This video is about a year old, but as of today it’s had fewer than 10 000 views (It SO deserves more), thus I’m betting that many readers here haven’t seen it yet. It’s not safe for work, though, so unless you have a cool boss (i.e., one who understands the difference between using profanity because you’re too lazy to think up a better word and using it you think it’s the best way to make your point) you’d better wait until you get home:

When times have gotten hard over the past year, when I’ve been faced with scary or odious tasks that — even though I TOTALLY don’t feel like it — still have to be done, I think of Colleen’s boulder song and it helps me. Seriously. Then I just set my timer for a 10-20 minute “get started” interval and hop to it, rather than expending valuable mental energy worrying endlessly about how the heck I’m EVER going to manage. I have a permanent entry on my Astrid to-do list, just to remind me if I forget.

The boulder is always on my to-do list

The Boulder song was my gateway into Colleen’s world. Her newsletter and RSS feed are two of the few things that have survived the Great Media Cleanout of 2010. Two strategies I’ve learned from her have been part of my regular self-motivational repertoire over the past few months:

Annual goals daily

Colleen’s not-so-stupid Stupid Reading Hack

Now that I “get” the concept of just pushing the confounded boulder, one of the most important questions I’ve been trying to answer for myself recently is this: out of the universe of possible boulders, which ones are ACTUALLY WORTH PUSHING? Admittedly, I don’t really find the concept of “New Year’s Resolutions” particularly useful. But even so, at this time of year it feels natural to review and assess the past year, and look forward to the year to come.

In the next “best of” post I’ll be presenting one of my totally-not-guitar-related boulders for 2011.

What is the Astrid Mascot, anyway?

But one thing is totally bugging me: WHAT THE HECK IS THE ASTRID MASCOT SUPPOSED TO BE?

Yes, I typed that in all caps because the question is SCREAMING in my head.

Is she a little octopus? A melted eraser? A character from Gumby who ended up on the cutting room floor?

I suppose life is pretty cushy when it’s questions like these that are your main source of anxiety.

EDIT: I audaciously tweeted the folks who created Astrid and they got back to me with the definitive answer: Astrid is a SQUID: “Astrid is an adorable little squid. We thought with all those tentacles Astrid would have some major multi-tasking skills!”

Whew! Mystery solved! And kudos to the folks at Todoroo for taking the time to answer even silly questions like mine!

The Gymboss 2009 dual timer is my most recent source of consumer joy. It’s designed for use in the gym (duh), to help you keep track of intervals, rest periods, metabolic circuits, or whatever special timing your workout involves. But the dual timer function is also useful for reminding you to do other repetitive tasks. Even with the best of intentions, it can be tough to remember to do certain things regularly throughout the day. Here are some off-the-top-of-my-head examples:

Avoiding desk fatigue with scheduled mini breaks (this is a big one for me):
Timer 1: 45 minutes (work time)
Timer 2: 2-5 minutes (get up, stretch, rehab exercises)
Repeats: 2-3 (then take a proper break)

Tracking billable freelance hours:
Timer 1: 15 minutes (time spent doing billable work)
Timer 2: 15-30 seconds (short break to note down billable period on time sheet)
Repeats: 3-4 (then take a proper break before you get back to your billable work)

Guitar Practice:
Timer 1: 2 minutes (practicing a particular exercise)
Timer 2: 60 seconds (rest, stretch, setup next exercise).
Repeats: Say, 10 for a 30-minute practice session.

Kicking procrastination’s ass a la Merlin Mann’s 10+2*5 method
Timer 1: 10 minutes (doing productive work)
Timer 2: 2 minutes (dicking around as a reward for doing productive work)
Repeats: 5. Congratulations, you’ve just worked a productive 50 minutes!

The Gymboss is easy to learn to use, and offers the following useful options:

- 1 or 2 timers
- Manual or automatic repeats (either infinite or a set number of repeats)
- Alarms: High beep, Low beep, Vibrate, High beep + Vibrate, Low beep + vibrate

I bought my Gymboss solely for use in the gym a couple of months ago, and by now I don’t know how I ever managed without it. What I didn’t expect is that this clever little timer would make it so satisfying (in a geeky kind of way) to program my “intervals” for other everyday activities. When something is more fun and satisfying as opposed to just “good for you,” you’re more likely to actually do it.
And in case you’re wondering, yes, it comes in PINK.

