"Graduate" This School in 3 Months! (Practice Regimen)

[Jak Angelescu]

Hey guys! I came up with this awesome thing that for me so far has been shuttle-launching my playing ability and so I wanted to share it with you all and I’m issuing MY OWN challenge. I’m going to “graduate” this school in 3 months. My purpose, schedule and practice regimen is to showcase to those who say “I don’t have enough time” can accomplish a HELL OF A LOT in very little. I’ll call this the “layered cake” method (I use to be a baker, so that’s where I came up with the idea). You see, when a baker bakes a cake, you can’t just leave the batter sit. The leavening agents will flatten out, the fats will eventually separate, and the batter will be useless. You also can’t leave the baked sheet in the freezer to shrink the molecules too long (tip for a denser, more moist cake) because then it will dry out and harden. So why do we linger in things so long? To hopes that they “set in” or “sink in”? What if we are spending TOO much time on one technique, that we don’t see how the next ‘layer’ of technique adds purpose to the previously learned technique? Like, if we were practicing sweeping, why not throw economy picking into it as well since they’re almost the same thing? Instead of spending HOURS and MONTHS on sweeping alone, we can see how to use them together!
So for those of you who are interested in this, this is the “layered cake” method.
Time to school completion: 3 months
Days per week on school: 5
Hours a day for practice: 1 (5 hours a week)
Lessons per day: 2 in sequential order. 20 minutes each (40 minutes total)
Application of lessons: 20 minutes (one hour total)
Number of school lessons: 114 and 10 lessons per week
Total Months: >3 months
Let’s be real. This is NOT like major music universities where our time is consumed by writing history reports, doing live gigs, and practically learning things we may not care to learn. So that’s where all that time goes. But here, we can focus and really hone in on our craft!
So I’m doing it! Monday is my first school day. Although I’ll be dedicating a LONGER time to my practice regimen, I’m spending my time on the school in this way. And I’ll try to upload my progress videos weekly. Let me know if this sounds like it may help out those who are crunched for time.
Let’s be real, the amount you spend browsing the internet, you could have your hour done

 

[Ed Seith]

I think this kind of schedule could certainly be beneficial for the theory-based lessons, but the mechanical stuff, especially when you get into late intermediate and definitely advanced stuff, I don’t see how it could be. Especially since you’ve been typically spending a week on each lesson. I’ve been wanting to find the personal discipline to do that for the theory stuff, myself. I think it could be eye-opening for me in the extreme.

 

[idssdi]

I agree with Ed that this works for the theory based stuff but as soon as you want to dive into all the different techniques and do the etudes I feel like you would spread yourself to thin when you do 2 of those on one day.

 

[Jak Angelescu]

I personally didn’t count the etudes as Lessons. And of course these techniques wouldn’t be mastered. That would come with time. But a lot of people can get impatient and they want to learn things faster. They also feel that an hour a day wouldn’t accomplish much. This is actually been my method as of late. Granted, I play for about 4 hours a day with other stuff. So in that time frame I actually practice what I’ve learned a little bit more. I definitely agree that you would need a lot more time to actually practice the technical stuff once things get more advanced and complicated. But I kept spending an hour a day on lesson 24 and I never wanted to move on because I felt like I didn’t have it enough. But next thing I knew, when I took Rick beato’s advice and moved on, the following lessons made lesson 24 make more sense. But by the time you graduate the school you won’t be a master of things that you will at least know them. I was trying to do this because there are people who say that they’ve been on the school for a year and are not getting any better. There are also people who say they’ve been playing for hours and hours a day on the same thing and they can’t improve on it.

 

[idssdi]

I kinda consider the etudes to be the final-exam as in if you would like to graduate and pass it you will have to do those at warp speed like Syn does. And purely grade wise I can’t recall any course I can do 5 lessons on in 1 week to sufficiently know the material to pass an exam so if you want to talk about graduation this is probably not the way to go about it. It’s a nice way to get acquainted with terms and a bunch of theory but actually use the theory is a whole lot more effort than 20 minutes. And doing to much at the same time for me usually results in not really remembering any of the concepts I studied because to much information to fit my brain. If you change it to 3 lessons a week that should work and you properly know the stuff that’s been told in the lessons. It will just take you about 58 weeks to get through them all.
I even had Syn tell me once to take one concept at the time and properly study just that concept for a week or a month so that’s kinda where that’s coming from

 

[Jak Angelescu]

