15 Minutes to Practice - What Should You Do?
Okay. So one of the things that we hear constantly as teachers is that, "I just don't have enough time to practice." So I thought I would do a quick video here where the scenario is: my wife and kid are gone and I have about 15, 20 minutes to do something. So figured I would just run through what I would do to quickly get some practice in.
What Does a 15 Minute Practice Session Look Like?
You can see I have my 7-string here, so, you know, don't let that worry you, just pick up your own instrument. First things first, we're going to tune, and then I'll probably do some quick warmups. Some things I like to say is like, you know, "Bust the Rust," kind of stuff:
Finger independence
Some noodling/improvisation
All right. Tuning's probably not perfect, but that's okay because it's just for a quick practice session, so if I'm happy with it, it doesn't matter. Don't leave any comments.
3 Octave C Major Scale
So what that was is a 3 Octave C Major Scale.
Just noodle around with it. You can tell I, kind of, improvised around it. If you don't know that scale yet, we'll link to the video for that particular scale.
Finger Independence Exercises
So now, typically I would just quickly do some finger independent stuff. You can find those on the blog/website. And, you know, just the one, two, three, or four-finger patterns up and down the strings.
Sometimes I like to do a couple of different things where you move up the string and then make a circular pattern. I'll do that now. So I'm starting the third fret on the low B, but you can start on just the lowest string and move up.
It's three, four, five, six, I'll be doing alternate picking here, and we'll run through that, so.
Now, one of the reasons I like doing that is that not only it engages all four fingers, but it gets you moving across the neck horizontally. Works in a shift, so you can see I went from the sixth fret here, and then moved to my pointer finger at the seventh fret. So I'm actually doing, you know, 3 through 10 there, and getting that shape in gets the shifts in, works all four fingers. It's a great thing.
So throw on a metronome and increase the speed there, gets all the fingers engaged. You can do a different picking exercise with it, some legato on it as well if you wanted, and it becomes another great exercise. So I'm just going to run through that a couple of times the way I would normally in a practice session.
Okay, so you can see, as with anything if it’s not comfortable, change it. You could see my mechanics there, the arm of my chair was getting in the way. So just adjust as you go and make sure that it's working for you.
I should also mention here that I do have my footrest below so that's why the guitar is at this angle. My foot's elevated as Chris mentioned in the posture video.
Improvising or Chordal Practice
Next thing, we can either do some chords or since, I probably only have a little bit more time to do something, I'll probably just chug around or, improvise, just get some under the fingers, or work on something that I've been thinking on. In short sessions, I like to do a lot of just songwriting riffs for warmups or anything like that.
Yeah, hope this helps. Don't ever tell yourself you don't have enough time to practice! You can see I'm seven minutes in, I've run through a bunch of exercises, and this is all I'm going to continue to do for the next like 10 minutes or so when the practice session is up.
Keep shredding. Click subscribe below. Ring the bell, be notified when I upload the next video and hit us up on our website or in the comments below. Love to hear what you're doing with your practice sessions. Even the short ones where you don't have much time.