Gymboss on Amazon (aff link)

Make the Shredtracker guitar practice motivator your new home page. You’ll either get the kick in the butt you need or collapse under the guilt of seeing how much time you waste dorking around.

Major credit goes to Mark Taw for his awesome Getting Back to Work motivator, the script for which I mangled and bent to my will. Found via the ever-so-inspiring 43-folders.

How contradictory advice messes with your head

If there’s one thing guaranteed to make you feel insecure about your guitar playing, it’s being confronted with wildly contradictory advice from killer guitar players whom you respect and and admire. Nowhere is this contradiction more striking than in the baffling variety of “Guitar Practice Secrets of the Stars” featured in contemporary performance-oriented guitar magazines. The vast discrepancy between the various approaches may be interesting to consider, but it also helps keep guitarists in a constant state of insecurity, thinking that “a better way” is lurking just out of reach. So they keep buying mags to find the secret path to guitar excellence — which I doubt the guitar mags are complaining about!

When it comes to putting in practice hours, you can roughly categorize the guitar gods into to three main schools of thought. Allow me to illustrate:

How much to practice? Three schools of thought

Low maintenance: In the low-maintenance, go-with-the-flow school you have Yngwie Malmsteen, who has repeatedly gone on record stating that he never practices. This immediately raises the question, “Well then, WTF counts as practice?” We can basically throw out the idea that “never practicing” is not an effective way to continually improve your guitar skills. All guitarists of any notable skill — including Mr. Malmsteen — have certainly spent some time engaging in activities that can reasonably be considered “practice.”

High maintenance: In the high-maintenance, play-till-your-fingers-bleed (and then some) school, you have Steve Vai, who recommends that players who are “intensely driven…to accomplish brilliant and historical acts on the instrument by discovering their unique abilities and talents” practice 10 hours a day (Guitar World, April 2004).

Advocates of grueling practice routines love to use words like dedication, intensity, drive, virtuosity, etc. The subtext is that if you aspire to be truly great, you must put in ungodly amounts of hours on your instrument — therein lies the dedication of the “true artists,” which separates them from the unwashed masses of wannabes who “don’t have what it takes.” Fair enough.

Sensible moderation: Steve Lukather, whom many (with good reason!) consider a true “guitarists’ guitarist,” advocates what I’d call the sensible, moderation-in-all-things school. He recounts striving to practice regularly about two hours a day, saying (in effect) that anyone who claims to practice a ridiculous amount of hours a day is either:

1. full of crap,
2. wasting time, or at worst
3. on the express train to burnout central, with stops in tendinitis city.

This sensible approach seems most likely to lead to success and continual progress for most guitarists. I have serious reservations about putting in extended hours of focused practice à la Steve Vai’s 30-hour guitar workout. Even truly stunning classical virtuosos (Itzhak Perlman, anyone?) don’t buy into the idea of marathon practice sessions. The key is regular, quality practice, not mere quantity. You’re not going to make much progress if practicing becomes a tedious chore — or if you have given yourself tendinitis.

Making sense of the senseless

With role models espousing such widely contradictory approaches, it’s no wonder that many guitarists spend so much time second-guessing themselves and searching for the perfect practice routine that will make the clouds part, angels sing, and provide a religious experience of instant guitar-skills gratification.

There is no perfect routine
Constantly judging yourself by what guitar heroes X, Y and Z do is the path to discouragement and despair. Rather than perpetually chasing someone else’s secrets, doesn’t it seem more fruitful to spend an hour or so defining your own personal goals as a guitarist, then devising your own “Secrets to effective practice” routine? Creating your own best routine can hardly be rocket science; you probably can’t go wrong with a routine that

• fits easily into your schedule (so you’ll actually do it),
• feels rewarding and enjoyable (so you’ll KEEP doing it),
• leads to steady, gradual progress in line with you outlined goals, and
• can be easily revised to adapt to your growth and development as a guitarist.

