Practicing guitar without practicing guitar
March 11, 2009I knew I wouldn’t like skiing. I’m an indoors person. I play guitar indoors, I rehearse indoors, I work indoors, I chase children indoors, I get yelled at by The Lithuanian indoors, I drink indoors. I do all my favorite things indoors. Skiing is an outdoors thing, and it’s a snow thing. I hate snow.
But it was my brother’s 30th birthday, and he wanted to go skiing in Colorado. I had a great trip in Breckenridge and made some new friends, but I also made some doctors richer by breaking my thumb on the hills. On my first run. On the blues. Sking isn’t my thing, adding to a long list of things that aren’t my thing.
That presented me with a problem, though. I joined a new band and I’m back to playing guitar. I was in the process of not only getting back to where I was on guitar, but also becoming better than I had been. Now, I had a setback, and the gigs in May are already booked.
So how have I been practicing guitar when I can’t even grip a guitar? I’ve been studying.
It’s not that I was completely oblivious to the way things worked in music. I’ve studied music theory, I understand guitar, I can tell you what note I’m on. That’s been true for years. What I can’t do is whip it off lightning speed in the middle of a song. I always thought I would just absorb everything as I went along, but I’ve been playing guitar 15 years, and I’m still lacking. So, I’ve started working on learning guitar and memorizing triads, fretboard positions, and other tools.
Here are some tools I’ve been using to quiz myself and push myself to be honest in my improvement and response times. I think any musicians and guitar/bass player can make use of these tools:
1. http://www.proprofs.com/flashcards/story.php?title=major-chords
This is a link to a set of flash card I made, but navigate yourself to the main site and you’ll find flash cards for a ton of subjects. Any teacher of any subject, or any student of any subject, has a wealth of study-aids available. For me, this was a good way to make a set of flash cards on Major Triads (and future things I’m focusing on), have then shuffled, and then quiz myself. There are other music sets already made. If you want to memorize simple sets of information, this is a great way to make digital flash cards you can use anywhere.
Here’s a helpful link to the fretboard cards I made:
2. http://www.musictheory.net/
Ricci Adams made a set of lessons and trainer programs that are fantastic. I’m currently focused on the fretboard trainer, but you can (and I will) use this site to improve your sightreading and ear training. Admittedly, I’ve found it more useful and usable in the real world to use the flashcards to improve memorization. I’ve even made a whole series on the odd frets on proprofs (see above), but I do like this site very much and you can’t do ear training on a flashcard. Memorization is a problem for me, and always has been. For the average person, this site will probably may advance them very quickly.
I have to admit that Walt reminds me of the Dell kid of years back (“Dude, you’re getting a music education!”). But Walt obviously knows his shit, and there is a wealth of info on his site, all in video form. Log on at the right time, and you can ask him questions as he broadcasts live (I haven’t tried this, but the archive footage shows it in action). Not just for guitarists, Walt does a great job of explaining what his topic de jeur, and he is upbeat enough to keep it interesting.
I won’t lie: most of the topics on Walt’s website are rather basic; hell with rather…they’re basic. But I like what he’s doing, and for players just starting out, it’s a good site to visit.
One more thing I’ve been able to do because I can’t play guitar and need to work the wrecked tendons in my hand comes from a tip a business colleage told me. I was talking about the stiff tendons in my hand and the exercises my doctor recommended, and he overheard and mentioned that he had been through something similar. He recommended what he did: he squeezed Play Doh. When his injury was all better, he switched to clay, which has a bit more resistance but is much more comfortable than squeezing a ball (and more effective because it works some extra finger muscles). For any string player that has tried squeezing a tennis ball and found it resulted in wrist pain, I can highly recommend this.
