Core Location: Nucleus
This is a framework for guitar practice. For beginners, this can be a great way to organize your studies. At least for a while, until keeping track mentally is effortless. The main idea is to build a solid guitar practice, ensuring that you are training & jamming, using whatever framework works for you. This is one idea. Over time, what and how we keep track of our practice will evolve, just as with our playing.
Our guitar practice routines can follow this general framework of 4 segments:
Warm up is a basic exercise or set of exercises that we do to start. This can change, or remain the same for every session. Our warm up includes getting in tune and setting up our practice space. We get ready.
Training is focusing on some aspect of our technique... picking, fretting, fingerpicking, strumming, or tap-touch. These things can also be addressed within any segment, when needed.
Core is the bulk of our practice, whether continuing our technic training, working on a piece, focusing on specific topics, etc.
Music is doing something musical such as playing the piece in performance/sharing mode, or improvising, or just tying our whole practice session together in a creative way.
Not all practice routines need to follow this framework exactly. Some of these segments can merge depending on the topic or goal of a session. Our overall goal is to address each segment with precision, and ultimately, to create our own routines based on our own needs.
How and what to practice can be challenging. Building a solid practice is at the core of continual development and ongoing positive experiences with the instrument. In this section of the site, we are sharing ways to practice. We call them circuits, and sometimes paths/pathways, praxis paths, wheels and routines. We will use different varieties of these areas, and in different orders. We are cross-training.
The objective is to learn to put together your own practice routines, based on your individual needs as a player.
There are endless things to practice for sure. Yet, the categories are similar across the stylistic spectrum. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to create our own topic areas [because this is our interest list] and choose best practices within them.
Practice routines can be categorized in two general types: multi-topic or single topic.
For multi-topic, we touch in on a variety of topics, digging in just a little in each activity zone. An example might be warming up, then doing some fingerpicking, then reading, then jamming, then thinking on some naming systems [theory].
For single topic, such as experimenting with a tone group ['scale'], we do a variety of things: train in a number of ways [picking, fretting, rhythms, tempo, sequences], jam [improvise], memorize tone names or numbering systems, etc.
5 minutes of focused practice daily can be as beneficial as long unfocused sessions. Steady practice adds up, incrementally.