Make a practice routine

I don’t always do this, but when I do it helps me practice so much more effectively.

I naturally do this with my private lessons. Speaking of, I do offer online music lessons for guitar, piano, ukulele, and music theory, music composition, and music production so send me a message if you’re interested.

But back to practice routines. Divide up your practice time into sections. Here’s a short example for a 30 minute practice session:

10m practicing scales/chords/arpeggios
10m practicing a specific piece
10m ear training

With this routine you’re practicing multiple different things and you have some direction. Otherwise often you end up practicing a lot without any direction and only improving slightly in each thing.

The way I like to create a routine like this is divide your practice time into three or four sections. Choose a few things that you want to work on and work on three of them each session. I like 10 minutes because that’s really do-able. It’s short enough where you can focus and get something done, but not too long where it becomes boring. It’s also a perfect amount of time to run through a few different scales in all keys.

Get a sheet of paper and write down whatever you want to improve. Maybe that’s learning scales or learning chords. Maybe that’s reading sheet music. Maybe that’s playing arpeggios. Maybe it’s ear training. Whatever those things are write them down so that you have them in front of you. Then choose three. Assign 10 minutes to each aspect of music you’re working on and that’s your routine.

If you’re practicing for longer than 30 minutes I suggest taking a break halfway through. That way you’ll come back more refreshed.

But then maybe you have more areas you can practice. For an hour you could do this:

10m – chords
10m – scales
10m – ear training
5m – break
10m – working on a piece
10m – arpeggios

Total that’s 55 minutes, which is basically an hour.

Feel free to try out any of those practice routines. It’ll make practice a little more directional and help you improve in different aspects, while keeping you from feeling overloaded by trying to cram for one thing.

ISJ