Hi, how are you doing?
Justin here!
Welcome to IM-199 which is the practice schedule
for the Intermediate Foundation 1.
Now, the point of this little video really
is to remind you of the things
that you should be practicing,
how long you should be practicing them for,
and giving you a few practice hints along the way.
Of which the first practice hint I wanna go through with you
and remind you of, hopefully most of you have been doing it,
is the idea of using a practice timer.
Now, it's something that many of you
that have done the beginners course
will already know about.
It's a really, really great idea!
Basically, you wanna practice for five minutes.
So you set a little timer,
you hit start on the timer,
you zone in and you practice,
and you really concentrate for that five minutes
until the timer goes off,
tells you that you finished your practice.
You stop and you move on to the next thing.
It's really important
because it helps you focus
and get really good concentrated practicing
on whatever it is that you are working on.
We are all busy.
So if you are gonna practice your bar chords for five minutes,
you may as well get into the idea of practicing
really intensely for five minutes,
making the most of your time.
It really makes quite a big difference.
The other advantage of course is that
it means you don't overpractice.
because some things, like let's say your bar chords you are getting into
and if you practice it too much
then you run out of time to practice the other stuff
which is just as important.
So what we've got for our practice routine really...
I've written out here a fifty-minute practice routine.
Now, if you can do fifty minutes a day- that's great,
and you'll really see a lot of progress in your playing
if you can get into doing fifty minutes.
But it is a lot of practice time,
and I suspect that many of you
won't have that much time.
So the way I've kind of shown on the web-site
is a breakdown of two twenty-five- minute sections.
Maybe you wanna do twenty-five in the morning and twenty-five at night,
maybe fifty at one go if you got the time,
but really,
you know,
it'll take you just...
basically it'll take you twice as long
if you do two twenty-five minutes a day
than if you do fifty.
Anyway, so what we've got here...
we've got the first thing on there is your bar chords for five minutes.
So the idea really is just the same one as when we learnt
new chords in the beginners course:
you put a chord down,
doesn't really matter which one,
you strum it,
. . .
you pick out the notes one note at a time,
. . .
check that every note is good and clear.
If it's not clear,
you go through your chord and you got:
. . .
Try and figure out what's wrong, you know,
move your hand around,
. . .
lift your fingers up,
see what if you can figure out the mistake is.
. . .
Yeah, you got it right!
Strum it again.
And that's it.
And you move on to the next one.
So, a whole five minutes of that.
When you are doing that
I want you to take your hand off each time
when you go into the chord.
So put the chord down,
take the hand off, put it on again,
remember the rolling your fingers back
and all of those little tips.
Go and revise the lessons again.
Each time it's a good thing
just before you practice
just jump on the site,
have a quick look,
look at the little checklist of things
you should be practicing,
what you should be concentrating on.
Definitely helpful!
Make sure you are practicing the right thing.
Really important!
When you're doing lots of practice and it's intense,
make sure you are practicing the right stuff
all the time.
Anyway, that would be your bar chord practice.
The next thing on your list
is your one-minute changes.
And remember of course
that this time we are moving our bar chord shapes
up and down.
So it's not timing yourself
and counting how many you can do.
It's just five one-minute of really intense concentration
trying to move that chord around,
making sure that your fingers
don't kind of come unstockened,
don't release the strings at all,
just release the pressure.
Maybe take your thumb off, if you need too,
move the shape,
press it down,
release the pressure,
move the chord,
press it down.
It's kind of more bar chord practice really,
but this time instead of taking your hand off each time
I just want you sliding between them
and making sure that you've got nice release of the pressure
each time you move,
and that you can hold the chord down.
Hold the chord shape down, I should say.
Now, the next thing on your list
is the major scale,
for five minutes.
Now, really I don't care at this stage
about how fast you can do it or how well you can do it.
What I care about is that you memorize it.
It's very, very important
that you memorize the scale as soon as possible.
All other things that lay on from here:
improvising with the scale,
changing the way that we play the scale
using one finger,
all of that kind of more advanced things,
they all rely on the fact
that you memorized the scale.
So that is your big assignment for this stage
is to memorize the scale.
Doesn't matter how fast or slow it is,
just make sure you get it into your memory.
That's a really important thing here.
And that you do, as you're learning it,
you do it really slowly and make sure you get it right.
Cuz every time you make a mistake
it's gonna be harder for you to get it right.
Now, the next thing on your practice list
is ten minutes of either the Justin Method,
which is the set transcribing that I give you,
or just generally transcribing.
