Hi Lee,
My wife kindly bought me your Pentatonic Scale Fluency book and I’ve just started learning it. I’ve been playing guitar for years but generally just learn other peoples songs and jam along but recently I’ve decided to try and get my head around learning to play properly. I’m up to exercise 11 in the book and have been enjoying playing between the scale positions to A minor backing tracks on youtube and was wondering how long to continue to do this, shall i give it a week or so of 30-60 minutes a day experimenting with the first 11 exercises so they are firmly “ingrained” in my playing or do you suggest giving it longer?
Thanks
Terry
To be honest you could practise stuff like this for years. I still do myself occasionally, just keeps things refreshed. I don’t think it matters so much how long you do this for, just keep doing what you are doing and playing along to backing tracks.
I think it’s a good idea to keep practising things until they make sense and then move onto something else … that could be the next exercise or something else entirely – but then come back to it and have short refreshers. Too much of the same thing can slow down your overall progress (in my opinion) because we can tend to end up doing less thinking and more “going through the motions”.
Let’s say for example (this is just an idea) you’re up to exercise 11 and you feel quite comfortable with what you have done so far and it all makes sense to you. Now you could move on to exercise 12, 13 and maybe a few more, play around with these for a while but occasionally include some of the previous exercises in between. This way you can move forward but also prevent forgetting what you have done so far.
The more you go through the book the more of it you will commit to memory, the more you should find things making sense and begin to figure out and experiment with your own ideas. Eventually it will just become a part of the way you view the fretboard and scales.
Take breaks, learn other stuff, learn some licks, go mad occasionally and just enjoy what you are doing – just come back and revisit things in-between until it’s ingrained. It all takes a while, you could do this for a few years and still have light bulb moments. I think it’s always a good idea to keep your practice varied – keeps things more interesting and probably speeds up the overall progress.
Thanks, your approach sounds good, I was thinking along them lines anyway.