About Practicing:

[chet]

How much are you guys actually able to practice normally every day? I know this may be accused of being a "Redundant" thread but I've also found that some people don't like to see old threads revived.

I read recently that one guy practices 4 hours a day.

I'm lucky if I'm enthused about material enough to practice more than a couple of hours on any certain night.

Guys in gigging bands I can understand because you might as well say it's work related.

[SINCASTER]

I don't know if it can be considered practicing but I spend at least a couple of hours a day watching tv while playing along with my Nocaster.
You want a sitcom theme song, I'm your man.

[MulliganChebichev]

Being a student with a job I'm lucky to find an hour....thats what Christmas break is for. :/

[Pete Galati]

Practicing never interested me all that much, and if you're not in a band there doesn't seem like much point in it.

Sometimes I play for a couple hours a day, but I'm not really practicing anything, I'm just playing.

[beep.click]

When I first started, I played 6 or more hours a day. It didn't realize it at first, and when it dawned on me, I was shocked.

Mind you, it wasn't 6 continuous hours. This was the summer before I started college, and I had time on my hands. I realized I would play for an hour or two; do something else; play some more. In retrospect, I see that I was obsessed.

Nowadays I work, and I don't practice every day. But I'm sure glad I had that foundation! And I'm still obsessed with playing, because when I look up from the guitar, another hour or two has flown away...

[Tom P.]

Define "practice". Playing along with CD's you already know? Learning new songs/material? Analyzing a classic performance note for note? Studying theory? Developing speed/technical skills?
The "play along" activity is kind of passive and easy to do for long periods. The really focused "growth" work is "heavy lifting" and tough for me to sustain for more than 60 min.
I enjoy going down to the "man cave" to play, usually 2 hrs a night, a mixed variety of the activities I mentioned, 5-6 nights a week.

[PostoronnimV]

I find it hard to concentrate on relaxed perfomance and accuracy for more than 20 minutes. So I do short sets of 15-30 minutes, do something else (like calculus or linear algebra :) ) and then continue with guitar. 2 hours total in a day, I think. I feel guilty now, should practice more...

[neocaster]

I sit with my guitar and play it for at least an hour a day. Sometimes I run scales, sometimes I just improv to backing tracks, sometimes I play through whole songs. I try to focus on what I feel weakest on at any given time.

[AJ Love]

I play my Esquire about 4 hours a day. I play guitar for a living and I've got a LOT of work to do, in order to improve. There are many many pro guitarists out there that are way more advanced than me!

[Larry F]

I love practicing and always have. Having a career means I can't devote as much time to it as I'd like, but I figure out ways to improve. I aim to improve specific things and always have a goal in mind.

[tiktok]

Someone once said that "practicing" is taking something you can't do and doing it over and over until you can.

[sax4blues]

Originally Posted by neocaster

I sit with my guitar and play it for at least an hour a day. Sometimes I run scales, sometimes I just improv to backing tracks, sometimes I play through whole songs. I try to focus on what I feel weakest on at any given time.

+1

My nightly practice/playing is also my downtime, my escape, so I try to play most days, even if just for 1/2 hour. I have band rehearsal 1 or 2 days a week and I don't play at home those days.

If I don't have something specific that strikes me I will run scales/patterns ..., again I'm just kinda escaping the world so even playing fundamental stuff is good for me.

[chet]

Originally Posted by tiktok

Someone once said that "practicing" is taking something you can't do and doing it over and over until you can.

That's about what I mean.

I'm thinking of going down and jamming with Tim Armstrong so I'm trying to relearn/memorize some old rock and roll songs etc. I'd like to at least have the rythym part down. Did I spell it right? lol

[aznrambo481]

I get barely any time to play... 4 times a week if I'm lucky. I play most on weekends (2-3 hours a day), but my time is depressingly limited (even over winter break).

[601210]

Originally Posted by chet

That's about what I mean.

I'm thinking of going down and jamming with Tim Armstrong so I'm trying to relearn/memorize some old rock and roll songs etc. I'd like to at least have the rythym part down. Did I spell it right? lol

rhythm.

