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Klaus Caprani

MCI RangeXpander S-10 3x4
www.klauscaprani.com

of course I will ramble as well..it's one of my strong points in life...

I generally practice 30 to 60 minutes every early am..the same stuff everyday until I am comfortable with the results. I am still playing basically the same material from around November, just with multiple variations. Working to break out of the box.

BUT..it's not the amount of time thats important, it's what you actually practice..

EX: if you practice the same scales 5 minutes/day in 2 or 3 positions and thats all you do, at then end of 30 days that 5 min/day will yield incredible results.

If you practice without a routine 60 minutes/day, and change the routine everyday, at the end of the 30 days you probably will not be much further ahead than day 1.

Time and routine go hand and hand. Routine + discipline is a requirement.

but what do I know, I'm sittin here LOOKING at the Steel and sitting at the PC !

t

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Larry Bell - email: larry@larrybell.org - gigs - Home Page
2003 Fessenden S/D-12 8x8, 1969 Emmons S-12 6x6, 1971 Dobro, Standel and Peavey Amps

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Fred Justice

1. Non-musical warm up. using a metronome, I play combinations of pedals and levers without picking, it helps to avoid cramps! Then it's right hand picking combined with pedals and volume. Up and down chromatic. That's about 30 mins.

2. Musical warm up. I go through major, minor and dominant scales through the cycle of fifths. Speeding up the metronome slowly. thats about 30 to 45 mins.

3. Then it's chord work. With metronome, another 30 mins, through all major, minor, dominant, diminished, augmented, 7ths, etc... thats another 30 mins.

4. If I still have time, I'll try to practice the songs we are playing with my band, or improvise over backing tracks from BIAB or the Aebersold courses.

That's it! In a couple of decades, I MIGHT be as good as I want to be!

As my muscle memory develops, I'll probably be able to practice in a different way, and enfasize other aspects of playing.

Anyone else practice like this?

Practice time...short period like 10 minutes several times a day. I get highly motivated by having a song to learn that I really like. I'm trying to learn "Am I that Easy to Forget" and its really pretty. Anyhow, that's what motivates me. And 10 minutes 4 or 5 or 6 times a day works. I'm learning.

Now doing scales is something entirely different. If somebody could come up with any motivation for practicing that kind of thing, I'd appreciate it. It's more like work, and we're supposed to be 'playing' the guitar, right?

IMHO, that attitude makes learning how to make music very difficult for some people. It makes improvising and comping "misterious" and "magical".

Some Pro's seem to know all the theory there is to know. Others play by ear. But I'm willing to bet anything you want, that the pro's that play by ear have some sort of system that works like music theory for them: ie. they can recognize different types of intervals, scales and chords, etc.

I don't have a very developed ear, so learning how it works in theory helps me know if I'm in the ball park for getting the type of sound I want.

anyway, that's just my opinion.

I have several tracks saved that are the circle of fifths in verying styles. maybe 2-4 measures of each chord.

Actually I agree. Scales are necessary and helpful for those arpeggios we hear. Its just that 'practicing scales' just isn't as much fun as listening to a song actually materialize when we practice it.

A 'way' of making scales more palatable might be to play those scales within a song, as in the form of an arpeggio. I'm not anywhere near trying that yet (still learning grips) but I know somewhere in the process of learning it'll show up, and I'm hoping that'll be in a song.

I practiced that way for a few months. But what ended up happening was that when practicing scales over BIAB tracks, any excuse was good enough for starting to improvise. So I would never get through the whole track with out letting loose!

That's obviously a good thing, but what I want is to get the scales under my fingers to a point where I don't have to think about it. So now, I practice the scales with a metronome, and then only after I've executed them correctly, I do a session of improvising over chords.

leila,

Playing songs is allways the ultimate goal. Except I'm the obsessive type . (I mean I'm the type of guy who coun'ts all the tyles in my bathroom, what could you expect!)

BTW, Re: grips. I found an old post where Joe Wright talked about practicing grips. There's only a limited amount of different grip combinations you can do. So What I do is practice all of them with a metronome. I also use this excersice to practice vibrato.

If you picture grips in terms of how many strings you skip, its:

000 (that is, don't skip any strings)
001 (that is, skip 1 string at the top) etc...
100
010
101
011
110
111

You can add alternating pedal and lever changes to the alternating grips for the ultimate nonsensical and boring ( ) warm up!

Farris, I admit to playing the banjo. Some of the more common 3-finger banjo rolls in 4/4 (8 eighth-notes-to-the-bar) form are:

1. Forward Rolls: TIM-TIM-TI, TIM-TIM-TM, TI-TIM-TIM, TM-TIM-TIM, IM-TIM-TIM, M-TIM-TIM-T (Basic 3-finger pattern is TIM)

2. Backward Rolls: MIT-MIT-MI, MIT-MIT-MT, T-MIT-MIT-M, IT-MIT-MIT (Basic 3-finger pattern is MIT)

3. Forward-Reverse Rolls: TIM-T-MIT-M, TIM-T-MIT-I (Uses both Forward and Backward 3-finger pattern)

4. Alternating Thumb Roll: TITM-TITM, TMTI-TMTI (Basic 3-finger pattern TITM or TMTI, thumb alternates)

5. Foggy Mtn. Breakdown Roll: IM-IM-TIM-T

where T=Thumb, I=Index, M=Middle, and the dashes are not rests - they're there to highlight the repetitive patterns.

Just the plain 3-finger patterns work well for 3/4 or Waltz time: TIM, TMI, IMT, ITM, MTI, MIT. Actually, these 6 cover all the possible basic 3-at-a-time patterns. Really good Scruggs-style players can mix and match these patterns and more at will, and at high speed.

For example, in the 4/4 rolls, the first forward roll just repeats TIMTIMTI over and over again. There are lots of possible variations on these. I still like Earl Scruggs' famous book and the record that goes with it. I use T, I, M, and R (Ring) fingerpicks on steel, which provides even more variations yet. I use TIMR, RMIT, and TIMT-RMIT (which is sort of like a 4-finger variation of the Forward-Reverse Roll) a lot for arpeggiating 4/4 passages.

Depending on how much blocking is needed, these can be much harder to get up to speed on steel than on a banjo. The banjo note on a good banjo decays so rapidly that one can just fire away and not worry about run-on in most situations. In addition, I often need to break up or otherwise modify these rolls for proper application on steel. I'm a relatively inexperienced steeler, so I'm probably not the best judge on this.

I'm a contractor by trade so summer time is real busy. Some weeks we work 7 days or until it rains but I always spend some time with my axe each day. Winter time is my best shot at real work on the steel though. Kids are raised (maybe) and the wife is gone to work by about 7:30 am so I have the whole house to myself. Thats when I can letter rip and expand my capabilities the best.