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Stop Playing Randomly and Start Practicing With Purpose · The Steve Stine Podcast

• 0:35
  Steve Stine: Hey, Steve Stine here.
• 0:36
  Steve Stine: Thank you so much for joining me.
• 0:37
  Steve Stine: Today we're going to be talking about the absolute importance of creating an effective practice routine.
• 0:45
  Steve Stine: Okay, if you're just playing things and again, don't get me wrong if you're loving what you're doing and nothing's wrong and you're enjoying what you're doing, I think that's wonderful okay.
• 0:59
  Steve Stine: But if you're struggling at all with your guitar playing and you just kind what you're doing, I think that's wonderful Okay.
• 1:00
  Steve Stine: But if you're struggling at all with your guitar playing and you're just kind of feel lost, like every time you pick up the guitar it's just kind of a random thing and you don't really know whether you're working on the right stuff Okay, this is where developing a proper practice routine really really comes in handy, and what I always try and do with people is get them to understand the benefit of creating both a daily and a weekly practice routine.
• 1:25
  Steve Stine: So I'd like to talk to you a little bit about that and see kind of how that works in my head and see if it's something that would benefit you as well.
• 1:30
  Steve Stine: So a daily practice routine would consist of fundamental elements that you need to develop or maintain.
• 1:41
  Steve Stine: Whichever one it is.
• 1:42
  Steve Stine: Maybe it's both okay to work toward whatever it is that you're trying to do.
• 1:47
  Steve Stine: So let's break that down a little bit.
• 1:49
  Steve Stine: Let's say you're a beginner and you're trying to learn how to play a song.
• 1:56
  Steve Stine: Now that song is going to consist of whatever chords, and even that is a conversation in itself.
• 2:04
  Steve Stine: Are these the right chords for you to be working on?
• 2:07
  Steve Stine: Are there too many chords?
• 2:08
  Steve Stine: Right?
• 2:09
  Steve Stine: Have you fully developed these?
• 2:11
  Steve Stine: Each chord itself needs to be practiced right.
• 2:16
  Steve Stine: Bouncing all this stuff?
• 2:17
  Steve Stine: You probably know that I talk about all those kind of techniques that you can do to optimize your cords.
• 2:23
  Steve Stine: So you work on practicing this cord and then you work on the next cord, and then you work on what I call lift and shift, which is bouncing between the cords.
• 2:32
  Steve Stine: Like that's part of your daily practice routine.
• 2:35
  Steve Stine: Is the development of these cords?
• 2:37
  Steve Stine: Is the development of these chords?
• 2:38
  Steve Stine: If you're a beginner, you shouldn't have 14 chords.
• 2:41
  Steve Stine: You just shouldn't.
• 2:50
  Steve Stine: Okay, the?
• 2:50
  Steve Stine: The role of the guitar instructor is to see where you are, give you some information, find some resources of songs and things like that that match what it is you're trying to work on.
• 2:57
  Steve Stine: Okay, make sure that the chords that you're actually learning are the best chords that you should be starting with relative to your ability of your fingers and the size of your fingers and the kind of music that you like.
• 3:09
  Steve Stine: All of those things are assessments that are taken into consideration right away that define which chords we should be working on.
• 3:15
  Steve Stine: Therefore, the songs that we're going to work on, along with these chords because if I can get you playing songs right away, you're probably going to have a lot of fun and you're probably going to practice more than just working on chords for a year and a half Okay, so that all needs to be worked out.
• 3:30
  Steve Stine: Once it's worked out now, your job is to spend time every day.
• 3:34
  Steve Stine: I always tell people practice on the days that you eat.
• 3:36
  Steve Stine: You spend time every day working on this cord and then this cord and this cord Develop them independently and then developing them collectively, and then we have a song that we want to learn how to play, and this song should represent and be in alignment with these chords.
• 3:58
  Steve Stine: If we're working on these chords and we get a song that has nothing to do with these chords, everything's out of alignment and you're just creating more work for yourself.
