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Question about learning songs faster/going to the next level

Sebastian Lane

Free Bird Player
Nov 11, 2019
21
29
Anyone have any tips on how you can learn songs more efficiently? I'm wanting to try put out a guitar cover every 1-2 weeks to get more serious on guitar but find my progress with learning songs isn't fast enough to do that. I am trying to pick things in my relative playing ability but still challenging myself.

Parts I struggle with but am continuing to get better at is to learn things by ear and transcribing things. Like I'll get a particular part played over and over in my DAW and hum along and then can figure out a bunch of things on the guitar but I am slow sometimes. I'm only checking another tab when I'm really stuck or want to compare my tab with another's for accuracy. Maybe to get faster at it I need to work on interval training? I have workedt at it a bunch in the past but didn't see as much results with it before.

I'm good at analyzing and breaking down all the sections down into how many bars for each length so I can learn individual parts pretty quickly, it's the 1st thing I do so I know how the song goes really well and recognize the repeating parts.

I've been playing off and on for 10 years and find my progress on guitar has been good for the last couple months using the lessons on this site. Have been trying to go back to the basics to get my lead guitar playing better as rhythm guitar is my strong suit.

Any advice would be appreciated, I know there is lots to work on :)
 
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Sebastian Lane

Free Bird Player
Nov 11, 2019
21
29
I aim to practice/play for 1 hour per day.

Before I practice I write out how much time I'm going to practice each thing like:
Guitar warmup: 7 mins
Syngates.com lesson practice: 23 mins
Cover or original I'm working on: 30 mins

I'll go over sometimes by 20 mins or so sometimes but there are times when I only have 20 or 15 mins to practice instead of 1 hour. Last few days wasn't able to practice due to a bunch of things coming up and a bunch of health issues were going on in December so wasn't as consistent with the 1 hour practice as I wanted to be but getting better with it.

That being said I'm doing much better so I think consistency for how much time I'm playing each day will help a lot too. Probably increasing the time I'm working on a cover or original each day maybe by another 15 mins would help too.

How do you organize your practices each day and how much do you each day on average? Thanks
 

idssdi

Sold-out Crowd Surfer
Nov 11, 2019
5,336
6,754
Groningen
11
The idea for me is to practice for an hour and a half and then just have fun for an hour or so:
30 minutes etudes
30 minutes gypsy jazz
30 minutes working on whatever song/metal minute I want to do
60 minutes just having fun

I tend to be very exhausted when I come home so I deviate from it quite a lot(after dinner dips are pretty common)
 
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Sebastian Lane

Free Bird Player
Nov 11, 2019
21
29
That makes sense, thanks for sharing. I probably need to work on the cover/original more then.

I find when I feel like not starting is I tell myself to play for something small like 10 minutes and then I can stop. Usually when that 10 minutes is up I want to continue to play. If I'm feeling really tired and had to do lots of other things then I will do a quick power nap or meditate to get energy to start. Or I can reduce the practice session from 1 hour to 40 minutes that way I'm still playing on a day.
 

idssdi

Sold-out Crowd Surfer
Nov 11, 2019
5,336
6,754
Groningen
11
That makes sense, thanks for sharing. I probably need to work on the cover/original more then.

I find when I feel like not starting is I tell myself to play for something small like 10 minutes and then I can stop. Usually when that 10 minutes is up I want to continue to play. If I'm feeling really tired and had to do lots of other things then I will do a quick power nap or meditate to get energy to start. Or I can reduce the practice session from 1 hour to 40 minutes that way I'm still playing on a day.
When I'm tired I just noodle which is fun and I'm playing but not dedicated practice really except sometimes it's also songwriting if I find something I like.
 
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