Get More Bang For Your Practice Buck

Rolly Brown has been practicing the guitar for 50 years, and, in that time, he's developed a large armamentarium of tools to aid and motivate himself and his students. In this two hour DVD, starting with his rule of "half work, half play", he shares many of these ideas, interspersed with teachings to help you better enjoy and understand music and the guitar from a simple "nuts and bolts" point of view. Whatever style of music you play, you want ways of practicing rhythm, harmony, and melody, the 3 building blocks of music.

Whether you flatpick or fingerpick, play bluegrass, jazz, or folk music whether you're trying to learn your first F chord, or looking for a method of practicing arpeggios to inform your jazz solos, this video offers tools and advice to improve your playing.

Topics include:

• On Creativity and Structuring Your Time
• Scales and Modes
• How To Rapidly Master New Chords
• Arpeggios: Bridging the Gap Between Chords and Melody
• Right Hand Technique
• Using a Metronome
• Practicing with Rhythm Tracks
• Sample Practice Routines

120 minutes • Level 1/2 • Tab/Music material is on the DVD as a PDF file

Review: Practice makes perfect. But practice - ugh. Trudging uphill to the woodshed can mean mustering heroic levels of initiative and inspiration. Need your inner fire stoked? An efficiency tuneup to maximize the payoff from your time invested?

Meet the Great Guitar Motivator: the unsinkable Rolly Brown. Buoyantly brimming with ways to keep your willpower afloat - and, importantly, your skills steadily and broadly advancing - this National Fingerpicking champion imparts the Tao of Practicing across two hours of enlightenment. After 50 ongoing years behind strings, Brown has cultivated a training philosophy for himself and his students which gets delineated through a creative array of concepts, exercises, tips, methods and mindsets.

Boost productivity in mastering scales, modes, chords and arpeggios. Tackle rhythm, harmony and melody. Hone your right-hand technique, both picked and barehanded. Metronomes (absolutely!), loopers, and slow-down software even get nods. Avoiding tedium and its close ally, apathy, this "Nuts & Bolts Approach to Practice" is anything but a rigid or rote regime. Instead, flexibly mixing and matching bite-sized pieces can lift any spare 10 minutes beyond simply noodling. Or interlock them together into comprehensive 30 and 60-minute workouts, which, by DVD's end, Brown nicely compiles for flatpickers as well as for fingerstylists.

Welcome back to the woodshed, the new and far improved woodshed. – Dennis Rozanski/Blues Rag