Guitar/Music questions

[Zavut]

Hey guys

I decided to ask some very broad questions here because I think the album Ink Complete is brilliant, and most of you seem to be musicians around here! Now, I have a fender squier series stratocaster, and I've been playing for about 8 months (I'm 16, started a bit late). I take lessons every saturday, so I'm learning some simple riffs, chords, picking patterns etc, and I picked up this book on musical theory, which I just started reading. Lessons are only a half hour, so there's only so much I can ask/write down in one session. I find the technical metal/crazy progressive/neo-classical stuff to be great, and I want to someday have a refined sound like that. So basically I want to know how many hours of practice/study I should aim for each day, what exactly is good to learn early on, how to get the most out of the time I spend learning, what not to overlook etc.

Hope some of you guys know where I'm coming from, any advice would be appreciated!

 

[Barking Pumpkin]

Well, I'm not a crazy progressive/technical metal person yet, so I don't know how much weight my statements carry. I've been going since November 2003, and I have a really great teacher. Anyway, I think that the best advice is that a shorter, focused practice, is far better than a drawn out, aimless practice. I do four instruments, so I do spread time out between them, but I still feel like I have achieved a lot and am improving doing an hour and a half to two hours of guitar a day, and focusing that practice. Sometimes if I just mess around and it turns out to be four hours, I don't feel nearly as satisfied as I would if I had focused more with the practice.

If you have the discipline to work hard enough on guitar to practice those crazy amounts of time, then do it, but just keep in mind that you're doing something with the time, and not just playing a long time just to be "practicing" x hours a day. I try not to get into that mindset, but in the mindset of "have I achieved something today?" Also, practicing a long time doesn't mean doing technique excercises for six hours, that's just going to tire you out and bore you to death. I would say break it up and do technique, chords, arpeggios, theory, or whatever else you want to work on. Even if you have a lot of things to do, I think you'll find that you might only need two hours or even less to do all that stuff in and feel like you've accomplished something for that day. One aspect of it is your natural ability to learn. Some people can probably do the same amount of learning in an hour that might take someone else three hours. Find out what works for you and makes you happy.

One thing I would say not to overlook, is reading music for guitar. I don't know if you're doing this or not, but it has helped me a lot, and it also makes you feel like a "real musician," besides being infinitely useful when working with other professional musicians. I'm going through the 'A Modern Method For Guitar' books with my teacher, it's the series Berklee School Of Music publishes. I can't say anything about the theory book you mentioned, as I don't use that book. But if it's helping you learn what you need and want to learn in terms of learning the language of music, then it's good.