Practice Schedule (Guitar Lesson IM-119) How to play IF Stage 1

Justin's Completely Free, Intermediate Guitar Course Lesson IM-119.
Stage 1, Lesson 9.

In this guitar lesson I take you through the things you should be practicing for the Stage 1 of the Intermediate Foundation. More info, checklist and goals on the web page!

Find the related course notes on the following link:
http://justinguitar.com/en/IM-119-PRACTICE-Foundation1.php

This is part of Justin's Intermediate Guitar Method, Foundation. A series of lessons available free online!

http://justinguitar.com/en/IM-000-IntermediateMethod.php

Taught by Justin Sandercoe.

Full support at the justinguitar web site where you will find hundreds of lessons on a wide range of subjects, and all the scales and chords that you will ever need! There is a great forum too to get help, no matter what the problem.

And it is all totally free, no bull. No sample lessons, no memberships, no free ebook. Just tons of great lessons :)

To get help with this lesson (and for further info and tabs), find the Lesson ID in the video title (like ST-667 or whatever) and then look it up on the Lesson Index page of justinguitar.com

http://www.justinguitar.com

Have fun :)

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Hi, how are you doing?

Justin here!

Welcome to IM-199 which is the practice schedule

for the Intermediate Foundation 1.

Now, the point of this little video really

is to remind you of the things

that you should be practicing,

how long you should be practicing them for,

and giving you a few practice hints along the way.

Of which the first practice hint
I wanna go through with you

and remind you of,
hopefully most of you have been doing it,

is the idea of using a practice timer.

Now, it's something that many of you

that have done the beginners course

will already know about.

It's a really, really great idea!

Basically, you wanna practice for five minutes.

So you set a little timer,

you hit start on the timer,

you zone in and you practice,

and you really concentrate for that five minutes

until the timer goes off,

tells you that you finished your practice.

You stop and you move on to the next thing.

It's really important

because it helps you focus

and get really good concentrated practicing

on whatever it is that you are working on.

We are all busy.

So if you are gonna practice
your bar chords for five minutes,

you may as well get into the idea of practicing

really intensely for five minutes,

making the most of your time.

It really makes quite a big difference.

The other advantage of course is that

it means you don't overpractice.

because some things, like let's say
your bar chords you are getting into

and if you practice it too much

then you run out of time to practice the other stuff

which is just as important.

So what we've got for our practice routine really...

I've written out here a fifty-minute practice routine.

Now, if you can do fifty minutes a day- that's great,

and you'll really see a lot of progress in your playing

if you can get into doing fifty minutes.

But it is a lot of practice time,

and I suspect that many of you

won't have that much time.

So the way I've kind of shown on the web-site

is a breakdown of two twenty-five- minute sections.

Maybe you wanna do twenty-five in the morning
and twenty-five at night,

maybe fifty at one go if you got the time,

but really,

you know,

it'll take you just...

basically it'll take you twice as long

if you do two twenty-five minutes a day

than if you do fifty.

Anyway, so what we've got here...

we've got the first thing on there
is your bar chords for five minutes.

So the idea really
is just the same one as when we learnt

new chords in the beginners course:

you put a chord down,

doesn't really matter which one,

you strum it,

. . .

you pick out the notes one note at a time,

. . .

check that every note is good and clear.

If it's not clear,

you go through your chord and you got:

. . .

Try and figure out what's wrong, you know,

move your hand around,

. . .

lift your fingers up,

see what if you can figure out the mistake is.

. . .

Yeah, you got it right!

Strum it again.

And that's it.

And you move on to the next one.

So, a whole five minutes of that.

When you are doing that

I want you to take your hand off each time

when you go into the chord.

So put the chord down,

take the hand off, put it on again,

remember the rolling your fingers back

and all of those little tips.

Go and revise the lessons again.

Each time it's a good thing

just before you practice

just jump on the site,

have a quick look,

look at the little checklist of things

you should be practicing,

what you should be concentrating on.

Definitely helpful!

Make sure you are practicing the right thing.

Really important!

When you're doing lots of practice and it's intense,

make sure you are practicing the right stuff

all the time.

Anyway, that would be your bar chord practice.

The next thing on your list

is your one-minute changes.

And remember of course

that this time we are moving our bar chord shapes

up and down.

So it's not timing yourself

and counting how many you can do.

It's just five one-minute
of really intense concentration

trying to move that chord around,

making sure that your fingers

don't kind of come unstockened,

don't release the strings at all,

just release the pressure.

Maybe take your thumb off,
if you need too,

move the shape,

press it down,

release the pressure,

move the chord,

press it down.

It's kind of more bar chord practice really,

but this time instead of taking your hand off each time

I just want you sliding between them

and making sure that you've got
nice release of the pressure

each time you move,

and that you can hold the chord down.

Hold the chord shape down, I should say.

Now, the next thing on your list

is the major scale,

for five minutes.

Now, really I don't care at this stage

about how fast you can do it
or how well you can do it.

What I care about
is that you memorize it.

It's very, very important

that you memorize the scale as soon as possible.

