Moose408
Forum Replies Created
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When trying to play music you are trying to do 2 things at once. The correct fingering with your fretting hand and the correct picking with your other hand. Trying to learn both at once is very difficult and the brain doesn’t learn very well when you have these 2 inputs competing for attention.
The best practice for this is to isolate the 2 hands and practice each individually. If you want to improve picking accurately only use your picking hand and do drills just focusing on accurate picking. Just a few minutes a day of this isolated practice will result in fairly quick improvement.
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I have a 7-day practice routine so I can keep track of what to work on each day, otherwise if I rely on my memory I find myself either over practicing something, or neglecting to practice something.
So during the week it is the TAC challenge, followed by 2 of the other essential guitar skills, notes, scales, chords, arpeggios, picking, aural, & rhythm. And then end the practice each day with 2 or 3 new songs I’m trying to learn. I mix them up each day. So I might only practice notes 3 times a week and rhythm 4 times.
Sundays are devoted to songs and I work through my repertoire, trying to play and sing each song from memory (I struggle with this).
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I found favorites problematic so I instead created a spreadsheet and copy the links to each lesson. I add the title, my notes, etc.
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That was great. It is not easy to sing while playing guitar and you did a great job at both.
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If you just click on the Skills link in the left hand menu it takes you to the Getting Started tab. You need to Techniques in either the menu or the tabs across the top.
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They are sporadic and definitely not weekly. There was nothing for months and then suddenly a few last month. I think I heard about them from the weekly email.
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You are not expected to master it. Instead spend at least 10 mins on it, doing the best you can and the mark it complete a move on to the next day. Progress over perfection.
It’s also perfectly ok to just practice a portion of the challenge. Maybe spend all your time on the first measure. These challenges come back around and the next time you will get even further. It’s a bunch of small steps over time.
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There is a forum search that searches all of the sub forums.
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Everyone struggles with this. Even after I felt like I’ve solved it still occasionally comes back. So I just revert back to the basics, hold the chord, pick each string, make micro-adjustments until each string rings clearly, remove my fretting hand and repeat the process. I devote 5 mins everyday to this practice. (Different chords each day).
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</div><div>Typically your transitions are slow because the chords are not yet ingrained in your subconscious.
It takes time. Basically you want to move the finger positioning routine from your conscious to your subconscious mind or what some people call muscle memory.
There are practice steps you can do to accelerate the process. The brain creates these routines based upon the amount of the attention you apply when learning and the how often you repeat the process.
The secret for me is to do dedicated, isolated practice for 10 mins every day, for a little over a month.
My steps are
– position my fingers and pick each string, if I have a muted string then slightly reposition the offending finger and repeat the above until every string rings out clearly.
– keeping my hand positioned I will then press down hard on the strings and then release the pressure, but keep contact with the string. Repeat this 20 times
– I then lift the fingers off the strings about 1/4” and repeat step 1.
– once I am consistent with that I will place one finger at a time, starting with my index finger, then middle, then ring. Do that 10 times, then start with the middle finger, then index, then ring. The start with ring finger, middle, index. I go through all permutations of first and 2nd and 3rd finger down. Then I move to trying to place 2 fingers at once and then adding the 3rd. Go through all of those permutations. Then go for all fingers at once.
You should notice slight improvement each week and then one day suddenly all your fingers will go to the right position. It takes me a month of this daily practice to get where the chord is automatic.
Once I have the chords automatic I work on doing transitions. One of these is to see how many transitions I can do in a minute, without strumming. Over 60 is the goal but in the beginning it’s closer to 25-30. These are often sloppy and not perfect chords.
Once I reach 60 (often a few weeks). I then add a strum and now strive for perfect sounding chords after each transition. This typically knocks me back down to the 30-45 transitions per minute range and I will work on this for a few weeks to get it back up to 60+.
Being methodical in the approach is the key for me and it can take months to get there.
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Not from Tony.
I use Ultimate Guitar to get the chords for songs. i occasionally look on YouTube for Fingerstyle songs.
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Click on the support link at the bottom of the left-hand menu.
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I don’t think you need to do anything special. He sends them out every Monday, if you are not getting them I would suggest messaging Support
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Learning to read TABs is an important skill and will significantly help you progress with Tony’s lessons.
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Are you looking at the associated TAB for the Daily Challenge? I personally can’t watch the video of Tony and figure out what to do. I instead read the TAB and then just use Tony’s example to figure out fingering and/or timing.