30 minute practice routine for Level 4
Now that your skills and knowledge are becoming second nature in your playing, the skills learnt over Level 4 can be applied directly to our song repertoire to bolster your performance. Hopefully you have attempted many songs now and some of them may be easier than others at the moment, like 4 chord songs. However, songs with complex structure and many interesting chords may still be in progress. This routine will help you remember more songs and give focus in your practice time.
Warm Up (5 mins)
Play around the 12 bar blues and incorporate the swing rhythm.
Barre Chord changes (5 mins approx.)
1 min each. Repeat for any changes that need more work.
E major barre chord to A major
B minor barre chord to G major
D7 barre chord to G major
Work towards being able to change between a barre chord and our normal major chords.
Song learning and repertoire practice (15 mins or more)
The aim is to have our 10 song repertoire that is at a good standard where a chord sheet is only there as a prompt, which is absolutely fine.
It would also be great to start playing along to original recordings of these songs, but it doesn't have to be every song. This task is more to do with joining in and having a checklist going of the skills you are doing well or not so well, so you can focus on progressing. Things like;
Chord playing endurance
Timing, rhythm and feel
Structure
A glance at the chord sheets along with our memorised sections of songs is a great skill to have and the more we focus on developing the memorisation through our practice the greater our ability of remembering songs is and helps us focus on new material for our routine.
The popular songs that we have absolutely ready to perform for our our family, friends or the 'camp fire' repertoire we have are going to be easy to do without even glancing at our prompts. So, we definitely want to build up our song bank with these but gradually introduce ones which challenge us with interesting structures and new chords we can play reasonably well already.
Rhythm challenge! (5 mins or more)
Try the swing rhythms and playing with which beats we choose from (1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a...) to familiarise yourself with the feeling of swing.
Keep your foot tapping and try counting whilst you play to keep in time but also to be aware of what you are feeling when playing the rhythms.
