How often should you practise?
Gitarrero Beginner recommends a daily practice session of at least 15 min, especially at the beginning. You are welcome to play longer. But you should look at the 15 min as the core of your session with regard to efficiency and high concentration. One or two days of rest will not do you any harm. But if you don't practise for a week or longer, the muscles necessary for playing the guitar will begin to reduce and your brain will forget how to play. It is best, if a regular practice session is integrated into every day life.
How should I practise?
Gitarrero Beginner gives you the answer to this question with the tutorial mode it offers. Do not take on too many lessons simultaneously, this reduces your chances for success.
The easiest way to learn something new is when it feels like fun. Music is fun when you can hear and feel improvements. This is why Gitarrero Beginner offers you an entire band on the PC. Nevertheless, it is still necessary that you practise your part on your own first.
In order to learn and understand a piece of music it is necessary to always start out slowly !!! when practising. You should only increase the speed when you can play mistake-free. Not beforehand. With the different levels provided for, Gitarrero Beginner allows you to always test whether you can play the song without any mistakes. Be true to yourself. If you compromise now, you will pay later.
The songs/exercises in Gitarrero Beginner are not too long and should always be played completely. When you make a mistake or something is giving you a hard time, stop and practise the difficult part on its own. You will also find small exercises in some of the study frames that will prepare you for the song featured in a lesson. You may even find exercises of your own if you have a particular problem. This could turn into fun, if you are a bit creative and again will contribute to your success.
You should never ignore difficult parts or mistakes you make and just move on, or worse: take a break. This will only result in dragging on your mistakes and the longer you do that the harder it will be later to correct your mistakes.
When you practise, always focus on those things first that seem the hardest to you. You will actually find that you move along quicker if you stick to this rather than trying to avoid the hard parts. At the time, it will seem hard to practise the difficult bits than to just play what you have no trouble with. But success will come and not only will it improve your play, but also your confidence.
Take your time and relax when something still won't come to you after several days of hard practice. Just leave it for a few days and get back to it then. Sometimes, that can be a real help.
Another time, you will have the feeling that you are actually getting worse instead of better. That is normal. First of all, your demands grow with your skills and secondly, your brain can never judge whether the bits of information it picks up will be useful in the future or not. What can happen is that something is stored in the back corner of your mind. When it suddenly becomes important, you just have to dig a little harder. Thirdly, it could actually be the case that your brain runs out of capacity with all the new impressions it faces. Overall, you will always improve through practice. Only sometimes, effort and reward can be two things apart.
Make sure to follow the recommendations given throughout this programme. Be critical with yourself and try to learn from your mistakes. Because you do not have a teacher in front of you who can point out your mistakes, beware of them and try to avoid mistakes in the first place.
This article is extracted from the help
section of Gitarrero Beginner - the Software Guitar
School for Beginners The article is included in the
Demo Version. For further information you need the Full
Version of this software, which you can order online. |
