Fingernails. Probably one of the hardest things to cover in text and offer advice about. Everyone has different nails, and different nail shaping needs.

The Wisdom of (Guitar) Crowds

One the most valuable fingernail resources on the Classical Guitar Blog is the Guitar Fingernail Open Thread. Several commenters have left advice about dealing with thing nails or awkward nail shapes.

If you have some thoughts or advice, please leave it in the comments to help the next person out!

Fingernail 101

Fingernail Basics covers some common terminology and offers some advice about the basics:

• Fingernail length
• Shape and buffing
• String contact and release points on the nail
• What nail files to use

Looking for a great fingernail tool? Try out these Micro Mesh Pads.

Do Guitarists Need Nails?

Classical Guitar and Fingernails answers that question and others about how long nails need to be. The verdict? You probably not need nails, but they help.

When to Do Nail Care

Take care of your nails before the practice day. That way there is no weird adjustment period mid-day.

Video Lesson: Nail Shaping and Buffing

This video talks about how to shape and buff your fingernails.

Talking about nails in text is a bit confusing, so this video should help a few of you out.

Related posts:

1. Classical Guitar Fingernail Basics
2. Your Practice Guidebook
3. A Review of Practice Techiniques

Classical Guitar Fingernail Collection from Classical Guitar

1. Practice Guitar More

That’s right. Spend hours and hours practicing. Don’t both with any practice techniques or taking breaks.

Just practice a lot. Hours are what matters anyway, right?

Forget about practicing everything perfect and disregard all considerations about practice efficiency.

2. Don’t Keep a Practice Log

Practice logs are lame anyway. If you’re going to practice a lot, it’s going to be way too much work to record all that nonsense anyway.

Never mind that when you’re practicing, you think of things that never would have occurred to you before. And forget that a practice log allows you to constantly have daily goals or, if you’re into lists, tasks to complete.

3. Spend All Your Practice Time on Technique

Or at least 50% of it. Forget that we play guitar to play music. Scales, arpeggios, and slurs are all more important.

And don’t forget that you should always try to have perfect technique from the start. Don’t do anything until your sure it’s correct–and be sure to ask about it on at least 5 guitar websites and forums.

Related posts:

1. Your Practice Guidebook
2. A Review of Practice Techiniques
3. On My Mind

3 Ways to Suck at Guitar in 2011 from Classical Guitar

Classical Guitar Arpeggios

Arpeggios don’t get a lot of love. Which is unfortunate. Guitarists spend a lot of time playing around with arpeggio textures. Some of the most famous pieces of our repertoire include extended sections of repeated arpeggio patterns. It makes sense then that we should spend some time with arpeggios in our technique routine. The Giuliani right hand studies and other similar exercises are some of the most effective ways to practice arpeggios.

Tremolo and cross-string trills also fit into the arpeggios category. They are, after all, extensions of arpeggio technique.

Resources on the CG Blog for practicing arpeggios

• A Right Hand Routine
• Three Ways to Develop and Arpeggio
• How to Practice Cross-String Trills
• Cross-String Ornaments

Slurs on the Guitar

Slurs (aka Hammer Ons and Pull Offs) are one of the most demanding left hand techniques. And, frankly, a lot of intermediate guitarists have trouble with them. Even advanced players have difficulties with trills and other extensions of left hand slur technique. Beyond the obvious technical difficulties of them, improper slurs can often ruing the musical flow of the pieces or even destroy phrasing.

Here are some resources to help with your slur practice.

• Slurs with the First Finger
• Descending Slurs
• Ascending Slurs
• Video Lesson: Beginning Slur Exercises

Classical Guitar Scales

Ah, scales, a guitarist’s best friend, right? Maybe not. Honestly the guitar repertoire doesn’t include a lot of passages of extended scales. And if you happen to be playing a piece with a lot of scales, it makes more sense to practice those scales instead of abstracted major and minor scales. Still, scales are an essential part of guitar technique and should be included in your routine.

