09-29-2020, 10:17 AM
(09-28-2020, 07:24 PM)BengalsRocker Wrote: One of the things that accelerated my playing was this. Playing guitar when watching TV. It gets your muscle memory going. Even if just switching basic chords and not actually playing a song. Before you know it those chords will come and you will barely have to think about the placement of your fingers.
HUGE pro tip.
I always keep a guitar in my living room for this very reason. It's either on a stand, where I'll just occasionally look over and have to pick it up, or it's lying on my couch.
I really like using "TV time" to work on the boring, mindless stuff. A lot of times I'll just sit there doing right hand exercises, or running scales, without even really thinking about it.
I had a really bad habit when I was younger about not using alternate picking enough. I really only used downstrokes unless I absolutely had to use. I finally solved it a long time ago by just sitting there and trying running pretty much every single combination of picking while watching tv. It got fixed pretty quickly.
Working on those exercies in a normal practice routine would have really sucked. When I sit down to actually play I want to play some tunes or just noodle. But when I'm watching the tube I can just sit there and work on triplets and 16th notes, different scales, etc. Stuff I generally hate to do otherwise.
I highly recommend everyone try this. Even if it's just during commercials. You can squeeze in a lot of extra boring work without even thinking about it.
