Hey, how you doing? Justin here. Welcome to the Practice Assistant!
In this video, I'm gonna explain to you exactly, how to use it.
So, welcome to the Dashboard! When you first log in, this is what you should find
or something like that, it may have evolved by the time you watch this video.
Today, we're gonna be talking about the Practice Assistant,
so just click on the 'Practice Assistant'.
When you first do, you're gonna be prompted to make a new routine,
so I'd suggest you start off by calling it 'Test', but you need a routine to be able
to get started, so let's 'Create Routine', and I'll take you through
all of the bits that you need.
On this first 'About' page, you'll find the link to this very video
and some text that'll explain all of the stuff that I'm talking about this.
Anyway, the 'Practice' tab is where you'll actually do your practice.
We haven't got a routine or any items done yet so there's nothing to practice
so we'll come back to this in a second.
The 'Routines' tab is where we'll make
and edit our routines, but before that, we need to create some 'Practice Items'.
So, let's talk about adding a practice item, first of all.
So if we go here to 'Add a New Item'.
We can set here a title of the item,
so let's start with one for say, 'Chord Changes'.
And then we add description, so, 'How many chord changes in a minute',
and the duration would be, say 'one minute'.
A related link could be for my one minute changes thing.
You might want to open up another tab, if you're gonna add related
lesson links in there, you could add links to anywhere actually, to tell the truth.
And statistic name is, 'Number of Changes' in this particular case.
We hit 'Save' and there we have our first active item.
You could, I guess, use this for anything, really.
If you're trying to count the number of pushups you could do in a minute.
You could add pushups to your routine,
'number of pushups' and save it,
and you can have as many of these active items as you want.
In fact, you're probably gonna end up with quite a few active items.
Note here we've got the very common pencil icon,
which is the edit button, so if we decided that we wanted to put
in our related link at a later time, we can always do that; at any point,
you can go back and update stuff. We've also got a duplicate item, so if you
wanted to work on, let's say, this particular chord changes, where you're working on
'A to D', and you decide that you also wanna specifically work on doing, say,
'A to E' as well, you can hit that 'duplicate button', copy item, go and edit
this one and just make it 'A to E', 'save' and job done! Nice and simple!
Now, only active items can go in routines.
When you've completely finished with an item
you can move it to 'Archived Items', by clicking on the little 'x'
and 'Archive Item'.
When you put it there though,
they will be removed from Routines, so only archive items that
you definitely don't want to use anymore. You can also add practice items directly
from the site, so for example, 'the finger gym' exercise on the site, if you click on
the Practice tab, you'll see there that we can add to your routine; we can add it
either to the active routine or to practice items.
Now, we haven't talked about the routines yet
so I was gonna add it to your practice item; there we go.
Now, when we go back to here
we do actually have to refresh the page, it's important.
We have to go then practice items and you'll see there
that the 'finger gym' has been added.
It's been added at 5 minutes, which is what I've preset it for, but you
could always just go in and change that, you know, to do 15-minute practice on
that which would be far too much but you get the idea that's another way
of adding items to your practice routine.
Okay, let's move on to Routines now.
So, we have here our 'Test' routine, which I'd recommend you start off with.
If we click on the little 'pencil' icon, we get the edit menu, which we select now
the items that we want to go into that routine. I've only got 3, so I'm gonna
select all 3 of them; if you've got a 100 items there, you might find this search
feature pretty handy to find the things that you want. If you wanna change the
order; if you wanna practice 'A to E', first of all,
you can use these little side arrows to
move things around in the order that you want.
When you're finished, you click 'save'
and we have now our first routine. We can see what's in it by clicking
that little arrow there. We can have lots of different routines, so if we wanted to make
a new routine and call it 'Test 2',
'Submit', we've now got 'Test 2',
we can edit it over here, maybe we just got 2 items in this one; save that.
We've now got 2 different routines, so we might be doing that on a Monday,
when we wanna do this one, we just click on that '+' arrow
and that makes 'Make Active Routine'.
So that is now our active routine with just the 2 items in it. Of course, we can edit it
and change it, whenever we like; let's swap those back, 'Make Active Routine'
and maybe this one, we're gonna delete now.
When you delete them, they delete them forever,
so be careful with deleting your routines; this can't be undone! Okay.
