Wisdom from David Russell
Cliff Notes:
- Start the day with the guitar
- Have a basic technical routine that essentially walks through the first lessons (basic RH and LH stuff)
- We, as musicians, want to preserve our enthusiasm for the instrument
- Keep a few beautiful, well played pieces in your head and under your fingers
- Whenever you start to loose that sense of fun, or get bogged down in playing difficult works, go back and play through those beautiful pieces
Personal Note: I hate practicing at night. I’d rather it get it done during the day. So each morning when I walk up, I grab some breakfast and start practicing. It takes about a half hour to go through the “first lesson” things pertaining to the right and left hands and run through all the basic arpeggio patterns. The bottom line is that starting each day with the guitar is awesome, and very effective. So wake up a few minutes earlier, make some great coffee and enjoy playing!
What do you do to get ready to play each day?
David Norton
I generally do chromatic scales and chromatic octaves as a warm-up, followed by Carcassi Studies No’s 3, 1, 7, and 2, in that sequence. It seems to work.
julian
i have that david russell video on my desktop so when i start the day and turn on my computer i see that video and keeps me in the right state of mind