Hello, how ya doin'? Justin here.
Welcome to IM-129, which is the Foundation 2 Practice Routine.
Now, we're up to a big one-hour routine now.
If you can't fit an hour a day in, just break it into half an hour,
and do half an hour one day and then a different half an hour the second day.
I've shown it on the website broken down into the two sections,
'cause probably for most people they'll be breaking it down into two half an hours.
Don't feel bad if you can't do an hour a day.
If you do do an hour a day, you'll of course progress twice as fast as someone
doing half an hour a day. Normally, that's kind of how it works, isn't it?
So let me just run through again what it is that you should be doing.
So, you should be doing 5 minutes, that's of course using your timer,
and all of the things that we've talked about before.
You'll be working on your Barre Chord grips, focusing of course on your Dominant 7th
and your Minor 7th chords.
Doing the strum, pick out, strum.
Making sure every note is clear.
Focusing your pressure into the centre of the barre,
to make sure that you get every note in that barre clear.
We're doing that for five minutes.
Then you'll be doing your 1 Minute Changes, which are between your open chords
and your barre chord grips, just the major and minor ones.
Really good exercise, remember that you're trying to form the barre in the air,
with your first finger already at the angle.
That's the really important bit to remember with that one.
We then have five minutes of the Major Scale with a metronome.
Making sure that we're synching up with the metronome really, really well,
that you're right with the metronome.
Not rushing and going ahead or waiting for the metronome and falling behind.
That you're right on with the metronome every time.
And that you're not speeding up before you can do it four times perfectly, consecutively.
Then you can start speeding the..., you know, getting it a bit faster.
Then we have five minutes of Major Scale improvisation.
So, in that five minutes, you should be using the backing track
if incidentally it's exactly five minutes long.
How is that? You know the backing track is.
So, and try and experiment with your major scale, remembering all of the hints.
You know, the play/rest thing, making sure you only hit the notes on there,
you know, using little repeating figures that you know, play/rest, that stuff.
You know it's really important.
So, go and revise the lesson if you need to, but you should be doing five minutes improvising.
And then we've got ten minutes on songs, repertoire,
playing songs that you know, preferably ones that are using these new skills
that we're checking out, and/or revising old songs that you need to do and/or transcribing new songs.
Learning to, you know, transcribing is such an important skill.
Please, don't overlook it.
You know I'm gonna be going on about this all the time. Get used to it.
But working out songs by yourself is the most important thing that you can do
to improve as a guitar player.
Without any question.
There's no doubt about it,
that learning songs by ear is the most valuable thing that you can do
to improve your playing.
So, that's the first half an hour set if you like.
Normally, if you were doing it I'd say do that half an hour and then have...
and then at least have five minutes off in between that and the second half an hour.
Where we're gonna do five minutes of note reading.
Now remember you can do that five minutes if you like on the train,
or on a bus or whatever, not while you're driving, because it's note recognition,
is part of it, of course the playing guitar part,
you need to be with a guitar.
Unless you take your guitar on the train, I suppose.
It could be entertaining.
Put a little hat out. Or something.
I'm sure you wouldn't get many people giving you any money,
if you were trying to busk by doing bad sight-reading.
But you could try.
Then, we've got five minutes of Minimum Movement,
which is of course, we've looked at before,
which is just trying to get the really small finger movements as you play your G Major Scale.
Then we've got five minutes of Rhythm Guitar, which is learning our accents.
So, making sure that we get our accent really strong and the other notes nice and quiet.
Really concentrate on bringing that accent up,
and then being able to use that little kind of accent on every third one pattern that I showed you.
Very, very common pattern.
So, working on it really slowly, getting it right, making sure that you can do it properly.
When you can do it, then straight away start trying to apply it to some songs.
It's a really..., you know, it's important that you try and apply these things as soon as you can.
Then we've got a Notes On The Neck Using Octaves. We've already been lookin' at that before.
But that's something I'm guessing many of you are probably need to stick at.
If you're cool with that then substitute it for something else that you're struggling with.
You know if you need a bit of extra help with your barre chord grips, or your chord changes,
or whatever, you know.
All of these Practice Routine things, you know, you should be practicing the things
that you can't do, not practicing the things that you can.
So, if something's really easy and you've got that bit down,
substitute it for something that's really difficult, you know,
that if you always work on the things that you find the hardest you'll see them,
the most improvement. That's a, you know, generally a really good thing to think about
when you're practicing.
And we have a little bit of a muddle now, because I said this already.
So we've got now ten minutes of songs, your repertoire.
The other thing that I talked about, I should have said,
am I gonna have to do the whole thing again?
No, I'm not gonna do it again.
You're all grown-ups, you can deal with this.
So, before I said ten minutes, and I said that it was repertoire practice,
it shouldn't have been,
it was Justin Method and Transcribing.
I was right with the Transcribing bit, but I kind of added some extra wrong stuff in there.
So I'm a teapot! OK.
Look I don't even know what I'm talking about here, you know.
OK, so, you should be doing ten minutes. In your previous ten minutes, should have been:
Justin Method transcribing exercises, or transcribing for real life and,
this ten minutes is, should be, your repertoire,
you're playing songs that you know, playing new songs of stuff using these new skills.
I feel a bit silly now.
But I don't want to do it again, because the rest of it was going so well.
And this is the last one I'm filming right now, and I'm really hungry, and I want to go home.
So please forgive me for making a mistake on my video, and leaving it up there.
I hope you'll forgive me.
So, yes!
Anyway, that was the end of 129.
In the Intermediate Foundation 2 Practice Routine chat about what you should be doing.
Hope the practice is going really well for you.
Remember that on the website I've got a list of the goals that you should achieve,
before you go on to Foundation 3.
So go and check that out, make sure you've ticked off all of those boxes,
and, I'll see you in a little while once you've had a bit of a chance
to digest all this Foundation 2 stuff for Foundation 3.
Take care of yourselves and I'll see you again real soon.
Bye, bye.