Sunday Guitar Practice #4

One of my 2021 goals is to get better at playing consistently with a metronome and/or with backing tracks. I’ll include an excerpt here from my practice this week — this is me playing guitar over a backing track from Gene Caberra on his YouTube channel CaberraTV.

It’s a bit repetitive, and unremarkable. Up and down the pentatonic scale… But I’ll work on practicing this more in 2021 and so hopefully I’ll have a chance to share some improvements I make on this kind of exercise.

Practice – What’s this for?

This post is my 4th guitar practice sharing post. What’s this for? Why am I posting these? One of my goals for my work in AAEAA is to level up my guitar playing. I have several ideas for how I’ll work to achieve this goal, and succinctly, all of those ideas point back to one thing: Practice. Practice some more. Keep practicing.

Practice Routine

Practice at least once a day. Twice a day as much as possible. Getting in one practice session in the morning, and one in the evening is the best way for me to envision when/where I’ll schedule the time to make this happen.

What am I practicing?

My practice routine is a mix of warm up and scale exercises (sourced largely from YouTube), learning full songs (sourced largely from YouTube), and song-writing practice (chord progression experiments). And of course my routine is going to evolve – I’m looking forward to seeing how the work for AAEAA will change what I want to work on to keep leveling up my guitar playing.

Who are my teachers? (For leveling up at guitar, who is Adam following on YouTube?)

There are so many amazing guitar teachers on YouTube and online – in 2020, I became an avid follower of several of those YouTube teachers. I’ll put some of them in a list below. While these are a few of my favorites, this is not a comprehensive list … going forward, I might post links to some of these guitarists’ YouTube channels when they’ve influenced or inspired something that I’ve recorded for this blog’s weekly “Sunday Guitar Practice” posts.

• Paul Davids – Guitar: Paul is top of the list — his videos are such a joy to watch and always jam packed with so much to learn.
• Eric Haugen – Guitar
• Mary Spender
• Marco Cirillo
• Tyler Larsen – Music is Win
• Tim Pierce
• … and so many more!

I believe that every single one of the above teachers also offers online courses that you can subscribe to which is absolutely awesome. There is a ton of content on YouTube that has had a big influence on my guitar practice this last year – it’s inspiring. Huge gratitudes to all of the above teachers and to everyone who’s contributing to the amazing content landscape for leveling up how we all make music.

Cheers to the year ahead! I’ll keep you posted with weekly updates on my guitar practice – there’s work to do… let’s keep practicing. Drip by drip. Step by step. Practice, practice, practice.