Exercises Vs Learning Songs

This topic has 8 replies, 8 voices, and was last updated 14 years, 10 months ago by Andy Mclaughlan.

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- September 27, 2008 at 10:14 pm
diode
Member

:confused: What’s best learning songs or doing a bunch of exercises or both? What happen when you can play the exercise well enough, and fast enough, just stop doing it? :confused:

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- September 28, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Coop
Member

Both. Just dont go for broke to fast. Pick some easy songs that you like and would want to learn. Then use exercises to help you learn the chords, scales, and melodies.

Over time pick harder and harder songs. I usually try to learn a song a month. So far I am up to over 200 songs that I can play fairly well. Some came real fast. Others took awhile to get down.

Coop
- September 28, 2008 at 12:39 pm
MSzymanek
Member

Coop sumed it up for you. Both are quite important, but not the only means of learning to play guitar. There is also improvising, jamming, theory and even songwriting. If you have trouble with particular songs, it often pays off to do some exercises involving techniques used in the song, so it is very beneficial to exercise.
- September 28, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Sean Conklin
Member

Like Coop and Sealer said, both aspects are very important.

@Sealer 4919 wrote:

it often pays off to do some exercises involving techniques used in the song, so it is very beneficial to exercise.

This is key. I find that creating exercises based on ideas from songs helps me come up with some pretty fun and creative exercises. Doing that can actually be a really fun thing to implement into your practice schedule. Try dedicating a chunk of time every practice session to create your own exercises from songs you like or find difficult.
- September 29, 2008 at 3:27 am
diode
Member

Well thanks a lot for your answers guys they are helpful, I like the part of making my own exercises that’ll be fun to get into thanks a lot

Diode
- September 29, 2008 at 1:18 pm
billmeedog
Member

@Sean Conklin 4936 wrote:

Like Coop and Sealer said, both aspects are very important.

This is key. I find that creating exercises based on ideas from songs helps me come up with some pretty fun and creative exercises. Doing that can actually be a really fun thing to implement into your practice schedule. Try dedicating a chunk of time every practice session to create your own exercises from songs you like or find difficult.

Excellent idea Sean! Also, I’d like to add that in the name of efficiency in improvementI think it’s important to isolate the very specific “problem-areas” that one is experiencing in a song. This could be a particularly fast passage or a challenging string-skip or something. Anyways, I’ve found that most students have the inefficient habit of spending WAY too much time repeating things that they already do well and not nearly enough time isolating the tough-stuff!

~Bill Meehan
- February 7, 2010 at 11:29 pm
jbmuso
Member

Hey diode, when I practise I usually do exercises to warm myself up for the first 10 to 20 minutes or so. Like Coop said, it’s good to have a mixture of both. I firmly believe that choosing songs that push your abilities is the best way to go because doing exercises is all well and good but putting them into practise is whats most important.
- February 9, 2010 at 7:54 pm
guitarbar
Member

@Coop 4918 wrote:

Both. Just dont go for broke to fast. Pick some easy songs that you like and would want to learn. Then use exercises to help you learn the chords, scales, and melodies.

Over time pick harder and harder songs. I usually try to learn a song a month. So far I am up to over 200 songs that I can play fairly well. Some came real fast. Others took awhile to get down.

Coop

I started out by simply learning songs and then ended up switching it up a bit and doing exercises as well. It’s worked out well and I’m feeling a lot more competent these days.
- February 10, 2010 at 11:09 am
Andy Mclaughlan
Member

I think its beneficial to make exercises that focus on your weaknesses. But working on passages you like from songs is also great because you can incorporate ideas you already like into your playing. I don’t really advocate learning entire songs just for the sake of it. Although it definately can be fun and as such, anything thats fun can’t be bad. But, from the position where you are trying to progress technically. Its definately better to work on weaknesses and new ideas that are intially hard.
Andy