Stuck In A Practice Rut?

There are many approaches to practice and while there is not only one fixed, rigid way to do it, it may help to have some guidelines to ensure that you are not stuck in a practice rut.

“I Don’t Seem To Be Going Anywhere With My Practice.”

Many of my meetings with students over the years have opened up with a statement along the lines of; ” My practice is going nowhere at the moment. I don’t seem to be improving. Can you help?”.

Well, first things first; How do you define practice?

What is it that you are actually aiming for when you direct your energy to practicing your Bass Guitar (or any other instrument, for that matter)?

If we haven’t defined this simple but important question, the chances of being
stuck in a practice rut are much higher.

There are many ways to look at practice. Some see it along the lines of a gymnasium; If they put in lots of hours, sets and reps, this will lead to improvement.

As common as this approach is, I tend to put this in the same bin as hand strengthening exercises, string crossing exercises and those gimmicky finger conditioners that claim to make each finger stronger.

I can’t vouch for the validity of finger strength builders but what I can say is that if you’re playing your instrument properly, you don’t need strong hands. If you are working with musical content, every combination of crossing strings will be explored anyway plus you’ll have a musically contextual reason for doing it.
Maybe a better way to see practice is as a process of problem solving.

“What Should I Practice?”

The answer to “what to practice?” usually comes in the form of problems that arise in your current playing situations (or the situations you’d like to be playing in).

As a beginner, the problems you need to solve are things like the geography of the instrument (knowing where the notes are, focussing on chord tones and how they relate to chords), whereas intermediate or advanced players may need to negotiate a particular chord sequence (All The Things You Are, “I Got Rhythm” changes, Giant Steps, etc) or
look at a specific rhythmic phrase and try it from various points within the bar.

“How Many Hours Per Day?”

From the very first time I started hanging out with “serious” musicians, I’ve been hearing statements such as;

“Charlie Parker/John Coltrane/Jaco (insert other legend here) practiced 8-12hrs per day!”.

Maybe that’s true but hearing that was quite disturbing for me, partly because I had achieved a reasonable standard on Bass Guitar without putting in 8hrs per day of practice. In fact, I didn’t even have a Bass Guitar to practice on.

I’m not vastly different from anyone reading this, certainly not superior, so how was I able to acquire my modest achievements without this austere approach?

It struck me that I was practicing but not with a time-based approach but with a focus on problem solving.

This meant that if I needed to “fix” something in my playing, I’d work on it a little every day. Even as a 17 year-old living with my parents, I didn’t feel I had 8 “spare” hours to dedicate purely to music. I certainly couldn’t find 8hrs worth of problems to solve every day. Most people I’ve probed on their 8hr schedule are noodling and impressing themselves for a lot of it.

As a 48 year-old touring musician with a mortgage and children, I certainly don’t have that time luxury now.
It’s not a problem, though, unless your paradigm is still fixed on “Hours equal excellence”.

 “Do I need An Instrument To Practice? “

As mentioned earlier, to begin with, I had no Bass to practice on. Most of my studying was looking at other players and where they put their hands and copying that. Sometimes on a cardboard Bass neck that I made, mostly either miming (yes, Air-Bass!) or largely just in my head.

“I Know All This Stuff… Show Me Something New!”

This is a classic line, heard many times a day in any field of study.

Let’s break it down and really look at this phrase that says a lot about the approach and attitude of the student who utters those magic words.

“I know all this stuff”. Think about it.

If I say ‘learn the location of all the notes of your fingerboard’, it’s easy to say that you know this until you are asked to play F# on the B string or C# on the E string?

Most students (whether beginner, intermediate or advanced) have not systematically learned their note locations to a point that they could play, for example, all of the G notes, along each string, moving to the next highest string, all the way up and then in reverse comfortably at 100bpm. Or take a major 7th chord. What’s the 6th of Fmaj 7? Or the 4th of Gbmaj 7?

So “knowing” is a matter of degree, isn’t it?

As for “Show me something new!”…

Our hunger for novelty often costs us growth as we fail to see the value of squeezing as much juice as possible from a single, apparently “simple” principle.

It takes real focus to explore an exercise to it’s full potential before throwing it out in search of the next hip thing.

Get Out Of That Practice Rut!

• Define Your Practice Goals. What is it that you feel needs improvement in your playing?
If you don’t know, ask the people you play with!

• Focus On Problem Solving, Not Hours Per Day. Enough said!

• Open Your Mind. Practicing mentally will free you of habitual finger patterns and familiar licks. Think in terms of harmonic function, chord tones, etc.

• Have Fun! Don’t forget you got into music because you enjoy it! Keep that sense of fun and wonder while you stretch your musical boundaries on the Bass Guitar!

Tags: bass, bass guitar, practice, stuck in a practice rut, stuck in a rut, what to pratice