I practiced today. In fact, I practiced more than usual, because there is construction going on next door to my studio, making it harder to focus. So when I got fed up trying to invent a good way to demonstrate improvising A minor licks over an alternating-thumb bass, I spent extra time with my Hybrid guitar, which is loud enough to drown out the tunes the guys like to blast ten feet from the property line.

But today's newsletter is a public service announcement for anyone who is currently thinking that they should be practicing more, that they've never practiced enough, that they would practice more if they knew what to work on, or who feels like practicing isn't helping them get any better.

What a weird word, anyway: "practicing." I've already said it so many times in the last paragraph, it's giving me semantic satiation, like in that episode of Ted Lasso. A show which, I must tangentially observe, also includes a great rant/monologue about "practice," specifically about not showing up for it, in this case in the athletic sense.

Eminently re-watchable pandemic-era comedies aside, however, I want to emphasize that while I am currently on a pretty productive practice jag, this comes after over a year of considerable, if benign, neglect in that department.

In fact, my current behavior can be pretty clearly chalked up to a couple of recent developments. One, I decided I wanted to learn how to play double-time like Dexter Gordon. And two, after three years of flailing around, I decided to re-tune my 7-string guitar and start learning the tuning created by Charlie Hunter specifically for that instrument.

Without those two decisions, I would probably still be scheduling time to practice my solo fingerstyle repertoire and then blowing it off when it felt like marching through molasses. Instead, I am picking up my guitar at any stray moment to try and work through some little piece of the seven-string puzzle, almost to the point of distraction.

Now, I do try and distinguish between practicing and playing, and with some of this I am walking a pretty fuzzy line. You have to do some amount of playing to determine what to practice next, and I'm still such a novice with the Hybrid that I don't really have a regimen worked out yet. So I'm doing some playing, then stopping and making mental notes of various problems to try and solve in the near future.

The Dexter Gordon project is more straightforward: I'm slowly transcribing four to eight bars at a time, attempting to memorize what I've learned, then playing along with a loop of the recording at tempo. The game is to acquire a mental library of bebop moves straight from the source, without writing anything down.

The point, in each case, is to find the fun, and turn that into my practicing, rather than working on some dauntingly large project that's too overwhelming to show up for at all, or pushing myself through some "should do" regimen that leaves me aggravated and unmotivated.

So if you're avoiding practicing altogether, or not getting any joy, excitement or positive energy from what you're working on, see if you can identify just one thing you'd love to work on. Not because you're supposed to (sight reading, anybody?) or because "they" say so (arpeggios in all twelve keys...). But because it's something you've always wanted to know how to do.

It could be a tune, a style, a technique, or something else altogether. Heck, maybe even a different instrument. I spent five years where my practice time was completely occupied with learning four-part harmony, counterpoint and orchestration. I'm still kind of sucky at it, but I had so much fun learning those things. And I actually wrote a couple of cool piano pieces along the way.

I would be remiss if I did not alert you to a couple of new toys that are making my latest practicing more fun. For my bebop project, I've been grooving on these Hammond B-3 jam tracks by Phil Wilkinson. You can find them on Youtube, but I finally threw down for a handful of my favorites at his web site so I could use them without having to face the internet first thing in the morning – or any other time of day, really:

Play Jazz Tracks

And I somehow only just discovered this Charlie Hunter project called Wheelhouse Beats, the unbelievably fun love child of a metronome and ten real drummers. If you've tried cobbling together your own practice tracks using drum software in a DAW, this is way easier, way faster and way more fun to use. It's definitely tilted towards funk, which is not especially my thing per se, but it's so cool, I don't even care:

Wheelhouse Beats

(And no, I have no financial agenda in recommending these two tools, I just think they're both fabulous.)

Alright. In the midst of all this, yes, I do have a new Youtube video out today. This month in the Fingerstyle Five membership we're looking at how to improvise blues licks over a steady bass – specifically, on the tune "Key To The Highway."

So in today's Youtube lesson I demonstrate how to use the phrasing of an existing melody to start coming up with your own blues licks. You can find it at the link below:

Turning Pentatonic Scales Into Solos

More soon,

David

P.S. To join us in the membership for the complete deep dive – playing, arranging and soloing on "Key To The Highway" – go to:

Fretboard Confidential