Truthfully what has worked best for me is I Spend 20 minutes each on 3 different lessons. That took a total of an hour which would be like if I had an hour-long lesson every day. And then I would have an hour’s worth of take homework so to speak. And then I would stay on those three lessons for a week-long. The more I went over it the more I can understand how someone like a beginner would be very challenged to do this. I’m just trying to figure out practice methods to encourage people to sit down even 20 minutes a day. There are a lot of students that are upset that they don’t have the time to play. They are extremely busy. And then I’m finding that they are getting discouraged about their progress and they don’t even play at all. So I love this feedback. Perhaps spending 20 minutes a day on one lesson for a week? Or maybe just two lessons for 20 minutes each plus 20 minutes of application for a total of an hour and stay on those lessons for a week before moving on? There is some sort of Common Ground between staying on something for too long and not staying on it long enough. I know that for me I spent four months on lesson 24 and I seem to never get any better because I thought I was not good enough to move on. Then when I started doing up to Five Lessons a week things seem to actually make more sense. If any of you or the viewers of this thread have any good feedback on what somebody could do to get the most out of an hour a day, feel free to write it down here! I am seeing some people’s ideas when they are crunched for time and it sounds so stressed, forced and unnatural. And I definitely don’t want this to come off like that. So hopefully maybe we can use this thread for practice tips to advance in the school at a reasonable pace that’s encouraging, inspiring and also productive.

 

[idssdi]

You can definetely crunch more lessons into a week. How many really depends on the lessons you’re doing. For example 11 to 17 or 52 to 66 line in really well together so you can do all of these in one or two weeks. However, this does not nescecarily count for all of them so I’m just trying to say be wary that you don’t cram to much different things in as little time as 20 minutes or an hour because for me that tends to lead to a lot of frustration because when I go back I realize I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to have learned.
2-3 lessons per week sounds fine especially if you do 20 minutes up to an hour per day. If you understand them quicker you can move on quicker of course.
I just had this tiny little idea. I(or someone else idk) can make quizzes for all the lessons which you can do so you can check whether you understand the subject well enough. This is just a little thing I just came up with during my study break

 

[Jak Angelescu]

Ids that’s a great idea!!! I love the quizzes idea!!

 

[idssdi]

I’m just testing for a second
https://nl.surveymonkey.com/r/LHQGJG7

 

[idssdi]

That one didn’t work but hopefully this one does
https://www.sporcle.com/games/iddsschiere/lesson-onethousandandsixtyfour-3





This reply was modified 7 months ago by  Ids Schiere.

 

[Jak Angelescu]

Holy shit how did you do that?! That is so awesome! This is going to help so many people! Hell, I wanna do this quiz now!

 

[idssdi]

I just went to sporcle.com and made a custom quiz.

 

[Jak Angelescu]

LOL, that one question tho!!

 

[idssdi]

Haha that’s just a joke I kinda like. This is basically just a practice run to see whether it works. I can make quizzes linked to all the lessons in the beginner section next Sunday and the weekend after that for intermediate and advanced. I may also make some for the etudes just to trigger people to think about what’s going on theoretically

 

[Calvin Phillips]

This is a great idea.. if you’re gonna go this route we can kind of relate the weekly homework to the quiz and lesson too (if were still doing that). The quiz would be a fine addition! Or on it’s own. Either way I’m glad we’re thinking out of the box all the time on things to keep us Interested.

 

[AGA]

Lol! The quiz! I got 80% and it said “How very mediocre” I’m laughing so hard!

 

[Jak Angelescu]

YES!!! I literally laughed at that! I got the crocodile question wrong

 

[AGA]

This are very cool ideas. Just to add what has worked for me personally; I group the lessons in topics. Like 1-10 “Introduction” 11-19 “Rhythm & Basic Chords” etc. And I watch the whole group within one or two weeks, then spend some time after that working on the concepts. That time depends on how long I need for that concept or technique to be solid. So that when I come back to it, it has a strong foundation. Right now, I am taking the time to strengthen my basics and fill in the gaps I previously had before moving on to the next topic.
One of the best practice tips a teacher gave me was, when something gets boring (an exercise, a technique, etc.) slightly change it up in order to always keep it fresh. This way I rarely get tired of what I’m practicing because it’s never monotonous even though it’s the same concept. It also challenges your creativity because you are constantly coming up with new exercises or ideas to practice.

 

[AGA]

Lol! I got the crocodile question right.

 

[Isaac Moss]

So in a way this idea is kind of like taking one thing for like two weeks or so and doing it way more than everything else.