Hi, welcome to another episode of Webcam Sessions. This week starts a three week
series where we're going to talk about practice routines and how to kind of
craft one for yourself. This week we're going to talk just a little bit about
practice routines in general, and I've got a fun analogy I like to make with
them. Next week we'll work on kind of an example of a more beginner's practice
routine for someone that's just starting out and then the week after we'll do an
episode on a more advanced practice routine for when you're trying to take
those next steps as a player, but today what I want to talk about is an analogy
that I really like when it comes to practicing, and you can think of
practicing a lot like eating a meal or making a meal, or food in general right
everyone's got to eat and that's just like if you want to improve on the
ukulele, you gotta practice right. But everybody is in the mood for different
things. Everybody likes different things and that's very very much the same
when it comes to practicing ukulele. You know for instance, I love a good steak
but I'm not gonna serve a steak to a vegetarian, just like somebody who maybe
loves strumming but doesn't like fingerpicking at all, well they don't need to
introduce fingerpicking into their practice to continually get better at
strumming right so it's important to craft your practice routine around what
you are in the mood for, what you're wanting, and to cut out the things
that aren't required. You can really take this analogy far, talking about what sort
of things need to be in a good meal.
Obviously ice cream for a meal isn't a really valid option even though we all
want it to be, much in the same way that just playing you know the same three
chords over and over, don't make a good practice routine. You need to have a more
even spread of different things. With a meal you could think of as like you need
some sort of protein, and some sort of starch and you got to make sure you're
checking the boxes for the different, you know vitamins and everything else that
make up a great meal. Practice is the
same way and so to drop the food analogy a little bit, what a good practice
routine needs to have is it needs to have things that challenge your fretting
hand, things that challenge your playing hand, and things that challenge you
mentally right. So we'll start here with playing hand.
So if you're a lefty, that will be or your, or excuse me fretting hand. If you're a
lefty that'll be your right hand, if you're a righty that'll be your left
hand, the one that does the fretting on the ukulele. What you want to make sure
you're introducing in any practice routine with fretting, is that you're
reinforcing good habits and introducing new techniques, so for instance if you're
someone who is just getting comfortable with the first three chords like a C, F
and G7, reinforcing those again and again and again is a really good idea in your
practice routine but to make strides in you're playing it's going to be
important to introduce new concepts such as barre chords for instance right. For
more advanced players, that might be some sort of finger picking you know song
that you like to play, you just practice the left hand fretting making sure your
fingers are getting into position on time right, it's got to have some sort
of fretting hand concept that's used. To go back to the food for just a
moment, that's sort of like I need a protein so I'm going to have a steak or
I need the protein so I'm going to have some sort of bean salad right. Those are
very different things just like there are very different ways to work the
fretting hand, you just need to make sure that one aspect of your meal or your
practice routine is covering that. Flip on it the other side, you're playing hand
the one that strums or picks, you need to make sure that you're using techniques
that you can reinforce good habits and introduce new ones as well. So for
instance I just mentioned that fingerpicking exercise for the fretting hand
right well that might be also a playing hand exercise too to reinforce some sort
of fingerpicking technique and getting your fingers into position to work right,
just like a bean salad might fit the role of a good side and your protein.
When you're building a meal you can have things things sort of fulfill
multiple roles and when you're practicing and building a good practice
routine you can have that as well.
Again the analogy, you can take as far as you want. I'm gonna
kind of drop it here though, I'm getting too hungry to keep talking about food.
But essentially we're trying to craft something that you know completes our
our meal. I just said I'd drop it and I didn't, but complete our practice routine
to be very well balanced.
So we got fretting habits
is something with the left hand right, playing habits with our playing hand
in terms of fingerpicking, or strumming, or whatever else, and then the mental aspect
is a little bit more broad. Mental aspect is knowing what chords you're playing
for instance, memorizing which chords you're learning the names of them are so
important right. It's also memorizing things like the fret board, knowing how
to traverse it quickly in terms of knowing where the numbers are and
potentially even knowing where those notes are as well. It's also
understanding elements of music theory so that you can talk to and relate to
other musicians. But music theory is one of those things that knowing a
little bit I think is good for everybody, but if it's something you're really not
that into, it's not critical to spend a lot of time on it just like with the
food, you know if you don't like that type of food, don't worry about eating it
a lot, just eat something else that gives you that same role, and in this case the
mental aspect could be more of looking at complicated tabs and being able to
traverse the fretboard knowing where the numbers are, not worrying as much about
the notes, and on the flip side if you really want to know what those notes
names are, spend more time on that. It's okay to kind of spread it to a direction
that you are going to get the most out of, and so again this video is meant to
be more of an introduction to building a practice routine, we're not really
covering much in the way of building one right now, that's what we'll be doing in
the next couple weeks, but this week I want you to start to think about what
sort of things you want on your plate of food in a practice sense right. What are
you hoping to get out of it? Are you trying to be more of a fingerstyle
player, if so you're gonna want to work more on things that will utilize fingerpicking
and I'll introduce some exercises next week for that as well.
Are you somebody who wants to sing and strum
and get better at working on different patterns to be able to you know take
your playing to the next level with your strum along groups or whatever else then
that's sort of the element that you want to focus on, or are you somebody who
wants to be well-rounded and do a little bit of everything. That's okay too, that's
just that plate of food that's got a little bit of everything right, and so
everyone's a little bit different with it. So again next week we'll start on our
first sort of example practice routine and go from there. If you guys have any
questions feel free to leave them down below and also I want you to leave your
ideal meal of what you'd like to be playing on the ukulele and I'll take
some of these into consideration as I'm making these example practice routines.
Are you somebody who really wants to do lots of classical style fingerpicking?
Are you somebody that who's more interested playing instrumental chord
Are you into jazz and want to play to support a vocalist?
Do you want to work on some country-western bluegrass and strum along and sing along?
What are your interests? It'll help me sort of craft well a plate for the next
couple weeks to show examples. So I hope this has been somewhat helpful. I'll see
you guys next week and really looking forward to it and have a wonderful week
and I'll see you next time.
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