome. Memorize the notes and play them for a while. Once you feel ready, use the metronome starting from 40 BPM.
How can you make your strumming technique more musical and interesting? Should you learn more strumming patterns?
Well, of course. However, there is a way to make your strumming more interesting that has nothing to do with learning new strumming patterns.
We can, for example, make the strumming more interesting by making the chord progression more interesting. And how do we make chords more interesting? By strumming them with purpose.
In this video, I will show you:
How to strum chords up to a certain string (instead of strumming all the strings all the time).
How to add more color to chords to make the strumming more interesting.
By the way, I made a video in which I show you five strumming tricks. Make sure you check it out. There are some great strumming tips there too.
We will be using five chords in the key of D major. The seven chords that belong to the D major key are:
The arpeggio is a chord broken down into single notes. For example, the E major chord consists of three notes, the root note E, the major 3rd G#, and the perfect 5th B.
We can play these three notes together as a chord, or we can spell out every single note to create an arpeggio.
The arpeggio takes the name of the chord. A major chord will generate a major arpeggio. The same thing will happen with a minor chord.
We can also play arpeggios from extended chords such as major and minor 7th or suspended chords.
In this guitar lesson, we will look at the beautiful add9 arpeggios (both major and minor).
Here’s how we play them:
Major add9 arpeggios: Root note, major 2nd (9th), major 3rd, and perfect 5th.
Minor add9 arpeggios: Root note, major 2nd (9th), minor 3rd, and perfect 5th.
The chord progression is beautiful, and we will be exploring the following arpeggios: E | A | B | C#m | F#m | Am |.
Of course, we will learn them in the most melodic way possible.
Take it step-by-step and learn one arpeggio at a time.
Harmonizing the scale means to build a chord on each note of the scale. For example, the C major scale, which is made up of seven notes, generates seven chords:
C Dm Em F G Am Bdim
We can play these chords in many different ways but in this lesson, I want to show you how to harmonize the C major scale melodically.
Three things!
Memorize the progression of chords: C Dm Em F G Am Bdim C
We will always only use fretted notes. So we are never going to use open strings.
We will be using the C major scale. However, to cover as many chords as possible, we will harmonize the scale starting from the lowest fretted note. The note F.
Make sure you memorize the position of the root note for each note of the scale.
Follow the video to learn more about melodic harmonization.
If we analyze all the chords that belong to the E minor key, we end up with seven chords:
Em F#dim G Am Bm C D
We can use these chords to write chord progressions in E minor key.
However, in the chord progression, I just played, I added a beautiful chord that doesn’t belong to the E minor key.
The chord is the A major chord. Precisely an Aadd9 with the C# on the bass.
When a chord is played with a different bass note, it’s called a slash chord, and it’s written like this.
A/C#
This is probably one of the most beautiful chords you can play on the guitar. With the B string open, it’ll become an Aadd9/C#.
A chord is just a chord if you don’t learn how to put it into practice. In this video, we will use this Aadd9/C# in a beautiful chord progression in E minor.
Em | G | A | Am |B |
We will also transform all the chords into slash chords by changing the bass.
The Blues is probably one of the fewest music genres that always sounds good, and it’s still lovely to play.
One of the reasons for that is that it sounds great even when you keep it crazy simple.
If I slow down the Blues I was playing at the beginning of the video, it still sounds good.
In this video, I want to show you how we can get started with the Blues in the most simple way possible and then slowly develop it rhythmically and melodically.
There will be five steps to give it a structure, and in each step, we add something more to the Blues.
STEP 1. The Chords and Blues Structure. STEP 2. Chords Broken Down Into Single Notes. STEP 3. Add One Melodic Note. STEP 4. Add More Melodic Notes. STEP 5. Rhythm, Dynamic, and Interpretation.