• 4:05
  Steve Stine: We need to find a song that aligns with what you're working on and once we find that song.
• 4:12
  Steve Stine: Now what we need to do is we also not only need to practice these chords, but we need to start learning to listen to the song, to start getting a feel of what is the song telling us.
• 4:24
  Steve Stine: What is the tempo or the speed, what is the groove, what does the?
• 4:29
  Steve Stine: And we'll get to the strumming in a second, but what does it feel like a strum would be for this?
• 4:33
  Steve Stine: What are the sections?
• 4:34
  Steve Stine: Like, oh, there's an intro where nobody's singing, and then there's a verse, and then it goes into a chorus and then there's a couple of verses and again, you might write this down, you might be able to kind of.
• 4:45
  Steve Stine: You know, I always call it driving.
• 4:47
  Steve Stine: You can drive through the song if you know the song well enough in your head, even if you've never heard the song before.
• 4:52
  Steve Stine: If you listen to it over and over and over, you start learning.
• 4:55
  Steve Stine: That's how I learn, and so I drive through the song.
• 4:58
  Steve Stine: So I'm listening to the song and I can see, oh, we're in a verse.
• 5:02
  Steve Stine: Okay, here comes the chorus.
• 5:04
  Steve Stine: Now there's that weird little break.
• 5:05
  Steve Stine: Now it's going to go into a verse.
• 5:07
  Steve Stine: Like, that's what I'm doing when I'm listening to the song, is I'm becoming aware of the song.
• 5:12
  Steve Stine: Okay, I'm ingesting the concepts of the song.
• 5:15
  Steve Stine: I don't know how all the chords go and everything like that, yet I just know these are the chords of the song, but I'm I'm acclimating myself to the song itself and I'm working on the chords.
• 5:25
  Steve Stine: The other part is I'm going to start working on strumming, or what I call scratching to the song.
• 5:31
  Steve Stine: So I'm not playing the chords along with the song, I'm just scratching to the song, trying to get used to what the rhythm is going to be.
• 5:39
  Steve Stine: Okay, I call this organic strumming.
• 5:41
  Steve Stine: And again, inside the Guitar Zoom Academy, which we'll get to in a second, this is what you would learn how to do all of this kind of stuff.
• 5:48
  Steve Stine: So not only are you learning the components or the tools needed to play the song, but you're learning how to learn songs.
• 5:57
  Steve Stine: So you're learning how to think about structure, how to memorize, how to ingest, how to listen, how to analyze.
• 6:04
  Steve Stine: In a very simple sense, that song that we choose is very important because if the song has a lot of sections and a lot of stuff, it's going to be a lot harder for you to play.
• 6:14
  Steve Stine: Our job is to find the right song that aligns with where you are and what you're trying to do, even if it's G, c and D, but it's got a lot of chord changes and a lot of stuff, it's going to be harder for you to play.
• 6:26
  Steve Stine: We need to find something that the structure is very simple.
• 6:30
  Steve Stine: Okay, so now you're really doing three different things independently You're working on the chords over here, you're working on the strumming and you're working on the song structure.
• 6:37
  Steve Stine: Then we start implementing them together.
• 6:40
  Steve Stine: We work on this the strumming, along with the song.
• 6:45
  Steve Stine: We start trying to work on the chords without the strumming, we just start trying to bounce our fingers along with the song.
• 6:50
  Steve Stine: Once we learn how the chord changes go, we start to put those in if our fingers don with the song.
• 6:53
  Steve Stine: Once we learn how the chord changes go, we start trying to put those in If our fingers don't move fast enough.
• 6:57
  Steve Stine: We need to go back and start working on this a little bit more.
• 6:59
  Steve Stine: And again, the process really isn't that difficult, but it just takes time Once you learn how to put and there's more to it, but once you learn how to do that, now you've got a game plan of how to approach the songs that you want to play and if a song has some element that isn't in alignment.