So we get into practice now. So we've got a routine.
It tells you what your total time is there.
You are expected to do everything, each practice session, if you need to reset it
for some reason, if you wanna do it again, or you didn't quite finish one day,
there's a 'Reset Routine' button here that you can click on that will reset it for you.
So, let's just hit the 'Start' button,
so the countdown timer is now counting down.
Here you can see there's the countdown. There's a reset, if you need to
change your mind about what's going on. Really useful feature is the 'Notes'.
If you wanna add a note, say,
'remember the anchor finger'. If there's something that
you're forgetting, like how to spell remember, you can always change it there.
This will stay with the particular items,
so every time you practice, these will come up;
pretty handy little thing! We've also got a metronome here; now this particular one
you wouldn't want to use the metronome but if you click the 'Show Metronome' icon
you can see that we've got a metronome, we can start; we can stop it,
adjust the tempo like this, we can add in 8th note subdivisions
or 16th note subdivisions as well, if you need them.
Now, at the end of this one minute, the screen is gonna flash,
for those of you that don't have the sound turned up or whatever,
or somehow managed to miss it like I regularly do.
I manage to get the screen to flash crazy,
so that you know that you're at the end,
and we get the little chime.
Now, this is said 'Record Statistic', the number of chord changes,
so let's say, you did 36 chord changes there,
you add that in and we are ready to go on to the next item.
Now, this will be the same thing; we've got another set of chords,
we've got more notes that you can add.
If you decided that you didn't wanna do the chord changes there;
that you wanted to go to finger gym, you can just click on 'finger gym',
and you can practice that one and then come back to the one that you've missed
at any time you like.
Some of them, if I've added where the video is, I'm able to
actually show the video within the actual practice routine, as well, okay? So that's
generally the ones that I've added; that's the website generated ones, that's not
ready for you guys to be able to do yourselves yet,
but it might be in the future.
You've also got there your related link which will open up the lesson.
Now, couple of other things to mention,
we can add songs to your routine; if we go to the 'Highway To Hell' here,
you see there's the practice thing, we can just
add practice, just like we can with lessons, it gives us the option of how many minutes
that we're gonna practice it for, so we're gonna add 15 minutes, and we can either
add it to the active routine, or add it to your saved practice items, such as this one
to the routine, and now when we go back to our routine and we refresh it,
we will find on our practice that we have
'Highway To Hell' has been added to the active routine.
As well as individual items, you can actually import a whole new routine as well,
so here you can see, we've just got our Test routine, but for example, if I go to
this blues '5 Blues Licks Lesson', we see there we got some practice; we've got a
whole heap of different items there, there's all five,
you can select which ones you want.
If you don't want wanna do all of them but you can add that to your routine.
You can replace your current routine with these, or you can add them to
your selected routine, so let's 'Replace Your Current Routine With All;
click on that one. When we go back now to our dashboard,
and we go back through that little thing.
It's the one thing that you slightly notice that we have our
blues licks practice routine here, which is preset via the website.
So one thing I didn't mention yet is Stats.
So on the Stats page, you'll find how much practice
you've done everyday, so actually, I cleared this user account just to make
this little video, so you can see there's no practice there whatsoever, just the
one minute that we've done; you can change the time of that, you can also have a look
at the details and figure out exactly what it was that you've been practicing.
You can also 'view recorded stats'; so we only had one thing in there,
which was the 'A to E', we had 36 changes
but you can imagine, you see a nice little graph here
of all different colors to represent each different item that you've got statistics
recorded for. So, I've just typed into my other account; thought I'd show you some
of my left-handed practice and what it might look like, so this is mostly
one-minute changes, you can see here.
Here's the statistics, where I was recording the number of chord changes,
I was doing with my chords back in-- when is that? September and October
and you can see that there's like a practice time, as well.
So that's kind of what you get after a while here, if I show the details as well,
you can see which things it was that I was working on.
I hope that explains everything to you.
If you do find yourself using it all of the time,
do remember to hit that 'donate' button.
This was gonna be a paid thing on the website, but I've convinced myself
it's better to keep it free for everyone, but if you like it,
your support will be greatly appreciated. You take care of yourselves!
See you for plenty of lessons very soon! Bye bye.