If you aren’t getting the results you’re looking for, it’s not that you don’t have what it takes.  While there is always a lot of hype about what to learn and what is popular to play, very little time is really spent going over practice method.  This isn’t just a minor oversight.  Sure, it’s critical to know what to practice.  Without direction, you can’t really expect any significant progress (except for possibly becoming an expert at playing “Smoke on the Water”).  What to practice can vary considerably from person to person.  It’s determined by things like personal goals, learning style, interests, etc.  The truth is, knowing what to practice is just the beginning and it is virtually meaningless without having a solid answer to a bigger question: “how do you practice effectively?”

Now this is a subject that I could pretty easily write a book series on – not because “I’m so knowledgeable,” but simply because there is so much that can be discussed.  While every basic principle of practice method can be expanded upon endlessly, you only really need a few instructions to get you moving in the right direction.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.  Before the knowledge of what to practice is even useful you must know how to practice – and before knowing how to practice can be useful, you need to know how to get yourself to practice and stay practicing. 

It might sound like we’re going around in circles, but stay with me.  The biggest pitfall guitarists run into with practicing is the challenge of keeping up with it.  This one takes a little determination and self-training, but it’s a fairly simple concept. In order for any task to be interesting it must contain two specific elements at all times.  For one, it must be challenging.  If you don’t feel like there is something to push you and without having some sense that you might fail, the task just doesn’t seem worthwhile.  Imagine playing Checkers against a 5-year-old.  If you’re goal is to win, it might be satisfying the first couple times that you play but, eventually, it is going to become mind-numbingly dull.  On the other hand, what if it’s too challenging?  If you’re the 5-year-old in that metaphor, all you are getting out of those games is endless frustration.  There’s nothing fun about playing a game that you can’t win – over and over.  So, for starters, you must be willing to set up your practice in such a way that it gives you the right level of challenge.  That, in itself, is not difficult to figure out.  If the practice is too easy, you will get bored.  If the practice is too hard, you will get frustrated.  You’ve got to find the sweet spot.  One other thing.  If you aren’t getting regular rewards, you just aren’t going to keep up with it.  This is critical.  Set small, attainable goals for yourself.  Take the time to appreciate the success, no matter how small.  You deserve it anyway.  The more of these little successes you can accumulate, the more satisfying practice will become for you.  You’ll actually get addicted to the process.  And, in case you didn’t know, being addicted to practicing is basically the opposite of procrastination heh heh.

Okay, so what about actual practice method?  Well, this article is getting a little bit long already…. So stay tuned and I will do a whole article dedicated to the nitty gritty of practice itself.  However, as important as practice method is, remember that it is essentially useless if you don’t have a handle on what I mentioned above.  So why not try getting a handle on that in the meantime here.  I’ll be back with some specific tips and methods.

Dan Mumm

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You’ve heard about the modes…

Aren’t scales good enough?

If you’re not already a mode master, you’ve probably heard about the “modes” on guitar and wondered what it’s all about.  If you’re not big into music theory, maybe they’ve seemed like one of those needless bits of extraneous information that some people like to talk about just to make themselves look smarter or more knowledgeable about music or guitar – and, yes, there are a number of things like that.  But the modes aren’t one of them.  Actually, the modes themselves are a fairly simple concept and originated long before the scales that you use every day.  As a matter of fact, the Major and natural minor scales are taken from the modes.  Major is the Ionian mode and minor is the Aeolian mode.  The Greek names of the modes are actually a testament to their age and long-standing use as a standard approach to music.  But don’t get hung up on their names.  You can actually learn and benefit from the modes without even memorizing the names of them (although it’s useful to know them) or knowing their history or original use.  The history is interesting and worth a Google search, but not in any way necessary to increase your guitar abilities.  

So how do the modes apply to Shred Guitar?  

Back when I taught private lessons, I had a number of students over the years whose primary focus was Shred Guitar.  It seems the standard approach for most lead guitar players is to learn a handful of scales (usually the Pentatonic, Major and natural minor scales to begin with), learn how to transpose them by moving them up and down the fretboard and go from there.  You might then learn a few different positions of a single scale and go back and forth between those positions during a solo.  The question, of course, is what’s going on in between those positions?   What are all those notes that get skipped?  It seems like a lot to have to memorize and a lot of players just aren’t that interested in spending their practice time memorizing note names for each individual fret (which is not the recommended method).  The reality is, the fretboard of the guitar simply repeats over and over again, creating the same exact patterns – the only difference being between the 2nd and 3rd strings where the tuning is changed by one half step.  If you know the root note you’re starting with and how to find octaves, you can find a number of repeats of a scale pattern.  But patterns are limited and it still leaves the majority of the fretboard dark and unused.  What if you could play your solos from the open strings all the way up to the 22nd or 24th fret without having to skip giant sections?    What if you had 12 or 13 positions per key, starting on the 6th string, that you could use for improvisation and guitar solos instead of just 2 or 3?   That sounds like an awful lot of work and memorization… but it doesn’t have to be.  That’s where the modes come in.   

How the modes work

The modes on the guitar are actually nothing more than a single Major or natural minor scale, being repeated in different positions up the neck – eventually covering every note on the fretboard that falls within the scale.  The trick is, instead of starting the scale on the root note, you start the scale on any note from the scale and continue up the original note pattern.  In other words, if you’re playing something in E-minor, you could play a scale pattern that starts on A, with 3 notes per string, and get a whole new position out of it – but you never play a note outside of E-minor.  It might sound a little bit confusing, but it’s actually very simple.  Since the Major and Natural minor scales are made up of very precise note patterns and the guitar repeats chromatically from one note to the next, you can learn the modes in little building blocks and memorize very small pieces of information that allow you to find any and every pattern in real time without having to memorize all those new patterns.  It also opens possibilities for Shred patterns more than any other single concept.  Once you get the basics of the modes down, the entire fretboard is yours for the shredding!  No more dark areas and skipped zones, just a full fretboard of shred possibilities.  Remember, you’re simply taking a single scale and learning how to expand it across the neck.  

During my time as a private instructor, I devised a special trick for how to learn this quickly and easily.  That method is the foundation behind my Guitar Tab eBook set “The Guitar Mode Codex”  Whether you work through the Guitar Mode Codex or not, I highly recommend at least getting some introduction to the modes.  It’s a way to take what you already know and expand it out by many, many times.  You can think of it as something connects a lot of things you’ve learned that always seemed to be unrelated.  Even arpeggios find their way into this mix, but we can talk more about that another time.   Between The Sweep Picking Compendium, The Guitar Mode Codex and my new product, Neo-Classical Shred Concepts, The Guitar Mode Codex has been the most overlooked.  The funny thing is, it’s almost certainly the most generally useful of all 3.  It’s also the link that brings them all together.  You can check out The Complete Guitar Mode Codex below.

The Guitar Mode Codex, Complete : https://sellfy.com/p/iRWq/

Dan Mumm