• 7:17
  Steve Stine: That's okay If it's three plus one, but this one is the part that's out of alignment.
• 7:21
  Steve Stine: Well, that's the one part that we need to start working on now.
• 7:24
  Steve Stine: That fuels our practice.
• 7:27
  Steve Stine: You see, that's how we set up a daily practice routine.
• 7:29
  Steve Stine: Maybe yours is technique, maybe yours is scales, maybe it's a combination of all of these things, which is great.
• 7:36
  Steve Stine: You might spend 15 minutes doing this and 20 minutes doing this.
• 7:39
  Steve Stine: That's your core practice for each day.
• 7:41
  Steve Stine: Then the next thing is setting up a weekly.
• 7:44
  Steve Stine: Okay, so your weekly might look like I'm going to work on songs.
• 7:49
  Steve Stine: Again, depending on your goals, depending on your interests, I'm going to work on songs on Mondays and Wednesdays and maybe Saturdays, and then I'm going to work on, you know, because this core is still going on every day, right?
• 8:02
  Steve Stine: So I'm going to work on a new song on these days, or I'm going to work on scales on Mondays and Wednesdays and theory on Tuesday, and then I'm going to work on creatives like improvisation on Thursdays and Saturdays or something like that.
• 8:16
  Steve Stine: The beauty of that is is that you've got your core element, that you're doing every single day, that you don't want to lose, because that's really who you are.
• 8:22
  Steve Stine: And then what you can do is you can swap out these other things depending on two things.
• 8:26
  Steve Stine: Number one, what your interest is that day.
• 8:29
  Steve Stine: And I always tell people there's a significant difference between interest and lazy.
• 8:33
  Steve Stine: You're not choosing because you're lazy.
• 8:36
  Steve Stine: You're choosing because that day you feel more technically ready to go and you're on fire, and even though the thing written on your wall says today is a theory day, you're feeling it and you want to do this.
• 8:50
  Steve Stine: I always tell people do this, don't deny what you're feeling that day, don't deny how things are going.
• 8:56
  Steve Stine: Just because something's written on a piece of paper, go with it.
• 9:00
  Steve Stine: If you find, for some reason, that you're never getting to that no, no, no, we need to schedule that then we can't deny that this needs to be developed for you to be able to achieve your goals.
• 9:12
  Steve Stine: We got to implement that.
• 9:13
  Steve Stine: So those are the two reasons.
• 9:14
  Steve Stine: Number one is because you're feeling it Okay, or number two, because you need it.
• 9:20
  Steve Stine: Those are the two reasons.
• 9:21
  Steve Stine: So that's what's great about setting up a daily and a weekly practice routine.
• 9:23
  Steve Stine: Now, inside the academy, that's one of the things that we do is we sit down with you, figure out what your game plan is what your goals are, what your struggles are.
• 9:31
  Steve Stine: We talk about all that kind of stuff.
• 9:32
  Steve Stine: We develop a daily, weekly practice routine for you so you know what you're supposed to be working on.
• 9:37
  Steve Stine: But then what you do is you lean on us and we have conversations literally on a daily basis, like on Zoom, just talking to each other, getting assessments of your playing, giving you direction, giving you encouragement, motivation, filling in the gaps of things that don't make sense for you.
• 9:53
  Steve Stine: We do that interactively on a daily basis, not, you know, once a week or something like that.
• 9:58
  Steve Stine: We talk all the time to make sure that your ship is upright, you're doing the things that you need to be doing, you're getting assessments of your playing, you're feeling good.
• 10:06
  Steve Stine: If there's any confusion that you've got, we fix that, okay.
• 10:10
  Steve Stine: So, anyway, take care, stay positive, keep practicing, and you know if you're doing this on your own, I think that's wonderful.
• 10:17
  Steve Stine: Give it a try, see how it goes for you, but really think about developing a daily and a weekly practice routine that best fits where you're trying to go.
• 10:25
  Steve Stine: All right.