In fact, “Let’s Forget Reality”, a song I still play in the present (but haven’t recorded yet) came out from a lesson on major and minor 7hs. I found this priceless for both my rhythm guitar playing and my songwriting skills. I have also learned a large number of rhythmic patterns as well as wrote many of my own rhythms, to which I applied the chords I was learning. The book focused on chords and how to use them, which is something I really needed back then. It would have contributed to a full 20% or more if I was learning new scales at a slower pace, and used the ones I already knew creatively, rather than running scales up and down to memorize as many as possible. Rough estimate: If I spent 20% of my practice time practicing scales, it contributed to some 10% of my progress. This lesson on how to improvise guitar solos will, in fact, show you that the total amount of scales you need to start improvising in any major or minor key, is just two! What I was doing wrong in the period of time we’re talking about was that I was learning a LOT of scales, rather than a few guitar scales and be able to USE them. I believe I get more value if I revise a few scale patterns as I’m warming my fingers. Nowadays, I practice scales I already know for warming up. This practice item was way more helpful than repeating finger exercises. However, even these things could have been achieved through other things, such as… 2. It helped in things like hand coordination, playing with a metronome and legato technique. Rough estimate: The 20% of practice time I spent practicing finger exercises was contributing to some 5% of my progress. There are instances where finger exercises have value, but I didn’t need them at that point in time, surely not in that quantity. What I should have been doing instead was teach my mind to order my fingers to go to the right places at will, not repeat the same 1-2-3-4 exercise or some variation of it for some 20% of my practice time. Neither are finger exercises the best way to gain speed on guitar. Increasing my speed on guitar, which was the main reason why I was doing a lot of finger exercises, definitely wasn’t the most important thing I should have been focusing on back then. Finger exercises (picked or legato)įinger exercises were the last thing I needed in at that stage. Next, I will go into each practice item and give a rough evaluation as to how effective it was to achieve my musical goals and what I could have done better had I applied the Pareto principle to my guitar practice. Though, back then I did practice some things that don’t fall under any of these categories, for the purposes of this article I’ll strip my practicing down to the following five items: I’m using them to highlight how efficient, or inefficient, that particular item I was practicing was in contributing to my progress. Note that the percentages used in these examples are somewhat arbitrary and may not even add up. To demonstrate how this is done I’m going to examine my own guitar practicing, during a period in my life when I thought that a lot of practicing alone was enough to become a successful musician, without giving any importance to that guitar practicing being effective. Applying the Pareto principle to practicing guitar If you play in a band, it’s good to take note of this. If for instance, all the members of a band put in as much effort as the most productive band member, that band’s success might easily skyrocket. The Pareto principle applies to all areas of life as well as to groups of people. A small part of our effort is gaining us most of what we want while most of our time is spent on activities that don’t contribute much to help us achieve our goals. Pareto himself states the numbers are not the rule themselves, they may be 90/10, or 65/35, depending on the individual person and the activity being done among other factors. Imagine if the other 4/5 produced as much! The Pareto principle, states that 80% of our efforts produce only 20% of the results we desire, while the other 20% is accomplishing 80% of what we want to achieve.Ī fifth of what you’re doing is achieving 80% of the result. The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) Now, the more you practice the guitar the sooner you’ll become good on your instrument, but as you’ll see below, the same person can get better in a much shorter time with more effective guitar practicing. Then I will use my own guitar practicing (back in a time where I didn’t care about effectiveness) as a case study to show you how practicing guitar can become more effective with the right changes to your practice schedule. In this article, I will explain what the Pareto principle is all about. That for each hour you’re spending practicing you’re most likely gaining less than you would if you actually applied the Pareto principle. What if I told you, the time you spend practicing guitar, is probably way less effective than it could be?
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