Is it always convenient for you to practice your guitar scales?
Anyone who says yes to that question is probably lying! Let’s face it. Sometimes our hectic and busy lives make it challenging to get in enough guitar scale practice time. This is especially true for guitarists who work a 9 to 5 job, and also have a family!
So what am I trying to say here?
The key point I’m trying to make is that mastering guitar scales will require that you make some lifestyle changes. You will need to change how you use your time. And if you want to gain a high level of guitar scale mastery, you may need to make SIGNIFICANT changes to your lifestyle. The true masters of scales have built their lives around their guitar practice time. They have also, in many cases, made large sacrifices in order to do this.
Some of the lifestyle changes that you might need to make can include:
- Reducing the amount of TV that you watch.
- Getting up earlier in the morning. (A fate worse than death for many people!).
- Eating a more healthy diet.
- Going out drinking and partying less often.
- Spending less time with negative thinking friends and other toxic people.
Obviously, some of these could represent a significant change to your daily routine. Which brings us back to the concept of incremental lifestyle changes. These are small changes made to your lifestyle to accommodate increases in guitar scale practice time. Let’s take a look at an example to explain this concept clearly…
Let’s say that you currently dedicate 30 minutes a day to guitar scale practice. You realize that to reach your musical goals you will probably need to devote at least 3 hours a day to scale practice. So what do you do? Do you give up because 3 hours seems too unattainable? Nope! You use incremental lifestyle changes. Here’s how it works…
Step 1: Choose a new scale practice length. For our example, let’s say that you will now practice guitar scales 45 minutes a day rather than just 30 minutes.
Step 2: Make any lifestyle changes that need to be made to accommodate the increase in scale practice time.
Step 3: Practice for the new practice length daily until it becomes habitual.
Step 4: Repeat the first three steps, with gradually increasing practice lengths, until you have reached your goal of three hours a day.
It’s important to realize that it may take you months to reach this goal. You will also probably be amazed at how many lifestyle changes were needed in order to reach this goal! And that’s fine. If mastering guitar scales were easy, then everyone would have done it!