Next time you open a guitar mag, remember that they are profit-oriented just like any other commercial venture, and that their primary goal is to sell you more issues. Keeping you feeling insecure about yourself while at the same time offering you a (temporary) solution is a great way to keep you coming back from month to month. Guitar mags provide lots of useful information, particularly for beginning and intermediate players, but it’s a good idea to use your critical thinking skills when evaluating the practice routines that they present. (And of course, do the same with the anything I tell you!)

Finally, don’t worry about how much somebody else practices, or how long they’ve been playing, or any of the other things that boil down to comparing your own level of achievement to theirs to see how you measure up. Learning to evaluate yourself by your own standards rather than those embodied by other players or dictated by so-called experts could be a massively liberating experience for you. It sure has been for me!

But then, as if it were a reflex, your inner voice begins hurling an incessant barrage of criticism and doubt:

• Is this idea really any good?
• It sounds a bit like [insert song here]…is it too derivative?
• Crap! I can’t be derivative…..Must! Be! ORIGINAL!
• Anyway, it’s just a little riff — how will I ever write all the other parts for the rest of the song?
• Oh man, and now I’ll have to program some drums — EWWW! It always takes me forever to get the drums right.
• And you know, it’s nowhere near as good as [insert favorite epic masterpiece of musical brilliance]. I’ll never write a song even close to as good as THAT.
• Even if I do get this song finished, will anyone even like it enough to listen more than once?
• How am I going to react to the inevitable criticisms?
• I don’t know…people probably won’t like it. I know it shouldn’t matter, but…
• Heck, even if people say they like it, they’re probably just being polite….

*sigh*

After a few minutes of this self-inflicted abuse, you feel so overwhelmed by obstacles and doubt that you decide your riff isn’t good enough to warrant investing all that effort. You abandon the idea of crafting it into a new song, and go back to aimlessly noodling the same old licks while surfing the net hoping for “inspiration.” But any enjoyment you might have had is spoiled by a nagging feeling that you really SHOULD be doing something more productive…

Does this sound familiar to you? What the heck is this and why does it happen?

Your creativity, your inner muse, has been bitch-slapped into submission by your critical inner voice, robbing you of the opportunity to create something of real value — a new song. Widdly, bedroom “Youtube shredders” are as common as mullets at a Nascar event; but guitarists who write songs, complete projects, and consistently get their creative work out the door are far fewer. You know this. But why is it so hard to squelch your inner critic and just DO something?

The curse of perfectionism

It could be that — even if you are far from “perfect” — you are a perfectionist. You desperately want to feel creative and inspired, but your creativity is as good as paralyzed by the pressure and demands you put on yourself.

I’m intimately familiar with the tyranny of perfectionism. In fact, when it comes to producing creative output, the multi-headed hydra of perfectionism, self-doubt, and knee-jerk self-criticism is my worst enemy.

Fortunately, now that I recognize the enemy for what it is, I’m on a mission to kick its whiny butt. But that means effecting a dramatic change in habitual thought patterns that have had decades to entrench themselves — you could even say I’ve practiced them to perfection! I don’t expect changing to be easy, but “more of the same” just ain’t gonna cut it this time. (It rarely does.)

In the coming weeks I’ll be writing here about what I learn and the methods I use to make negativity and perfectionism my bitches, in the hope that others can benefit (and because the accountability of announcing goals publicly is an industrial-strength motivator). But don’t worry — I’ll be focusing on tools and knowledge you can try for yourself rather than subjecting you to reams of self-absorbed “navel contemplation.”

And I promise, there won’t ever, EVER be any New-Age BS about learning to nurture your inner child.

Recently I increased my playing speed from 78 bpm to 170 bpm on a certain exercise. In two days. That’s an increase of 118%. I never imagined I’d be able to achieve something like that, but it was surprisingly easy — so easy that I am kicking myself in my metal butt for wasting so many years practicing inefficiently.

