Ive been listening to this video everyday at work and practicing like this for a month or more. To all you beginners out there, do as much of this routine as you can for 30 days and I guarantee you will make great leaps in your musical abilities that you may not have been expecting for many months or even years. Especially do the parts that sound terrible when you attempt them. In a week or two you'll be jumping up and down celebrating your graduation from terrible to "Hey, I think my ears just stopped bleeding."
I love to know you are feeling the good growth here! Great advice to share with others - yes! try it for 30 days and I would guarantee folks will see and hear good results!! :D thanks for the comments David!
The sixes, man!! I started doing the sixes one day and spontaneously broke out into my first really freakin' okay tremolo! Since then I've tremoloooooed all the way to Italy and back three times.
Wayne Benson showed me the folded scale a few years ago during a lesson I had with him, I agree that it's a very useful exercise along with all the other patterns you showed here. Thanks for sharing!
Chris this is a valuable demonstration. I have been doing this every day for awhile now. It's great for finger strength and dexterity. Lot of fretboard fluency and muscle memory mixed in as well. It's a lot of material, and honestly more than I want to start my practice routine with on the daily. So I started just doing all 21 exercises of one key daily. Really progressing on G#. Especially the folded scale back down. That one was a bugger at first. Thanks for your valuable contributions!
You’ve got it! I might should have clarified it’s good to pick and choose and the folded scale is the one that I most often defaulted to. Glad you have been connecting in G#!! Toughy!!
Great stuff. I thought I had it mastered .... until I tried to play along with a metronome 😊. That adds a whole new dimension. I need to do that every day.
I would love to hear your ideas on this applied to other instruments. ie. fiddle, guitar, banjo and talk about what you'd change from one instrument to the next.
That’s a good idea for a video! Thanks to the suggestion 😀🎶 might be mostly the same on mandolin, guitar, and fiddle (although not being an expert on bowing wouldn’t know how to negotiate that wisely) but banjo would be much different because of the roll. 🤔
Wonderful comprehensive look at Grunt Work! But … If I have only 60 minutes per day to practice, and if Grunt Work is my 20-minute Pillar #1, there’s no way to do all of these in that 20 minutes. So the key question is: What to select each day to focus on, and how do I somehow work all this in over time and build proficiency in all the keys, patterns, etc?
Thanks for the kindness Gina! That’s a very good question! A bit choose one’s own adventure, but I would say that the ones that helped me the most were the single stroke folded scale in G, A, and G#. But yeah, also to your question, slotting enough time that you’re touching on everything at least every couple of weeks could be good! And then if there’s not much time, focusing on the single stroke folded scales. Hope that helps!!