[chet]

[Tim Bowen]

I'm a huge fan of practicing in a very methodical and disciplined way. This was a way of life for me as a teenager and a young man, on through music school, and it was my escape when I lived the corporate lifestyle. I kept log books and metronome markings, and devoted certain amounts of time to different disciplines, and I transcribed stuff. It made me extremely content to be anal-retentive and academic, and practice for hours on end. It still would.

Since music is my job, I have some sort of instrument in hand at most any given point during the day. Since part of my income is derived through teaching, I have to be at least a little bit academic. If folks want to know about something that I don't know about, I research it. The fringe benefits of doing the work here are that I don't come off like a moron, and I get paid to learn about something that I wouldn't have otherwise pursued.

The biggest differences in my personal practice habits anymore are that I either focus my disciplines on my obligations, or I'll sit and dink around with something that sounds cool to me for two hours like a three year old. I don't run lydian dominant scales with a metronome on a daily basis anymore, although I'm sure I'd still enjoy that, because I'm a geek at heart. If I've got an upcoming session for bass or backing vocals, I'll work on that, as opposed to, say, harmonizing scales. Having said that, my practice wank sessions include harmonizing scales by default anyway, because I'm always looking at voicings and inversions for chord progressions.

Other than meeting my obligations, what I try to do each day is to write something, arrange something, do some improvising, do some singing, dink with something unfamiliar, and play some different instruments. If there's something that's technically and physically kicking me around, I view this as an excuse to watch television. I smooth out most of my rough edges by drilling the tricky bits ad nauseum while watching a film.

[fphh]

I play 1-2 hours per day- this includes warmup scales (2-3 times per week), arranging, writing, rewriting, rerewriting, rerearranging, and playing stuff I'm already supposed to know- and sometimes I do.

fphh

[MandyMarie]

I noodle all the time and never realize it's "practicing"

I love it when I really get in the mood to sit and play along with a record or a CD though - I wish I had the time to do that as much now as I did when I was a kid!

[GoldieLocks]

Everytime I pick up the guitar I'm practising.

I try to push myself to the next level. Jamming in a new scale (C#major). Coming up with a new riff. Working on speed, endurance. & constantly adjusting my tone micronally

[GoldieLocks]

Oh yeah! only about a half hour a day. Unless its a band practise.

[klasaine]

I practice hardest and most consistently when I have new music to learn - which thankfully is fairly often. Getting into something new is what inspires me to start working out other things for myself as well.
If I don't have a "project" up I will usually take a few days off from playing altogether until some kind of 'inspiration' hits me. When that happens I can and will go on practicing for days on end barely coming up for air. And then it just stops. I just sort of "wake up" or something wondering what all the fervor was about. It's been that way since I was 15.
I'm not a real big TV practicer. Not because I think it's distracting, I just don't like television very much.

[JohnnyCrash]

At home I usually just play along with CDs of my favorite stuff, or whatever pops on the radio.

Otherwise, I practice with the band, so I'm not sure if you call that "practising."

Aside from that I record nearly everything I write to some degree, but I've been really focused on recording my band's album... I'll run through recording about 10 takes on a solo just to work through it and actually "write" it as I go (in other bands I rarely recorded, so I had to actually write that kind of stuff or just improv it at every show) - again, not sure if that's "practising" or not.

I'm a rock and roller, "real" practise usually screws up our messed up sense of timing :)

[601210]

Originally Posted by JohnnyCrash

I'm a rock and roller, "real" practise usually screws up our messed up sense of timing :)

+1
I don't like metronomes. They're too... mechanical.

[cowboytwang]

I don't think I've actually practiced anything since '76.

I play about 2500 to 3000 hours a year, on stage, in the studio, or at jams, but I never sit around and practice scales or licks.
Once you have down the motor skills to play, it seems like you would know how to play. Like driving a car, once you learn how to drive, you don't go out and practice it. I've never went out to the car and said today I'm going to spend an hour practicing turning right, or pressing down on the brake pedal. You just learn it, do it, and it become instinct.

To me it's the same with a musical instrument. Once your brain knows how to make your fingers hit the notes it wants, then your there, you have it down, now just get out and play.