Five 5-10 Minute Practice Ideas

Hey everyone! Hope you are all well!

Here’s some practice ideas that I’ve found fun to do and/or practice ideas that I have learned a lot while doing.

As always, please feel to comment/send questions, ideas, suggestions, lesson requests!

How to Use 5-10 Minute Practice Ideas

I like to do a bunch of shorter practices throughout the day.

Of course, longer practice sessions where I focus on certain things are great.

I also like to jam and also to record stuff, too. While there are practice sessions in the traditional practice-your-scales sense, they are great and I love doing them. and they are a positive thing anyways.

Main Points

• Use a Metronome, Click, Beat, Solid Groove from a good recording, Backing Track
• Have fun!
• Practicing 5 minutes a day is a great way to improve momentum/grease the groove
• Usually I’ll end up playing longer anyways, since I set my goal for just 5 minutes, I feel success, and then just have fun practicing longer. (As opposed to a 1 hour practice goal, and “only” practicing for 30 minutes, for example)

Play Along with a Great Track

Some of my favorite artists/tracks/bands to play along with:

• So What for straight-ahead jazz
• New Birth Brass Band for 2nd line
• Daniel Barenboim for classical piano music
• Coldplay and Johnny Hartman for singing
• Burning Spear and Gregory Isaacs for reggae
• Vivir Mi Vida for congas 🙂
• Oscar Peterson for quarter note comping

I have a lot of favorite tracks that I love to play along with. Playing along with the greats is where it’s at. There’s so much to learn from them, plus it’s relaxing and fun!

What are some of your favorite tracks?

In 5-10 minutes (or longer), you can play along once or twice to one of your favorite songs.

Try:

• picking out melodies
• singing along
• playing muted rhythm along to the groove (with with chords, if you know the
• making up your own solos

Sing Along with a Great Track

For instrumentalists (especially guitarists), I believe it’s a great thing to learn to sing. It’s fun, you practice your ear, you can play a chord and sing the melody, etc.

Anyways, besides realizing that so many great guitarists can sing, I realized I might as well practice singing while I am driving!

So if you have a few minutes where you can’t easily play guitar, try singing!

Count Out Loud While Playing

I learned this from Ruben Diaz and it was confirmed by Adam Neely. Plus, all great drummers can count out loud while they play.

It might seem simple, but if you haven’t done it before, give it a try. It’s especially helpful for rhythm/groove stuff.

I basically first learned to count out in flamenco music. Learning the compas of bulerias, for example, was much easier when I counted the beats out while I slowly play the music (hopefully in time, too)

Then I started applying it to jazz guitar, too.

If you are playing a melody, you can still count out the melody while you play it. It’s probably even more challenging, but (I believe) you’ll see some amazing results if you try it for a week or two!

Solfeggio

One of my weaknesses has always been my ear and singing. I could always sight-read pretty well. I love reading music – a beautiful piece written on a page looks beautiful.

But I love to learn by ear, too. Besides playing along to music and transcribing solos, solfeggio is a great way for all musicians to improve their musicianship.

It’s basically like singing, but instead of singing lyrics or a vowel tone, you sing a specific name for each note.

In “western” music, these are (diatonically):

Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti (& Do)

I’ve learned so much by singing melodies with solfeggio. It is also a great way to improve your ear – play the chords to a song and sing the melody in solfeggio!

Or you can practice your scales while singing solfeggio. I try to do this often – it helps my ear, my singing and I also try to improve the tone and fluidity of a scale at the same time

Chunking

Learning to chunk is a huge practice skill.

I am still learning to apply this.

To chunk properly takes a lot of mental focus. But it’s worth it!

Basically you take a small phrase of music that you are working on, say 2-8 beats, on focus on polishing that small phrase. Different people do it different amounts of times, but between 5-20 times.

Then you do the next chunk. And then you put the 2 chucks together and practice them!

In summary (the basic idea):

• Take a small chuck of music (2-8 beats)
• Practice/polish it up 5-20 times
• Each time you play it, consciously intend to improve the phrase in some way
• After each time playing the phrase, pause and consciously reflect on what you liked and what you could improve
• Pick the next phrase and repeat the process
• Then add the 2 phrases together and repeat the process

Practice Makes Progress!

Hope these ideas help!

I also just wrote another post about the 5 minutes practice idea of making your own backing tracks! Please check it out, it’s a great way to have a fun, productive practice session.

All the best, take care and have a great day!