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Jan 9 2018

Maintaining Focus

It’s a new year.  We always see this marker as a time to make big changes in our lives.  I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing if we can stick to these changes but I always find this…

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Dec 10 2017

Just another practice tip

Pick a new key signature every month.  Use this for your picking exercises, scales, arpeggios, chords, theory, composing, accompanying.  If you use iRreal Pro or Ultimate guitar, learn songs, but transpose them to this key.

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Nov 3 2017

Legato

If you’re not familiar, here is the technical definition: smooth and connected; without breaks between the successive tones.

A good lot of my students struggle with this, especially on lead lines or on sustained barred chords.  For the most part…

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Oct 18 2017

Your friend the alarm clock

I talk about metronomes constantly, waxing poetic about how they will keep time for you.  But beyond keeping track of your speed, you should be managing your time when practicing and the best way to do it is to keep…

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Sep 26 2017

Consistency, bro

I’ve set out to work consistently on alternate picking for 100 days, mostly because I’d seen a lot of lessons online of people saying how, really the only thing holding you back from playing like this is dedicating the time…

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Sep 25 2017

Mapping as it relates to speed picking

I’m finding this to be the biggest hurdle.  In terms of improvisation and composing, a lot of what is holding us back (this could possibly apply to repertoire as well) is that we’re not strong with our fretboard knowledge.  Ear…