What do you "practice"?

mystixboi1

mystixboi1

Kick Henry Jackassowski
So I only really get 15 - 20 min a day every few days to play(we have a toddler).

I realized that I spend that time just jamming along to backing tracks... no way to spend time on new technique or learning anything else.

What do you practice when you play your guitar?
 
If have barely been playing at all for the past three months, but I did get out my acoustic yesterday night and figured out a song I have been wanting to learn.

Normally I will run through a couple band songs to get my parts down more, then run through some stuff from Mark's blues book. Then just screw around and see what I can come up with.
 
Lately I've been working on being able to play a chord, then quickly find a lick that plays off of that chord, then back to the next chord, lick, rinse repeat. Basically like the way jazz and blues players do.

The metronome was ticking a hole in my brain, so I've been using my Alesis drum machine to practice along to.
 
Warm-up plus developing repertoire. And any issues with the latter will guide my practice by focusing on weaknesses.
 
I'm doing about 4 hours a day during the week...I'm very close to a breakthrough with my picking technique so there is a lot of warming up and drilling..I'm also trying to ingest some vocabulary blues-wise playing along with and transcribing tunes..Once a week I work on a jazz standard to post a video on "Jam of the Week".

The last two weeks for "Jam of the Week":





On the weekend I do a little warming up Saturday mornings and there have been pretty consistent cover gigs at least once a week. I've also started rehearsing my band to start playing out next year:






The constant recording this month has been a great help on what to focus on. I spent almost 4 weeks practicing with the Pykmax and this week decided it was time to give it a rest and just play with my normal picks.

January as we gear up to NAMM I'll probably be stepping my practicing up a bit since that week gets me quite a bit of exposure playing in person. Once that is through I think its going to be time to work on building a better repertoire of jazz standard in addition to writing for my group again.
 
Virtually the only time I practice is at actual band rehearsals. So at church I practice whatever songs are going to be in whatever upcoming service I'm going to play. We play around with the arrangements though (unlike some churches, who take a "cover band" approach and actually attempt to exactly replicate recordings of modern praise/worship songs). Same thing for my main band, Crash Pad, we just run the set. Any new material will have already been written by me prior to rehearsal, and then we work on the arrangement at practice.

For my side band that does experimental/performance art, similar deal, we run the set. Slight difference on how we do new material though, because the front man brings in lyrics and describes what he wants, and then I make up music for it. He plays keys on some songs but is completely untaught as far as musical terms, keys, etc.

I don't ever sit down and work on technique or scales or any of that business though. No time.
 
I don't have anything I work on. I just grab a guitar and play. Most of the time I am listening to Pandora and something comes on that makes my grab the guitar.
 
Lotta times I'll sit down with the acoustic and just play some chord progressions to songs I've learned. Then maybe a bit of technique stuff like making sure I can still Travis pick, LOL. Otherwise, I will plug in and play along to stuff on CD and try to learn more that way. Mostly I've been trying to learn songs I like. Not really practice per se. But I will work out the rust on things here and there.
 
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I've been working on my alternate picking and playing the major scale using a metronome. Working on string skipping. Also, learning to play Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love.
 
Arps around the circle of fifths, songs for upcoming shows - acoustic or electric, ii-V-I changes, Intervals, etc.

Need to work on picking but I don't.
 
I recently bought Andy Timmons lesson from Truefire. First lesson was using the 3rd note as the sweet note. I'm now on lesson 2 Eliminating the blind spots on your fretboard. Good stuff.
 
Bass is about 90% bootleg Black Sabbath on Rocksmith. Guitar varies—I got bored with Rocksmith so right now it’s back to blues and Sabbath played through Garageband because the new version of Garageband finally has some decent guitar presets.
 
Ive been playing about 3 days a week lately but for a couple hours each time...... My business is kinda slammed right now. Should slow down after new years.
 
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