Hey, guys, it's Marc back here with you. Welcome back to the podcast short episode today on a really efficient and easy to to create practice session. Because of course we're guitarists. We're trying to get better here. So whether you want to learn to play jazz at a high level or just learn to improvise, learn harmony, you need a plan.
It's better to have a way that's very deliberate in the way you're going to practice. Or else, we run the risk of, you know, walking in circles in the forest and going, oh, I've been here before, you know, I've been here maybe six months ago. I was trying to play that chord progression or do that technique, and I wound up stuck.
And then I try to circumvent the problem, and it comes back around and around and around. So having a plan is one of the best ways to just move forward and actually get out of the woods. Although the woods are pretty dense and wide and large if you're especially if you're attempting to learn the improvised jazz. So here are the tips to make it efficient, simple, and fun.
Hopefully
Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists to learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Mark, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe.
Dedicate daily time so if you can practice five, six, seven days a week, at least half an hour, you will make progress if it's well organized. So that's just me reassuring you. Secondly, really important to have a practice session that doesn't have too many topics. Often. the practice session is my students that just come into the program that I coach will look like a grocery list.
There's like 15 or 20 items I would like. So this is your daily practice session? Yes. Like, no way you're going to practice all of those and actually make progress. And actually have some mental energy left for, for the rest of your life or your family or your work or whatever. So it's important to have perhaps 3 to 4 topics.
Max. And I invite you to use my process. It's called a deep daily practice pulse. It's a spreadsheet that I set up. There's a template found in the Just Our Fellowship linked below. You can join for free. And this is how I keep an eye on my students, and how people track the time they put and see how they organize their time, where the time is going when they practice.
Because it is like an investment. if, you know, you put a dollar, you want to be sure to have at least a dollar out. And it's an interesting how people practice music and will have diminishing returns and keep spending time and putting money, quote unquote, into their practice. So to make sure you have a positive return, track your time.
That's one of the main things I can tell you. And make sure you have a limited amount of topics in which you can go deep and feel yourself get better over a period of three or 4 or 5 six week, eight weeks, 1012 weeks. Right. So having the spreadsheet is good. I did the spreadsheet. I set up four columns.
You may use only 2 or 3, but four is like 3 or 4 is a magic number. another thing, before I go into what components go into your practice session, I cannot stress this enough that timing yourself with an actual timer beeper timer, like a kitchen timer, is going to be a game changer. Interestingly, my students don't, don't believe that until they do it.
And when they start to do it. We all realize I did that myself too. We all realize the timer is not meant to practice more. It's actually to stop myself from going too deep into a thing and actually experience diminishing returns over the time I practice. So if I tell myself it's going to be 20 minutes, I put a 20 minutes and I rehearse for that time, the danger is to have the thing be over 20 minutes, do an hour or more on it, and not make as much progress as if I'd done the same 20 minutes consistently, consecutively over several days.
So that's the thing. The timer means stop and a great, great way to do your plan, which I'll get to in a minute, is to have a timer for three different topics to stop and then to reassess. Do I have more time and where do I want to invest that time? Or is it time for jamming, having fun and going to I don't to fire and taking guitar lessons with Stevie or whatever.
It doesn't really matter. But the point is to be really deliberate and how that time is invested. So without further ado, drum roll the perfect practice session has three main components. First, 150% of practice time on building repertoire and songs. So that's half an hour over your hours, 30 minutes through your. Our second component will be something technical or building your vocabulary.
And I recommend that being about 30% of your practice time. So maybe, something like 18 minutes. Is that correct? Is my math okay, so I assume it's 30 minutes 18 minutes. And then the remaining 12 will be on retention or maintenance. So the last 12 minutes is known songs through the process that I personally like to use and deploy and teach my students and keep people accountable for the process.
And this process is really, if you have repertoire that you know already, like say jazz standards, you practice those without making too many mistakes, meaning they're slow and deliberate.
So if you learn a new tune, it goes into building repertoire. If you maintain that tune and you want to make sure you know it, it goes into retention or maintenance. So really split your practice time. And I know some of you, especially people watching the YouTube, say, "Marc, I have 15 minutes a day to practice. What do I do?"
I say, "Well, do five minutes of repertoire building, five minutes of vocabulary building, and five minutes of retention." Boom, there you go. You can get better even in 15 minutes. Although 30 minutes or more per day is way better, obviously.
So building repertoire is learning tunes. You can read it, memorize it, whatever you need to do to understand the melody, harmony, chord changes, the key, the whole thing. And second, the vocabulary building could be as simple as running arpeggios or scales or practicing your 2-5-1 licks or doing transcription or exercises on alternate picking, sweeping, comping, etc. Whatever you feel needs work. Maybe you're running patterns from books or practicing melodic minor scales. You decide.
And then retention and maintenance is taking songs you already know, going slower than you're used to, and making sure there are no mistakes. You know the chord changes, the melody, and you try to play the song without too much interruption. So that would be your three main practice categories.
When you use this system, you stay accountable, and you’ll notice, "Oh, I learned three songs this month, and now I have 15 in my repertoire." Or, "I’ve improved on alternate picking because I’m practicing it every day for 18 minutes consistently."
The big takeaway here is that consistent, deliberate practice over time beats random bursts of energy. It’s like going to the gym. You can’t work out for 10 hours once and expect results. But if you do 30 minutes five times a week, you’ll get there.
So that’s my perfect practice session structure: split your time, use a timer, and track your progress. If you want to know more or need tools to help you, check out the links below, including the Jazz Guitar Fellowship where I share templates, advice, and keep my students on track.
Thanks for tuning in! If you enjoyed this, make sure to subscribe, share with your guitar friends, and keep practicing. See you in the next one!
