New Year Re-Solution

I’ve been playing guitar now for about 15 years and been taking serious lessons for about 5. This year I hope to push my music theory knowledge and I think I’ve discovered the key!

In October of 2014 I decided to come up with a solution for my unfortunate habit of practicing guitar without intent. My guitar teacher is strict with his studying: “If you’re playing guitar, you’re not practicing guitar.” The difference between playing and practicing being casual enjoyment vs. progression. My solution in October was geeking out. I made a spreadsheet to keep track of my practicing, and for the most part I was able to keep on task for the last quarter of 2014.

For the New Year, I revamped my method further and adjusted my spreadsheet to log my progress through four different areas:

1. Scales – 15 minutes going through Major, Minor and the modes. These are done with two cycles of 12 where I step through the circle of fifths, one key per day alternating between starting C on the sixth and fifth string
2. Etudes – Three Allen Hanlon etudes per day, tracking tempo and switching etudes only upon clean performance at a reasonable tempo (different per etude).
3. Jazz Study – Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory book. Mastery of one page per day
4. Song Analysis – Fakebook, one page per day chord analysis

This series takes between 45-60minutes.

If I can keep this up for all of 2015, I will complete both the jazz theory book and the Fakebook (both of which have approximately 350pages). My hope? To be able to immediately find key transitions and be able to identify and nail modes for soloing (or even just scale arpeggios) at 160bpm.

2 thoughts on “New Year Re-Solution

  • 1/7/2015 at 6:24 pm
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    Frankly I don’t think you can consider yourself much of a guitarist without also locating sub-major divides with interloped finger-picking, and hammering trigger group shred techniques for isometric-paired pentameter chords at 176 reverbs per vacuum tube.

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  • 1/8/2015 at 7:04 am
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    I bought a book called “150 ways to not burn yourself”. Thats my resolution…..

    Reply

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