Creating the Ultimate 1-Hour Practice Session
With all of life’s commitments, finding the time to sit down and practice effectively can often seem daunting, let alone put together a daily practice schedule to improve the areas of our playing we feel are falling short. What little time we find to dedicate towards practising can generally feel like wasted time, noodling aimlessly into the ether, searching for the echo of an answer to find us in our uninspired, unmotivated cavern. Creating a practice schedule is a powerful tool to combat these feelings of being stuck in a rut, ensuring we don’t become so disillusioned with the guitar that we stop picking it up. Though, it’s crucial that we plan and build this schedule in a way that promotes positive and not negative practice, creating bigger long- term goals for our playing, as well as smaller short-term goals and solutions to navigate our way to the level we feel our guitar playing could reach in the future. By doing so, we can follow, exercise and tweak this schedule on a daily basis, developing the skill of consistent positive practice and rewarding ourselves for our progress. Now I know what you’re thinking, “how can I find the time to plan a practice session if there already isn’t enough time within my schedule to practice alone?” Well, with a little ego death and time management tools, creating and planning a practice session foundation that works for you can take just 1-hour (even less, too!). 1-hour is the perfect amount of time to balance hard work and reward within a practice schedule, and when executed daily, it breaks down the walls of any rut, making you a more confident, consistent guitarist. Here are some essential tips and tools to help you build your ultimate 1-hour practice session.
1. Visualise & Manifest
Before we even think about picking up the guitar and warming up, it’s essential to self-reflect on what has been holding your playing back. Although assessing your weaknesses can be humbling, it can also be compelling. The positive side to doing so is that it also shows you what you want to improve and what kind of guitar player you want to be: a critical thing in developing positive, consistent practice skills.
Visualising your goals is super important, and starting any practice session by doing so creates affirmations, declaring to yourself what you want to achieve. Write down your long-term goals and display them where you can see them during your practice session, reminding yourself why you are doing the hard work now. Naturally, these goals will change into new long-term goals as you see hard work manifesting as progress, building your confidence as you navigate your guitar-playing journey. It’s all about creating the determination and ideas in our mind, setting ourselves up to execute them positively in our daily practice regime. Never underestimate the power of your mind and its tenacity - use it to your advantage! Take 5 minutes before you pick the guitar up to visualise and manifest your goals.
2. Time Management & Pre-Practice
Time management is a key factor to consider when planning a practice session because it allows us to assign practice areas to a specific duration of minutes within our 1-hour session. The idea of ‘time blocking’ is a powerful tool as it allows us to measure our progress in real-time, putting practice areas into small, focused and manageable sessions and, thus, broadening the variety of our overall 1-hour schedule.
This helps us to create smaller, short-term goals that we can focus on improving the little things that are potential factors in more extensive weakness areas of our playing. This means we need to take the time to identify those weaknesses honestly and positively so that we can best use these valuable periods of time.
We can think of this as an idea of ‘pre-practice,’ taking short bursts of focused practice whilst, without realising it, warming up both physically and mentally. By allocating 30-second, 1-minute and 2-minute time blocks to this principle, we can begin to create “short-burst” practice sessions with goals that are attainable within their given time constraints. For instance, scale workouts, picking exercises, theory exercises, testing your rhythm, bending and vibrato intonation etc. These are all things we can work on within this “short-burst” approach, helping us identify what areas of our playing need further focus.
Try allocating 15 minutes within your 1-hour session to these to warm up the mind, body and vision.
3. Super-focus
Now that we have discovered some areas that need work, it’s time to hyper- focus our attention on the weakest of those areas or, more importantly, develop short-form sessions that look to drive us towards our long-term goals. By creating a "super-focus" time block, we can extend the weakest of the previous "short-burst" sessions using a 5-minute time block to improve them further. The goal here is to improve the areas that we have identified are holding us back. This is the time within our practice session to really put our playing in the spotlight, effectuating our progress. Our improvement can be identified, monitored, and targeted through this process. In 5 minutes, we can develop super-focused, short-form practice habits, ensuring our commitment to what we're doing and enabling them to be executed daily. It’s also a great amount of time for retaining and maintaining focus, minimising the room for distractions.
Take 15 minutes for this section of your schedule, constructing 3 “super-focus” time blocks to areas of your playing that really need it. Executing this daily will transform your weaknesses into accomplishments quickly, with visible, traceable results.
4. Consistent Context
The hard work we put into improving is something we often forget to apply within a musical context after putting in so much effort to perfect our technique. In addition to practising techniques and styles unaccompanied, it is equally important to learn how to apply them to musical situations.
After putting the hard work into “super-focus” sessions, now is the time to reward yourself by hearing how your progress sounds in real-time. Choosing backing tracks that coincide with what you've been working to improve will help you cultivate your labour, empowering your new skills whilst staying within the musical context.
Including this in your daily practice itinerary will enable you to identify what is required of you musically from any contextual environment. This helps bridge any gaps between technique and expression, making you a versatile musician in the long run.
Allocate 20 minutes after your “super-focus” workout, either focusing solely on one backing track genre or splitting them into 4 separate tracks to maximise your versatility consistently.
5. Inspiration Causation
After almost 1-hour of dedicated practice, it’s important to reward yourself with things that inspire you. Inspiring yourself daily will help you to continually return to the instrument, feeling excited to pick it up next.
Establishing the practice of learning something new on a daily basis can help you reach that goal, so make sure to reward yourself by mastering that incredible solo or riff you recently heard that turned your head!
Equally, to stay inspired and confident, it's essential to practice and review pieces or songs you have already mastered - this will help to keep your memory fresh and remind you of your progress.
Try taking 5 minutes at the end of your session to reset the mind and the ears with some newfound or existing inspiration!
6. Session Arrangement
Ultimately, we’re all different people and players, which means there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to arranging a practice session. Take these tools and tips and arrange them in a way that works best for you within that 1-hour. It may take a little time to get it right, but everything will start falling into place once you do.
