GUITAR PRACTICE: FIXING UP MISTAKES

Your ears and mind are your most important guitar practice tools. Your ears help you identify specific causes of your guitar playing challenges and mistakes. Your mind trains your hands to make your guitar technique more efficient, accurate and effortless.

Most guitar players struggle to hear mistakes that occur at fast speeds. Notes go by quickly and you may only notice that something does not sound right…but not know why. Worst of all, some mistakes only occur near your maximum speed and disappear when you slow down.

These guitar practice methods help you identify and fix mistakes near your top speed without having to slow down:

Guitar Practice Method #1: Emphasize The Problem

Emphasizing the problem allows you to:
Have more time to hear sloppy notes while playing at or near your top speed.
Clean up your sloppy mistakes in the context of the original exercise.

Guitar Practice Method #2: Isolate The Problem

Isolation practice is about extracting a challenging group of notes from the context of the exercise (or guitar lick) and:
Practicing it over and over (in isolation) until it is mastered.
Inserting the challenging part back into the exercise to practice it in context.

Notice the important difference between emphasizing and isolating your guitar playing problems. Emphasizing a problem allows you to clean up your playing while practicing in context the entire time. It is most useful for refining an exercise or technique you can already do well and are close to mastering.

Isolating the problem allows you to focus only on the sloppy notes at peak intensity without being distracted with the other notes of your practice item. This method is most applicable when you are making big changes in your technique or are learning a brand new guitar technique for the first time.

Guitar Practice Method #3: Exaggerate The Problem

Sometimes it’s hard to identify causes of your guitar playing mistakes even after trying to emphasize and isolate them. Exaggerating your guitar playing challenges makes the symptoms of the problem more obvious and easier to observe. This allows you to identify the causes of the challenge and fix it more easily.

Examples of exaggerating your guitar playing problems include:

1. Playing even faster - if your playing first begins to sound sloppy at 100 beats per minute, increase the tempo to 110 beats per minute and practice at that higher tempo.

Doing this helps you to:
Feel the effects of the problem more clearly (so you can identify their causes and solve them).
Make the original tempo (100 beats per minute in this example) feel much easier by comparison.

2. Play guitar unplugged (at your maximum speed). This challenges your articulation (and 2-hand synchronization), so you can identify which notes are not perfectly clean. After you identify the sloppy notes, apply the emphasis or isolation guitar practice method to master what you are practicing.

Note: playing unplugged also helps your legato playing to become cleaner and more articulate.

This video shows you more examples of exaggerating your guitar playing problems so you improve your guitar technique faster.

Use these guitar practice methods to speed up your progress and make your guitar playing sound better.

HOW TO BUILD A DRUM SOLO

BUILDING A DRUM SOLO

The best way to look at a drum solo is by thinking of it as its own song. With a song, it starts out with a bit of an intro, and slowly starts to build. Towards the end, the song will build and build, giving off more energy to keep you the audience intrigued. You would not want a song to start with a heavy bridge and end with a slow, softer feel would you? The same is with a drum solo. A lot of drummers will throw their best chops, rolls, and drum rudiments in right at the beginning, realizing they have nothing left for a solid outro. This being said don’t think this is the only way to do a drum solo. A drum solo should be an expression of the drummer, if you want to do a solo with slow rolls for five minutes that is totally fine. Drum solos should always be unique and personal, but try your best to make them as innovative as possible!
Building A Drum Solo

It is very important to keep a solo in time. That being said, most times you can change the tempo to achieve a certain feel during your drum solo. A good way to keep time is by using a metronome, and playing a solid quarter note beat on your bass drum
Now its time to fill in the rest. There are many ways in going about doing this, so do not feel limited, this is only a very basic solo idea. Try adding some toms over top of your bass drum pattern. One example would be to add a 16th note roll on your toms.
All that is left is to add some cymbals in, and expand on the beat a bit. There’s no limit to how long you can’t go for, as long as you keep people interested. You don't want to keep repeating the same roll over and over. The audience will get bored very fast. You have to keep changing different techniques and feels, while keeping them all related. Just like a song, you wouldn't totally change the feel every time you go from verse to chorus, you always need something relative to tie everything together. Make sure that all elements of your drum solo all have the same type of feel. You can get a lot of ideas from going on websites like YouTube or Google-Video, these websites have home made video's from many talented drummers that you can learn drum solo techniques from.

Finishing A Drum Solo

There are many ways to finish off a drum solo. One way is to bring it down to a soft stop. This can be done by bringing the dynamics down, and slowing the beat down a bit. You may like this technique if you are doing a long solo, where all attention is on you. It will bring closure to your beat. The other way is to go out with a bang. This is a great method if you are ending a show, or song. Crash away at your cymbals, while playing on the set as fast as you can. Fast drum rudiments going around the toms are sure to impress your crowd. End with a final blow to your crash.

Like I said before, a drum solo does not have to be too technical. They just have to be able to keep the listener intrigued. I cannot express enough how important it is that you continue to be creative with your solos.To add some spice to any solo, try playing it with brushes. Make sure that every solo you create is unique to your style, the audience can easily sense if the drummer is bored, or dissatisfied with a performance. Soloing is very fun and rewarding, so always try new tricks, and never stop learning! Try to add some spice to your soloing by playing some patterns in a linear style