All other things that lay on from here:

improvising with the scale,

changing the way that we play the scale

using one finger,

all of that kind of more advanced things,

they all rely on the fact

that you memorized the scale.

So that is your big assignment for this stage

is to memorize the scale.

Doesn't matter how fast or slow it is,

just make sure you get it into your memory.

That's a really important thing here.

And that you do, as you're learning it,

you do it really slowly and make sure you get it right.

Cuz every time you make a mistake

it's gonna be harder for you to get it right.

Now, the next thing on your practice list

is ten minutes of either the Justin Method,

which is the set transcribing that I give you,

or just generally transcribing.

And I'm gonna recommend a few tunes

that might be good ones for you

to be transcribing as we go through the course.

Now, the transcribing and learning songs by ear

is such an important skill for any musician!

Please, don't neglect that!

I know a lot of people, beginners,
write and say:

'Oh I found it really difficult,

and I had trouble kind of focusing
and staying focused on that.'

It's kind of a problem,

and you will find that there's kind of a limit

to how good on the guitar you can get
if you don't do transcribing,

ear training and transcribing of songs yourself.

There really is.

So please believe me that, you know,

all of the great guitar players

that ever walked the face of the planet

learned to play guitar transcribing

and learning riffs of other guitar players

using their ears.

Not using the tab books and all of that, you know,

internet tabs and all of these sort of things.

So make sure you get into the using your ears!

Really important!

Really, really, really important!

So that would make it
twenty-five- minute practice set.

The second twenty-five minutes you've got

is the minimum movements.

So five minutes of doing minimum movements,

which is kind of technical work.

Either using the major scale

if you are confident with the major scale.

If you are not confident with the major scale,

just using chromatic
one-two-three-four on each string.

It's a really...

it's a massive boost for your technique.

A lot of people don't even realize they've got an issue

with the flying fingers.

And when they do and they start practicing

they see an immediate improvement in their technique

over.... not maybe overnight but within a week or two

you 'll probably start to notice difference.

So five minutes you've got on that.

You've got five minutes on your rhythm playing,

which is basically going to be alternating between

8th notes rhythms and 16th note rhythms,

trying to make sure

that you can play along with the metronome

doing 16 and 4 strums per click

with the metronome,

and than you're tapping your foot
on the beat each time

on the 1 2 3 and the 4,

and not just with every down-strum.

That's the focus there for your rhythm.

We've then got five minutes

spending learning the notes on the neck.

So using the little exercise iI told you,

just picking any random note on the fingerboard,

using the octave shape to work out what the note is.

If you don't know the notes on the thickest two strings

you can spend your five minutes doing that.

But really, you shouldn't be starting this course

unless you 've got the notes
on the thickest two strings,

because it would mean
that you don't know your power chords properly

if you haven't mastered those notes

on those bottom two strings.

And lastly, we've got ten minutes of playing songs,

repertoire, having fun,
jamming the tunes that you like.

It can either be songs that are specific to the material

that we've covered this week
using those E-shape bar chords.

But probably you are still learning those a bit

so maybe it's just revising songs

that you've learned before,
making them better and better.

You know, pick a song,
pick a couple of songs, you know,

it's up to you how you do that,

but really what you are aiming for
is to be able to develop your repertoire,

to be able to play lots of songs from memory,
at the drop of the hat, 'lets do this song!'

Because that's a really, really...

I mean that's kind of the point
of playing the guitar, is to play songs.

So, whether the lead guitar,

I wouldn't recommend
doing the lead guitar at the moment.

Mainly you should be concentrating
on you rhythm guitar

and developing your rhythmic tunes.

But if you wanna include
a little bit of that kind of riff playing

or little lead stuff, that'd be cool too.

It's really up to you,
what you wanna do for your songs.

That's a whole lot of practice, you know.

I hope you are handling it OK.

Remember, if you get any pain at any point

with anything that you are practicing,

if your wrists start hurting,
you fingers really hurt,

stop playing.

A lot of the bar chord stuff,
you gonna get sore muscles,

particularly the one in-between
your thumb and your first finger.

Expect it to get sore.

it's just gonna happen, alright?

So, you know, you're best off
just kind of dealing wth it.

It should feel like you've just been to the gym

and had a bit of a work-out, right?

It shouldn't be painful.

If it's painful, something's not right.

So, it should be sore.

Sore is good.

Just, you know, that 'I've worked out' feeling is great.

But 'oh my god, I can hardly pick up a cup of tea,'

that's bad, right?

So, be aware of that.

If you do get any pain,
please go and see a doctor

right away and get it checked out,

because what you don't want

is developing some sort of serious hand problem because of your guitar playing.

Could stuff you up for quite some time.

Little bit of sore- good, pain- bad.

That's basically what I'm saying.

Okay, hope you have fun with that.

On the web-site there's
a list of goals for you as well.

So, go and check that out.

That's the things that I think
you should be able to do

with each one of these different topics

before you move on to Intermediate Foundation 2.

Hope you've enjoyed all of this.

Have fun with your practice

and I'll see you
for some more lessons very very soon!

Take care!

Bye-bye!