Practice schedule

Kalebima

Hey Michael,

First off thank you for creating such a great book. This is such a great resource for those of us just getting started. I'd like your feedback on the practice schedule I'm currently trying to achieve.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday: "Lead days", meaning I do the following:
- 30 minutes consisting of 2 minute per each of the 15 open string exercises, to warm up
- ~90 minutes consisting of 3 minutes per each of the 29 musical application exercises

Tuesday/Thursday:
- An hour of practicing with Art of Accompaniment

Weekends:
- Focus on song learning for however long I have (usually an hour per day). I'm in the process of learning Minor Swing...I have the tabs for Stochelo's version since I was a member of the Rosenberg Academy for I month (I also downloaded all the charts, back tracks and tabs I could while my subscription was active). I wish I had a video to go by though, since I don't just want to learn off tabs. I was really starting to like learning by watching his short videos.


Altogether that's about an hour a day, which I don't think is all that bad for a University student. What's your opinion? Thanks.

MichaelHorowitz

Hi,

I like you're disciplined approach! I would recommend spending more time on the open string exercises, as those really let you completely focus on what the right hand is doing. You don't have to do all of them every day. I would just work really hard on the first five until you can do them comfortably at various tempos and move on from there.

For rhythm I would spend as much time as possible just getting the basic pompe sounding good. Denis' DVD is great to study with. But at first don't worry to much about all the different chords, rhythms, and styles. Just get the basic pompe prefect with some simple songs/chords.

Repertoire is important too....good to get all the basic versions of the top 100 songs down. The Gypsy rhythm book has basic versions for lots of songs and the Nolan Gig book is also good for that. Later on you can learn all the advanced versions.

Good luck!

Michael

Kalebima

Thanks for the quick response.

Yeah, I'm afraid I may be setting the bar too high on M/W/F though since that's a lot of time. I was hoping to get it done within an hour but after seeing all the exercises 90 mins seems like the only way to get the most out of it. What do you think?

Alright, I'll keep practicing that then. I'm finding that adding the upstroke into my pompe makes it much, much easier for me so I'll try and train the downstroke-only pompe more.

Gypsy Rhythm is on my Christmas list, going to have to wait another month or so for that one

MichaelHorowitz

You can still get a lot done in an hour. I would focus on the quality rather than the quantity. Spend more time on less exercises. I think you'll find once you get them wired into your muscle memory you won't have to practice them anymore. At that point you can move to the more advanced picking patterns.