And I'm gonna recommend a few tunes
that might be good ones for you
to be transcribing as we go through the course.
Now, the transcribing and learning songs by ear
is such an important skill for any musician!
Please, don't neglect that!
I know a lot of people, beginners, write and say:
'Oh I found it really difficult,
and I had trouble kind of focusing and staying focused on that.'
It's kind of a problem,
and you will find that there's kind of a limit
to how good on the guitar you can get if you don't do transcribing,
ear training and transcribing of songs yourself.
There really is.
So please believe me that, you know,
all of the great guitar players
that ever walked the face of the planet
learned to play guitar transcribing
and learning riffs of other guitar players
using their ears.
Not using the tab books and all of that, you know,
internet tabs and all of these sort of things.
So make sure you get into the using your ears!
Really important!
Really, really, really important!
So that would make it twenty-five- minute practice set.
The second twenty-five minutes you've got
is the minimum movements.
So five minutes of doing minimum movements,
which is kind of technical work.
Either using the major scale
if you are confident with the major scale.
If you are not confident with the major scale,
just using chromatic one-two-three-four on each string.
It's a really...
it's a massive boost for your technique.
A lot of people don't even realize they've got an issue
with the flying fingers.
And when they do and they start practicing
they see an immediate improvement in their technique
over.... not maybe overnight but within a week or two
you 'll probably start to notice difference.
So five minutes you've got on that.
You've got five minutes on your rhythm playing,
which is basically going to be alternating between
8th notes rhythms and 16th note rhythms,
trying to make sure
that you can play along with the metronome
doing 16 and 4 strums per click
with the metronome,
and than you're tapping your foot on the beat each time
on the 1 2 3 and the 4,
and not just with every down-strum.
That's the focus there for your rhythm.
We've then got five minutes
spending learning the notes on the neck.
So using the little exercise iI told you,
just picking any random note on the fingerboard,
using the octave shape to work out what the note is.
If you don't know the notes on the thickest two strings
you can spend your five minutes doing that.
But really, you shouldn't be starting this course
unless you 've got the notes on the thickest two strings,
because it would mean that you don't know your power chords properly
if you haven't mastered those notes
on those bottom two strings.
And lastly, we've got ten minutes of playing songs,
repertoire, having fun, jamming the tunes that you like.
It can either be songs that are specific to the material
that we've covered this week using those E-shape bar chords.
But probably you are still learning those a bit
so maybe it's just revising songs
that you've learned before, making them better and better.
You know, pick a song, pick a couple of songs, you know,
it's up to you how you do that,
but really what you are aiming for is to be able to develop your repertoire,
to be able to play lots of songs from memory, at the drop of the hat, 'lets do this song!'
Because that's a really, really...
I mean that's kind of the point of playing the guitar, is to play songs.
So, whether the lead guitar,
I wouldn't recommend doing the lead guitar at the moment.
Mainly you should be concentrating on you rhythm guitar
and developing your rhythmic tunes.
But if you wanna include a little bit of that kind of riff playing
or little lead stuff, that'd be cool too.
It's really up to you, what you wanna do for your songs.
That's a whole lot of practice, you know.
I hope you are handling it OK.
Remember, if you get any pain at any point
with anything that you are practicing,
if your wrists start hurting, you fingers really hurt,
stop playing.
A lot of the bar chord stuff, you gonna get sore muscles,
particularly the one in-between your thumb and your first finger.
Expect it to get sore.
it's just gonna happen, alright?
So, you know, you're best off just kind of dealing wth it.
It should feel like you've just been to the gym
and had a bit of a work-out, right?
It shouldn't be painful.
If it's painful, something's not right.
So, it should be sore.
Sore is good.
Just, you know, that 'I've worked out' feeling is great.
But 'oh my god, I can hardly pick up a cup of tea,'
that's bad, right?
So, be aware of that.
If you do get any pain, please go and see a doctor
right away and get it checked out,
because what you don't want
is developing some sort of serious hand problem because of your guitar playing.
Could stuff you up for quite some time.
Little bit of sore- good, pain- bad.
That's basically what I'm saying.
Okay, hope you have fun with that.
On the web-site there's a list of goals for you as well.
So, go and check that out.
That's the things that I think you should be able to do
with each one of these different topics
before you move on to Intermediate Foundation 2.
Hope you've enjoyed all of this.
Have fun with your practice
and I'll see you for some more lessons very very soon!
Take care!
Bye-bye!