Making a practice routine

Making a practice routine

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Clint McLauglin

People ask me all the time about a practice routine.
The fact is that every player is at a different point and that changes weekly.
The best person to give you a routine is YOU.

Look through every one of the method books that you can get your hands on and write down the types of technique that are involved.
Keep track of how many times each technique is shown in all the books. (That gives an idea of how important that the authors thinks it is.)
Now play some of each technique. (ie double tonguing) and rate how well you do that.

Play and rate each type of technique.
Now on your chart you have each technique and a rating of your skill.

The 1st thing is to attack the low scores. You want things to be even.
ie you feel slurs are the weak link so then you focus more attention and time to that until it catches up to the other skills.
Once you have your skills even; then you go down the list changing the focus of the practice.
The main focus is the 1st item until it raises up 1 number (like from 5 to 6 out of 10).

Then the 2nd technique on the list is the main focus until it raises 1 number.
Then the 3rd thing…

So every week will be different because you changed the main focus from one technique to another.

However; you should spend at least 5 minutes on every technique. Playing 4 hours a day that will be more like 10-15 minutes on every technique.
Don’t ignore skills/techniques, just focus more time on the ones that you have more trouble with.

Unless you see the same teacher every day then nobody can write you a routine because if you want to stay in a fast growth phase then it has to change like I just proposed.
Pops