LESSON > FRETBOARD WORKSHOP
Avoiding Practice
BY MARC SCHONBRUN
Marc Schonbrun graduated magna cum
laude from the Crane School of Music in New
York. He is an active educator, writer, and
performer in the San Francisco area, and
has an eclectic performing background that
includes classical concertos, jazz trios, and
rock bands. An active lecturer, Schonbrun
frequently tours the country explaining music
technology to players and teachers. Visit
marcschonbrun.com for more info.
CHOPS: Intermediate
THEORY: Intermediate
LESSON OVERVIEW:
• Learn how to transform otherwise boring exercises into
musical phrases.
• Understand how to apply
chords in unique combinations
across the neck.
• Slide linear scales across the
fretboard to open up the neck.
guitar in my hands. My love for the guitar
is what has allowed me to progress year
after year. So, how do you get better without locking yourself in your room with a
metronome, vowing not to come out until
you’re a better guitarist?
Well, for one thing, you need to step
back and think about how you’ve improved
at other skills in your life. Carpenters don’t
lock themselves in workshops working
on saw technique. They get out and start
building things. Sure, their first attempts
are a little rough, but you get better by
doing. If you want to get better at the guitar, you’d better play the guitar a lot. If you
want to get better at something specific,
you’re going to need to do it a lot. What
I will push back on is the idea that you
need to divorce technique and music from
practice. It is possible to have fun, make
music, and still improve. I just could never
see how sitting in my room playing scale
patterns with a metronome was going to
help me get better when I’d never play scale
patterns on stage like that. There has to be
Click here to hear
sound clips of
these examples.
What do you think of when you hear the word “practice?” When I think
of practice, I think of the following things:
boring, repetitive, disciplined, structured,
drills, metronomic, and scale patterns. I’ve
been playing for the better part of 17 years
now, and I have something to confess: I
hate practicing. I really don’t enjoy it and
every attempt at being structured or disciplined has always failed to motivate me in
any way. I love getting better and improving my skills, but I hate what most of the
world thinks of as practice. In this lesson, I
want to talk about how I think about practicing and ways to keep it fun and creative,
no matter what your level is.
Play Along. Play Often.
For whatever reason, I found playing gui-
tar by myself very lonely and boring. So
much so, that for the first four years of my
musical life, I only played along to CDs or
played with my band. Since the band only
practiced once a week, I spent the majority
of my musical life playing along to CDs. I
was ambitious, too. I played along to Steve
Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Eric Johnson
CDs (and just about anything else I could
get my hands on). I really couldn’t play
most of their riffs, but what I was able to
do was play along in the same key. As I
was learning about scales and arpeggios, I
was able to apply them to real music right
away. I’m sure that if I listened back now,
I’d cringe at the epic noodling I was doing
back then, but at the time, it was a com-
plete blast. I was having fun.
Fig. 1
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Playtime
I absolutely love playing the guitar. I really
do cherish any time I can get with the
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