A Guitar Practice Mistake That Is Hurting Your Playing
By Luca Turilli
On your journey to becoming a great neoclassical guitarist, you will spend a lot of time learning the techniques needed for this style, such as: sweep picking, directional picking, string skipping and pedal point licks. Although it is important to practice these skills, the mistake that a lot of guitarists make is becoming so distracted by the difficulty of mastering them and forgetting the reason why they began to practice these techniques in the first place.
The reason why you practice guitar techniques such as the ones listed above (and others, appropriate for the neoclassical style) is to allow yourself to play on guitar the music influenced by composers who wrote for other instruments.
This means that the objective isn't to learn how to play these techniques cleanly and fast just for the sake of doing so. You practice these skills in order to apply them to the final goal: playing music! And in music, these techniques need to be skillfully combined, like ingredients in a great recipe, to produce the final delicious result :)
Most guitar players make the mistake of forgetting what I wrote above and instead practice guitar technique in a static way. They learn sweep picking for example, the way a gymnast learns to do a back flip. The gymnast's final goal is to learn to do a back flip (plus other skills), in isolation, and then perform these moves as well as he can in competition with other gymnasts who are trying to do these same exact skills, only better.
Your final goal as a neoclassical musician isn't to play any one technique really well in a static way. You need to have the ability to seamlessly and effortlessly combine all techniques that you know to play music. But you will have a very hard time doing that if you spend all your time training each technique in a vacuum without any context to apply it to.
So, when you practice, you must spend time on learning to use guitar techniques in the context of real solos and etudes. This is very different from simply practicing them in a static way as described above.
For example, spend a few minutes practicing a lick that uses string skipping and sweep picking in one phrase. Next, practice combining directional picking with tapping. After that, practice a pedal point lick with a legato passage, switching seamlessly between the two techniques. Finally, create one long etude that uses all techniques in unpredictable ways!
The best way to practice combining neoclassical guitar techniques is by looking at examples of actual music by your favorite guitarists and seeing how they use these skills to play their greatest solos.
Of course you still need to practice techniques in isolation to refine specific problems you may have with a certain skill. But most guitar players overtrain in this way and neglect a highly critical aspect of learning: practicing to play music with the techniques they develop!
This is why when I was designing my Neoclassical Revelation guitar course, I arranged each lesson to include both elements of practicing: working on specific techniques in isolation and also teaching my students transcriptions of my original guitar solos (with Rhapsody of Fire) to help them practice using their skills in music. This is part of what allows my guitar students to develop their skills faster.
I want you to apply the advice above to your own practicing and your playing will start to progress much faster when you do!
You too can learn to play guitar at the highest level of neoclassical guitar maestros. I can guide you to reach that goal in the shortest period of time in my Neoclassical Revelation course. Visit my online neoclassical guitar lessons website to begin today!