The Practice Room

Terry Syrek on Concentration

From Terry’s book, Shred Is Not Dead:

Technical guitar playing is probably 99.9% in the mind. It’s not really what you practice, it’s how. You must develop your ability to concentrate to an immense degree. This is easier said than done. Try this exercise within an exercise:

Take one short lick or sequence… Loop it – play the example over and over again. Don’t think about anything but what you’re playing. Feel the pick hitting the strings. Is it dead on? Are you getting a full sound on every note? Feel the tips of your fretting hand. Are you using just enough of the finger to get a good sound without being inefficient? Are your fingers springing off as quickly as possible without cutting the sound off? Are you lifting them too high? Try to sense all of this at once. Keep going.

During the looping exercise, are you thinking about what happened in school or work today? Are you wondering what’s for dinner? Are you thinking about what’s on TV? Are thou thinking about an object that’s iin the room you’re in or an event that’s happened to you? Most likely, the answer to one or more of those questions is ‘yes’. Or maybe you were distracted by a sound, like birds or cars outside your window. The answer to all of these needs to be ‘no’.

You absolutely must concentrate completely on whatever you’re practicing at a particular time. Essentially you must ‘be’ the exercise. The mind wants to wander – and certainly will – unless you take control.

 

[TJH]

New WorkshopLive Feature: Find A Teacher In your Area

WorkshopLive has just installed a new feature, the Teacher Resource Program. In a nutshell: students can find teachers by country, state and city (we list teachers in the U.S. and Canada); teachers can sign up to  be listed.

This is a great service that will help you find the right teacher and help us promote WorkshopLive as a great supplement for any teacher's lessons, since we don't believe that WorkshopLive can replace real music teachers.

The Teacher Resource Program is not only limited to listing teachers who teach an instrument currently available at WorkshopLive, but is open to all instruments. WorkshopLive teachers are marked with "WL Approved."

Wherever you are, use our Teacher Resource Program and find the teacher of your choice.

Peter

Practicing

"If you don't have time to practice,then you should get out of the business."

   - Jazz pianist BIlly Taylor, quoted in Larry Coryell's Improvising: My Life In Music

[TJH]

Latest Lessons at WorkshopLive

Here's a brief summary of new music lessons WorkshopLive has added recently:

Guitar:

• Using Major Scales to Solo over Triads - Tom Dempsey
• The One-Finger G7 Chord and 3/4 Time - Lou Manzi
• The Full A Minor and E Minor Chords - Lou Manzi
• Time: Rhythms, Beats, and Measures - Lou Manzi
• Notes on the 2nd String - Lou Manzi
• Time: Rhythms, Beats, and Measures - Susan Mazer

Keyboard:

• 7th Heaven: Dominant 7th Chords - Andrea Amos
• Intervals Revisited: Minor and Major Intervals - Andrea Amos
• A Scale of Minor Importance: Introduction to Minor Scales - Andrea  Amos

New lessons are published constantly; check WorkshopLive's home page frequently or look for news in The Practice Room.

Peter

Ben Verdery Interview

Check out this great 3-part interview with Ben Verdery, "a guitarist of boundless imagination and ability" and "one of the classical guitar world's most foremost personalities." Ben holds the chair  of the guitar department at the Yale University School of Music and has performed with many of the greats of the music world. For the Rock fans among you, you'll be interested to know that he has been performing regularly with Police guitarist Andy Summers, which resulted in the record "First You Build A Cloud" (To be released soon).

Ben will be a guest artist and teacher at the National Guitar Workshop in Andrew Leonard's Classical Guitar Core Class in New Milford,CT during wk#2 July 8th - 13th.

Learn more about this master guitarist at www.benjaminverdery.com.

What do you still find hard to do?

Every now and then we ask our WorkshopLive teachers, all of whom are established pros and great players, “What do you still find hard to do?” Here’s what jazz guitar teacher Jody Fisher said:

Everything is hard. It’s a very difficult instrument. Sometimes I feel like I’m starting over every single day. It’s hard to keep your technique up, it’s hard to keep composing, it’s hard to keep always updating your music, learning other people’s material, it’s hard to stay booked, it’s hard to be self-employed. The whole thing is hard, but the return is so good, I can’t fathom doing anything else.

There are some days I pick the guitar up and think, “Wow, have I ever touched one of these things before?” Usually in 10 or 20 minutes of warming up I’m in pretty good shape again. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would bet artists and actors would say the same thing – it’s just a tough thing to reach into yourself and do this.

[TJH]

Relax those fingers

A practice tip from Scott Tennant’s Pumping Nylon: “It seems to me that the main cause of many peoples’ hand problems is the retention of tension. They hold the tension in their fingers and hand while they shift, change notes, or any other time they are not actually playing a note. There is no reason for this aside from technical insecurity. Know what your hand is doing at all times, which fingers are pressing and which are not - be totally aware. This is the first and most important step towards a secure technique. What you do or don’t do between the notes means everything.”

[TJH]

News from WorkshopLive

1. We have added a "What's New" link on the right side of the lesson selection screen. To see the new lessons added or updated in the last two weeks, simply click on the "What's New" link on the right or on the "What's New" link in the history/new favorites box. The color squares will remind you what filter selection is active. All new lessons will be listed; just click to preview or play them. Don't forget to change the filter back to "all" before looking for your favorite lessons.

2. We have added a great new feature to the Search tool. You can now access all the jam tracks and printable exercises from the Search tool. When searching by jam tracks or exercises, leave the keyword field blank and the entire catalog will be listed. Or, you can filter the results based on your desired criteria. You can play the jam track or open the exercise flash paper directly from the search tool list - no need to open the lesson.

If you have friends who are interested in learning to play guitar, bass, keyboard, or drums, please tell them about WorkshopLive. We have added 50 new sample lessons  that represent all the instruments, styles and skill levels available at WorkshopLive. Tell them to check out the sample lessons at this link: http://www.workshoplive.com/lesson_interface/lesson_interface.cfm?sl=byob&h=sample. (Or, if that's too complicated, just send them to The Practice Room.)

[TJH]

NATIONAL GUITAR WORKSHOP MUSIC EDUCATION PROGRAM ANNOUNCES GUEST ARTIST CLINICS FOR SUMMER 2007

The National Guitar Workshop is a summer music workshop program. We currently have 8 locations across the country: Nashville, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco and New Milford, CT and McLean, VA. The National Guitar Workshop has been teaching music (Blues, Jazz, Rock, Country, Classical, etc.) (Guitar, Bass, Keyboards, Drums, Songwriting, and Vocals) to teenagers from the age of 13 to adults to the age of 90 for over twenty-two years. Please visit www.guitarworkshop.com to learn more.

Drum & Percussion Lessons with Kalani

The first series of the long-awaited drum & percussion lessons is available now at WorkshopLive. Subscribe or buy the lessons in a package. Whether you want to jam on a conga or on bongos, play the tambourine in a band or learn the basics of djembe playing, renowned percussionist and award-winning musician Kalani will show you how.

Choose from lessons that cover different hand drums, such as congas, bongos, djembe, and other percussion instruments, including claves, tambourine, shaker, and more. Learn the basic techniques and the most popular styles that are used in Latin and Pop music:

• Salsa patterns: Rumba, Guaguanco, Mambo, and Songo, Afro-Cuban 6/8 rhythms
• Calypso and Merengue