| Where guitar is concerned I do this....
warm up for 10/15 mins which includes warming my hands and wrists up, stretching off the guitar, stretching on the guitar, chromatics, melodic minor modes, scales in different groupings, string skipping chromatics, all the 3 and 5 string arps, then a couple of 6 and 8 string arps.
Then its straight onto riffing
usually spend 4-7 hours on this a day but I also include other things such as endurance workouts for picking, speed workouts for picking and control workouts for picking.
After that I spend an hour or so doing legato with my right hand which is basically all the stuff I do on my left hand....but with my right.
Then I do some sweeping and sweep tapping for 20 mins or so. Usually I just make up licks and play them over and over.
The last part of my practice is either Allan Holdsworth music (chords only) and a lot of jazz progressions OR legato lines. This is either Holdsworth, Derryl Gabel or my own licks. I spend a lot of time mixing 3/4/5/6/7/9 note groupings along with wide stretches. Legato really does take ages to master.
Ive done all the shreddy shreddy stuff when I was 16-18 and I came to realise its fucking boring and hardly ever required unless you have a youtube account. For this reason I focus mainly on metal rhythm, tapping which will open up anyones playing, chords which are the best things ever, and legato which is awesome when used with riffing.
Please excuse my english, I am english but I am also tryin to play guitar now too
I think every guitarist needs to spend a lot of time on their picking hand. Guitarists I have met rarely spend any time on it and accept that their picking is pretty bad.
I used to spend 6 hours a day on it.....they were very long days indeed.
But it really paid off.
And I dont agree with what Marty says. You have to learn the technique properly before you can apply it to music. Learning by trial and error will only result in unreliable technique and possibly injury.
There are many exercises that will greatly open your playing and help you break out of learning other peoples licks and sounding EXACTLY like everyone else.
Jon |