Scale practice should include long, short, and burst practice. Not just long, 1 or 2 octave Segovia scales. Try incorporating some one octave scales and five-note bursts into your technical routine. My next ebook will feature some more in depth information and exercises about bursts and short scales.

Here are some resources about scale practice.

• Guitar Scales: The Right Hand
• Guitar Scales: The Left Hand
• Scale Practice Techniques

Left Hand Shifts

Shifting down and across the neck fall into this category. Honestly, this one might be better left in repertoire practice. So much of this stuff is piece-specific that it’s hard to practice it outside of those contexts. Should you want to add this to your technical routine, I suggest you extract portions from pieces and use them.

Also read Sequencing the Left Hand and Practice Techniques: Stop/Go.

Extended Techniques and All the Rest

This is the catch all for all other techniques. Rasgueado is probably one of the most important things that falls into this category. Unfortunately there’s not anything on the CG blog on the subject of rasgueado, but that’s in the works. Barre technique falls here too, but again that may be better left to piece-specific work.

Extended techniques are the weird sounds you hear from guitar sometimes. These are things like nail scrapes and snare drum effects. Again, because these are often very piece-specific, they might be better left in repertoire practice time.

Related posts:

1. Sequential Planting
2. Your Practice Guidebook
3. A Right Hand Arpeggio Routine

The Building Blocks of Classical Guitar Technique from Classical Guitar

Related posts:

1. Your Practice Guidebook
2. A Review of Practice Techiniques
3. On My Mind

7 Ways to Improve Your Guitar Playing This Summer from Classical Guitar

On Business

• If every musician spent 30 minutes each day developing relationships and networking there would be many more successful musicians.
• Reputation and developing your brand is more valuable than any amount of money.
• If performing is part of your brand, a performance degree will do nothing to help you get there. Seek out concerts (see the first item).

I gave a talk about some of the business stuff here

On Teaching

• The longer I teach the less interested I become in teaching styles other than classical.
• Recitals for students are extremely valuable–nothing makes a student more excited than experiencing success in a performance situation.
• Students get very excited when you let them express creativity in music. It’s very easy to get a student composing from the first lessons.
• Beginning guitar technique has very little variation. It’s never boring to teach it, however; every student is different and needs different sorts of cues and explanations.
• It’s easy to teach even the youngest students to incorporate basic musical elements.

On Performing

• Living with a piece for a long time–performing it often–is the best way to overcome anxiety. Or at least get used to it.
• Performance anxiety doesn’t go away, but the feel of it becomes a sort of thrill.
• Talking about a piece before playing it is much more terrifying.
• Start strong and end strong. The stuff in the middle is nice too. I guess.

On Practicing

• Efficiency is king. If I can get the same amount done in less time, that leaves more time in the day for me to pursue other interests or network (see the first item).
• Part of efficiency is managing repetition. 7-10 perfect repetitions is fine. The problem is finding ways to play a passage perfectly! (see practice techniques).
• three hours per day is just about right.
• Slow/fast alternation is awesome.
• Never wait to develop an interpretation. Never wait to get the piece “in the fingers” before starting to make musical decisions.
• There’s no reason why a multi-movement piece has to be learned start to finish. Hit the hard stuff first.

On Music in General

• If you want to understand music analysis, take composition lessons from a good teacher. It changes the way you look at music–you’ll see connections that have previously gone unnoticed.
• A good repertoire selection will include challenging pieces that take months to work up and pieces that are easily prepared in a few practice sessions or weeks.
• It’s more fun to play pieces that no one else does.
• Form and motivic development interests me more than harmony.

Misc.

• Pool is a good game.
• I really enjoy learning things–even a lot of random stuff.
• The music binder is a good idea.
• Sometimes little things can add up to a big difference.

In the fall I begin a DMA at the University of North Texas, and I’m excited to keep posting as I learn more.

