Personal Practice Sessions

Whether you are already playing in a band or just getting yourself prepared to join a band, it is important to spend time alone with your instrument.  Often bands practice songs to iron out rough spots and nail down how they will execute songs by arranging them in sets.  It’s a time when you can make sure that all the members of your band are on the same page and doing what needs to be done to prepare for your next gig. Unfortunately, band practice sessions sometimes don’t leave much room for an artist to work on their own personal growth as a musician. Without some much needed personal practice, you will find that playing the same stuff over and over again just makes the whole experience of being a musician start to feel a little stale and redundant.

Every week I look forward to that two or three hours that I have set aside to work on the things I want to work on.  Things that will make me a much better musician.  Sometimes it is time spent pulling the metronome out to work out any timing glitches creeping into my playing. Other times it is examining the shape of a scale on the fretboard to see if I can find some new slick arrangement of notes to incorporate into a run.  Sometimes it’s just time I spend looking up articles written by other musicians to find out what is going on in the world of guitar.  You never know when some hot shot is going to come out with the next revolutionary technique that helps to further separate the pros from the amateurs.  And it is useful to be up to date with new techniques and approaches, because every little bit that you learn can enhance your ability to play.  It can also make it easier to more efficiently contribute to your band when it comes time to move beyond cover tunes and into writing your own original pieces.

When putting a personal practice session into your weekly schedule, it is a good idea to have a sense of what you plan to work on.  A lot of guys know that it is important to set time aside to do this, but they don’t have a clear sense of what they should be doing with their time. Consequently, their personal practice sessions aren’t very productive. What I find works best for me is to keep a notebook filled with techniques I want to work on, concepts I want to learn more about, and music I want to listen to.  Any time a new issue comes up, I write it down in my book.  Before long, you find that you have a rather exhaustive list of ideas to both research and incorperate into your playing that wasn’t so readily at your fingertips before you started taking notes.

The most important things to take note of are areas where you know you are weak.  Working out the trouble areas in your playing will benefit you as a musician more than anything else.  For me, it is more often a simple matter of slowing things down and getting in the habit of executing a technique or run correctly.  It’s a lot of hard work to advance your own playing and work out your own glitches, but the reward of meeting your goals is worth the effort expended to hit the nail on the head.  So, if you want to be successful as an aspiring musician, make sure to set aside time for your own personal practice sessions every week.