I’m so excited about this breakthrough that I had to share how I did it so that you can try it yourself. Here’s how I increased my strict alternate picking speed by over 100%, and finally mastered a picking exercise that had eluded me for YEARS, one that I honestly thought I’d NEVER be able to play.

The key, in a nutshell, is slow practice. Yes, to play fast, you have to play slowly first. Really f’n slowly.

Now before you stop reading in disappointment, rushing straight to the comments section to tell me “That’s nothing new — it’s common sense!”, hear me out.

In my experience, most people — even if they start out playing slowly — try to play too fast too soon. And let’s face it, having to play slowly when you really want to play fast is a drag. You get bored and end up hacking away as fast as you can — fooling yourself for instant gratification — and still sounding “OK.”

But who wants to settle for “OK?”
“OK” is for other people; we’re going for MIGHTY.

Here is how to dramatically increase your speed while maintaining clarity, accuracy, and articulation.

Tools needed: metronome, programmable timer, practice diary for recording progress, and PATIENCE.

Procedure

1. Slow way down and carefully analyze your technique until you discover what is holding you back.
2. Decide what you need to do to fix your technique.
3. Practice this new technique ridiculously slowly, using a metronome.
4. Make sure you can play what you are attempting for one minute solid, relaxed with no mistakes, then…
5. …increase speed by 1 bpm.
6. Repeat until the desired speed is reached, over several sessions if necessary.

Overall approach
If you find your technique getting even slightly sloppy at a certain speed, then that’s your top speed for that practice session. Back up the metronome a few clicks to a comfortable speed again, and finish the practice session by playing a few one-minute repetitions at your highest RELAXED and CLEAN speed. It’s important to finish your session feeling successful so that you will be eager to resume practice the next day.

Remember, the whole point of playing slowly is to give yourself room to analyze your playing, identify any tension or bad habits that are holding you back, experiment to find your optimal technique, and let your brain and muscles gradually learn to consistently get it right. If you are feeling tense, you are playing too fast. To make real progress, you’ll have to fight the natural tendency to want to rush past the boring slow speeds and get to the sexy faster stuff. But if you move slowly move forward, one click at a time, past the frustration point and through the impatience barrier, it will pay off. Guaranteed.

A practical example

Here is the example I started with. It’s an ascending scalar pattern that I’ve wanted to be able to play fast and clean for as long as I can remember, but — no matter how much I practiced it — have never managed (unless you count HACKING my way through it).

Note: in this article BPM refers to quarter notes per minute. The exercise above is sixteenth notes, so at 60 bpm you’d be playing 4×60 =240 notes per minute. At 170 bpm you’d be playing 4×170=680 notes per minute.

I made it my goal to master this pattern. Three notes per string, alternate picking is what I was striving for, but something wasn’t working. Using my original technique I could only play this pattern at 78 bpm without blurring certain notes. Pathetic.

I slowed down to 60 bpm to investigate what I was doing wrong. Carefully observing my picking hand, I discovered that I wasn’t alternate picking all the notes as I thought I was; I was doing some half-assed economy picking here and there. Therein lay the bad habit I needed to fix.

Objectives identified, I started practicing the pattern at 60 bpm following the method described above. (I was reformatting and reinstalling Windows on my laptop at the time, so it gave me something productive to do while waiting.)

By the time Windows and my favorite apps were reinstalled, I had increased my speed to 115 bpm. A couple of times I’d slipped back into my lame economy picking habit and had to slow back down. But by the end of the session I felt confident and relaxed at 115 bpm.

The next day I started at 100 bpm and easily worked my way up to 120 bpm, my goal for that day. In fact, it felt so easy that I kept on going, one metronome click at a time. At this point I reduced the duration for each pass to 45 seconds because it seemed to be enough, but I stuck to increasing speed in one-click increments. In this fashion I gradually reached 140 bpm before starting to feel a bit of tension. I considered 140 my top clean speed for that session.

Then, just as an experiment, the little devil on my shoulder told me to try 150 bpm to see if my technique would fall apart……I tried……It didn’t.

160 bpm?

Piece of cake.

170 bpm?

Too much tension, but it still sounded good.