Related posts:

1. Technical Exercises for the Absolute Beginner
2. Your Practice Guidebook
3. On Teaching Children

28 Things I learned in Grad School from Classical Guitar

In the meantime, here’s some things that have been on my mind:

• People need to play easier music. A good repertoire selection will have some hard stuff, and some easy. Trying to put together an entire program of hard music is not the best way to get better at guitar.
• I’d rather listen to easy music played well than hard music played badly.
• It’s all about the legato. Music is about lines, and we need to connect them. Just because the guitar can make nice pointallistic stabs of sound does not mean we should do it all the time. Always try for a legato sound as your default (unless the music says otherwise, of course).
• Don’t learn interpretation later. It’s like learning two different pieces, and people spend too much time just, “getting in their fingers.” It’s no surprise, then, that a bad, uninterpreted version is the one that comes out on stage.
• Everyone needs to spend less time on scales and more time arpeggios. Seriously. Most of our stuff is arpeggio like in texture. That said, don’t neglect those scales completely.
• A smile and a good moment of poise can make a performance. Master those two things and your stage deportment goes to a new level.

What’s on your mind?

Related posts:

1. Your Practice Guidebook
2. A Review of Practice Techiniques

On My Mind from Classical Guitar

Slow/Fast Alternation is just what you would thing: play it slow, then play it fast. Why play fast? After a movement is programmed in (the slow portion), it’s essential to try it at concert tempo. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t take months of work to play at concert tempo. Anyone can do it for a short time after very little practice. Sometimes those movements that work slow don’t work at tempo. This method will let you know if that’s the case right away.

Changing the Rhythm is a good way to step outside the usual. Playing something a, “swing,” rhythm automatically building in speed bursts, and is a great way to work on a passage. It doesn’t stop there, however. Try arranging passages into many different rhythms for a lot variety.

Practicing with a variety of Dynamics is a great way to nail down right hand patterns. Playing loudly feels different from playing softly. We can harness those differences to make a passage more secure and fluent.

Thunk Practice is when the left hand is just held over the strings muting all of them. This is a great way to hear evenness in right hand patterns. However, thunk practice can also be done where the left hand is used as normal, but never actually presses down — the fingers just lightly touch the string at the fret. The result of practicing this second way is a very light feeling left hand. Worth a try!

Are you away from a guitar on a regular basis? Try Mental Practice. Just as the name suggests, this form of practice does not involve the instrument. It’s all about visualizing and analyzing.

Stop/Go Practice is best utilized on difficult left hand shifts or events. Play up until the shift, STOP, move, hover, then place and play and go. This give you time to think and analyze the movement; it allows you practice it the same way each time, speeding up learning through correct repetition.

Chaining is stringing together short passages by connecting downbeats. It’s a very effective way to get something up to tempo quickly.

Not every difficult passage will require all of these techniques. Pick and choose what works best. I use a lot of stop/go and slow/fast practice. However, with big scales, I tend to change the rhythm. Try a few for each passage, and see if it works. Write it down in your practice log and go from there.

Related posts:

1. Your Practice Guidebook

A Review of Practice Techiniques from Classical Guitar

Here’s some reading on practicing.

1. Finding Time to Practice. Everyone is busy, but finding to practice does not have to be difficult. Set aside a time every day that’s always for practicing.




2. Micro-Practice for Big Results. Who says a fifteen minute practice session is a waste of time? This post explains how to make most of short practice sessions.




3. Deconstructing a Mistake. A technical or music event is something that gives you trouble. Breaking down that event and finding the elements with in it is the key to fixing problems. That’s what practicing should be about. It’s not just pure repetition.




4. Five Reasons to Start a Practice Log (today). Practice logs make you a better guitarist. I’ve written on this multiple times. Still need convincing? Read this article.




5. Goal Oriented Guitar Practice. How to use various goals to give your practicing focus and direction.




6. Refined Laziness. Everyone is lazy sometimes. That doesn’t mean laziness is bad for practicing.




7. Guitar Practice Schedules. Figuring out exactly how to spend your time practicing is difficult. This article contains some thoughts on how to set up practice schedules. Just remember: not everything can be fixed in one day.

Related posts:

1. Practice is Conditioning
2. Refined Laziness
3. Finding Time to Practice

Your Practice Guidebook from Classical Guitar