Do you ever feel stuck in place on the guitar. no matter how much time you spend practicing?

Have those pieces you’ve been playing for years barely improved? Are you bored with what you can play and tired of feeling hopeless about ever being able to play what you can’t? 

If so, here’s my question to you: How do you actually spend your practice time?

You can put in 10,000 hours of practice. But if you waste half that time practicing badly you could need another 10, 000 hours to get where you’d be if you had practiced well. You might even need to spend another 10,000 working to untangle and fix things you did wrong.

How good you get over time comes down to the quality, less than the quantity, of your practice time. It depends on learning how to practice well. 

In “Building the Perfect Practice Session,”  I will show you how to build habits that lead to practicing well, every time you practice.

How DO you build a perfect practice session?

For one thing, it’s got to be YOUR practice session. In the same way that how you build a house depends on your location, your vision, and your materials, how you build your practice sessions depends on YOU.

We all have different hands, physiques, personalities, as well as different mental blocks and blind spots. And each time you sit down with your guitar, you’ll have different goals for the day, a different mood, a different amount of energy in the tank, more (or less) distraction, temptation, time—all of these are going to vary. But the tools and concepts, the habits and principles that enable you to reach your fullest musical potential are more consistent. And the ways to adapt to your daily differences and practice well stay much the same.

Building a perfect practice session means learning to transform each practice session into a vessel that carries you through your current challenges into the realm where your music flourishes.

Practice Session 5

What’s in the Course?

This course is my best current attempt to pull together a foundational approach to practicing.

But first I’ll give a way a ‘secret:’ There is actually no such thing as a perfect practice session. You knew that already. But all experienced artists and musicians also know that perfection is an enticing trickster that continually fools you into having breakthroughs and revelations and making good art, while remaining endlessly elusive. Philosopher Charles Eisenstein says that art is something that is “better than it needs to be.”  If we don’t chase that trickster in our practice, our practice stays mediocre. 

There are many ways to approach this fruitful chasing of perfection in practice, but there is a basic formula I have come to rely on that I believe is at the heart of all worthwhile practicing. 

My formula for practicing well goes something like this. Every time I write this down, it comes out different, but there is a deep structure there:

1. Enter into your session with intention, attention, and humility.

2. Stay curious and cultivate endless openness to what’s happening and to how it feels, to objective analysis and to intuitive soulwork.

3. Listen for what to to listen for. Follow the music, staying open to all possibilities and probabilities for its improvement.

4. Relax into everything, letting what was once difficult become easy.

Every thing in this course dances around the exploration and enhancement of this powerful process. It’s woven invisibly into the course, during which I progressively introduce ideas, practices and tools that bring you closer to being able to match the sounds you hear in your had with what your hands can actually do. 

What is this course NOT?

It’s NOT a bunch of blueprints to slap over your 45 minutes (or 3 hours) in the practice room.

It’s NOT a bunch of exercises or technique suggestions. I’ve got 50+ books of exercises and almost as many books on technique. They are only useful is you use them well.

It’s not a list of tricks and or tips. There’s a progression to the course, and each video builds on the previous one. 

It’s not a one-size-fits-all formula for divvying up your practice time.

It’s not the one be-all, end-all, last word on practicing after which completing you will graduate to the status of all-knowing practice master. It can be the beginning of your journey towards that status, but you need to do the work and keep doing the work.

It’s not the answer to life, the universe and everything.

But it is just $42. At least for now.

I’m happy to be able to finally share this with you.   It’s the essence of what I wish I could download into the brains of each of the guitarists I work with, but never have time to fully communicate in one carefully thought out sequence.

Who is designed for?

It’s designed for anyone who is frustrated with their progress on the guitar and wants to finally get serious about transforming their approach. It’s for anyone who is seriously ready improve their ability to learn, to memorize, to conquer technical hurdles, to make the music they play sound as great as their abilities will allow. It’s anyone who feels stuck in the mud or on a plateau or in the trees for lack of being able to see the forest,

If you are truly sick of this and want to apply yourself, it doesn’t matter whether you are a near beginner, or rather advanced, or anywhere in between the two.

This course is designed for those who seriously desire to turn wasted time into quality time.