At 175 bpm I started having timing problems, so I considered 170 bpm my absolute-if-I-have-to-do-it top speed for that day. The slow playing had definitely paid off.

Above 140 bpm I was just starting to feel tension, so that is the speed I logged in my practice diary. But what’s important is that after a measly TWO DAYS I was playing well enough at 170 bpm to use this technique in a recording if I wanted to. It sounded fine; it was the tension I was unhappy with. It is obvious to me now that by using the same method I will eventually reach a relaxed 170 bpm (heck, why not go for 200?). And if a non-shredder like me can do it, so can you.

Instructions
On the tab sheets just give each discrete practice exercise a letter name (or a number).Use this name to fill in the little bubbles on the ShredTracker form.

The tab sheets are PDF files in A4 format and come in 4 flavors:
Guitar tab sheet 1 x 7 staves
Guitar tab sheet 2 x 3 staves
Guitar tab sheet 3 x 2 staves
Guitar tab sheet 5 x 1 stave

If you’d like other stave formats, let me know and I’ll whip ‘em up for you.

Happy shredding!

[Confession: It took a heroic effort not to go all Web 2.0 on y'all and name it ShredTrackr.]

ShredTracker background

I get a surprising amount email from people who want my advice about how to practice guitar. (That I rarely practice myself doesn’t seem to matter to them.) If the detail of their questions is at all representative, I’m amazed at the amount of mental energy that people can put into finding the optimal guitar practice routine. I don’t think it needs to be that complicated: it seems logical that the keys to gradual, steady improvement on a musical instrument are simple:

1) Decide what you want to play,
2) practice until you can do it, and
3) repeat as necessary.*

(*Preferably regularly and at increasing levels of challenge.)

It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. If you play guitar regularly (say, at least 3 days per week) over weeks, months, or years, and are actively pushing yourself to grow, you will. The details of your routine are, well, just details; regularly planting your butt on the practice stool and putting fingers on strings is the most important thing.

When you are practicing regularly, the ShredTracker can help you track your progress. Seeing concrete proof of improvement is a great motivator!

Instructions and rationale

Download the filled-in example (PDF 350k) to see how to use the form (it’s pretty obvious).

Here are some of my thoughts behind the ShredTracker’s design.

Five-day week.
Practicing more than 5 days per week is probably not realistic for most adults who have job and family commitments. 5 days per week is a worthy goal, but even if you only manage 3 you still get the satisfaction of filling in more than 50% of the form . Seeing a bunch of empty days on a 7-day form would be a total bummer.

Light-colored text in the fill-in areas, so that you can write over it and maximize the available space for notes.

Eminently do-able, short intervals.
Sometimes I’ll go for weeks without playing AT ALL because getting started with the quality hours of “real practice” that I keep telling myself that I need is BEYOND daunting. Sound familiar? But what about telling yourself that you’re only going to practice for 10 minutes? Or 15? Or 5? Telling yourself you only need to do a few minutes can give you…

…a motivational kick in the butt.
It’s fairly easy to get started if you know you’re only going to do 10 minutes of focused work before you can get back to goofing off. That’s the genius behind the 43Folders (10+2)*5 Procrastination Hack (a MUST READ for all procrastinators and slow-starters). The gist of this brilliant hack is to focus on your task (here, practicing) for only ten minutes, then you get to dick around for two. After two minutes of IM-ing your friends, reading blogs, or checking your web stats, you do another ten-minute block of productive practice. Ten minutes of focus, two minutes of screwing around, repeat until done.

10-minute blocks are not optimal for guitar practice; you often want to do an exercise for as few as 5 minutes or as many as 15, or any multiple thereof. So I designed the ShredTracker diary to let you block out 5, 10 or 15 minute intervals. Just mark the correct interval next to the group of bubbles, then fill a bubble for for each completed block. There’s also plenty of white space for you to take notes.

Those are the basics. I’ll be happy to respond to questions in the comments section.

Download the ShredTracker

The ShredTracker weekly diary is in European A4 format and comes in two colors: Pink (of course) and Blue for you macho dudes who “don’t do pink.” You can also download a filled-in example that shows how it can be used. Happy practicing!