How to Improve Practice Schedule

[Cacophonic]

[Is is better to] practice something (modes, arps.) only a certain day of the week, i.e. only practicing arpeggios on monday. Or practice arps for 30 minutes each day? I want to improve my schedule.

[Metal Dan]

I believe more in consistancy then in the actual amount of time spent (though that's important too)... It's more beneficial to practice something EVERYDAY a half an hour or so... then it is to ignore it all week and do a giant 12 hour block of it on Sunday. Practicing certain things only once a week might guarentee that you're not spending enough time with it to truely understand and utilize it.

[silent-storm]

It depends what your learning style is.

For me, I learn better if I concentrate on one thing almost exclusively and work at it until I get it good enough and I only need to review it about once a week. I find that once I have something down if I play it stuff only once a week I still make improvements at it on a pretty constant basis. That and it helps to cut down working on certain things and focus on others to try and get stuff into your long term memory.

[Bongo Boy]

I don't think a uniform or fixed rotation is necessary, but I do think it's important to have lots of repetitions of any given practice 'chunklet', with ample rests in between. I often find that, after I return to a particular exercise after 1 to 3 days of doing something else, there is marked improvement. If, OTOH, I forget about an exercise for something over a few weeks, it's almost like starting over.

I don't feel my progress is all that great, though, so I'm only saying what I've experienced--it's just an approach you can try for yourself to see if has a similar effect. Consistency in the approach for a particular chunklet is important though, otherwise the 'experiment' is invalid.

By chunklet I simply mean a small component of your overall regimen: a particular lick, 8 bars of a given tune, Steve Vai's Exercise 1, and so forth.

[Bande]

Cacophonic, I can only say that YOU will have to decide what fits you best. Everyone practises differently, so maybe my workout, or someone else's workout won't work for you at all.

You know, one man's meat is anothers poison...(ugh)