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Old 01-01-2016, 11:32 PM   #170
Disco King
Minion of Satan
 
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Thanks for the responses, fellas

I have some time off, so I'll probably try to get back into the habit of actually practicing. When I do pick up my guitar, I mostly engage in aimless noodling and running through sections of songs I already know.

It's kind of daunting trying to figure out what to start practicing when I pick up my guitar. Do you guys have a practice schedule?

I've tried making one in the past, but I think I put too much shit on it, so it became too long and unrealistic. I can't practice every single area of guitar playing all the time, but at the same time, I can't myopically focus on one until I am satisfied with my skill level, and then move on to another, because you have to keep at everything indefinitely. You don't, like, "graduate" from scales and then move on to chords or something.

There are a lot of goals I have, but breaking them down is kind of hard. Like, I want to just have a better musical vocabulary in general so that I have more to draw on when writing songs, instead of just defaulting to the same power/cowboy chords and pentatonic scales I'm comfortable with (I noodle so much in the minor pentatonic that I hate the sound of it now). I'm trying to drill into my head extended chords, major modes, and exotic scales, but they aren't sticking well. I also want to hone my chops so that I can play faster (maybe even shred), do that fingerpicky sorta thing (not sure what you call it... you know, songs like "Rotten Apples," that are very arpegiatted and I suck at), be able to incorporate artificial harmonics fluidly into playing, etc. Also, transcribing songs by ear (I rely on internet tabs way too much to take myself seriously as a guitar player).

Thinking about all this stuff intimidates me so much that I end up just doing my aimless noodle shit and never improving.

 
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