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your daily practice: The FUNDAMENTALS (members)
I constantly stress this truth : The players who practice well, play well. The players that practice like masters, play like masters. Read this chapter several times and take your time to fully understand the concepts explained because they are essential to your progress as a guitar player. You do not need special gadgets or special talents to practice like a pro, what you need is an attitude. One made of simple tools like a pencil, an eraser, a small notebook and, ideally, a metronome and a tape/video recorder. Playing like a pro is not only about playing flawlessly but it is about a series of very important intertwined factors. Your goal is attainable if you wish to implement the correct practicing habits. Than, consistency and perseverance, glue everything together into what is generally known as a great player. Many of my students are stuck with different guitar methods. I say stuck because guitar methods are designed to get you stuck somewhere around the middle of the book . I still have not met any guitar student who finished a guitar method from beginning to end. The reasons are obvious, most too often the player looses interest and, eventually, tells himself :" What am I doing playing Lullabies and Christmas Carols when my aim is to play Recuerdos de la Alhambra !!". I agree with these students and that is where I want to introduce you to a concept that will definitely make playing more what you dreamed it would be and get you one step closer to your dream piece with every practice session. The practice method is called "Make your own exercise", it is not a trademark, it is not a system invented by anyone, it is simply 4 words which explain a learning process PERFECTLY. It is demanding in that you will have to write things down to keep track of what it is that you have been up to and have your practicing time very organized. I will use a practical example to illustrate the idea. The Make your own exercise approach allows you to start playing any piece, and, the best piece to play first, is not necessarily Romance or Lagrima, but the piece you like most. Nothing can be more effective in overcoming technical challenges than motivation. Ok. The first things that the guitar
player has to determine when he faces a musical technical challenge are:
Is the challenge in the right hand or is it in the left hand...maybe it
is a little in both.
Some of you may recognize this famous measures...they are the first challenge in Cavatina...We generally see it like this: "a nasty C 9 played at the 9th fret, with a legato performed on the second string... all of this performed as we are trying to make one of the greatest melodies ever written stand out". Ok. First of all let me clarify that although you will eventually play this phrase just fine, it was really designed to work on 2 guitars. The player must first spot the melody, which has to be protected from all the surrounding notes.... the melody is :
What I do is take the melody line and isolate the legato and the high C# in order to master these first. What you are doing with this is reduce the problem to its minimal components which have to be mastered separately. I will not introduce the barre yet because that can and will come later.... I will simply use the base of finger 1 to play the C# . Look how I break the problem into parts making the following exercise... 
Animation, allow a few seconds to load frame by frame sequence What you see in the animation above
is the exercise you created to overcome the difficult section in Cavatina.
You created the model (frames 1-4) and you moved it up the fingerboard
( frame 5-12, your exercise)
 When the first 4 steps have been clearly understood, seen by your brain, and performed by your hands, than you can proceed to step 5 which consists of moving one fret backwards. Frames 6 7 8 & 9 will repeat the MODEL... you will proceed this way all the way to first position (Anything you play in first position is technically harder because the frets are further apart and your muscles are working at an angle with respect to the body...). If you make a mistake, STOP, rest and start again. Your goal is to be able to play the MODEL all the way to first position flawlessly. Remember, playing the C9 MODEL at C1, is like running with weights on your ankles...when you take them off (go back to C9), you will feel faster and lighter... As a rule of thumb, remember that whatever you play in first position is harder than the equivalent played down the fingerboard (positions 5-9) What you did is incorporate a new MODEL in your playing lexicon...one that will probably show up again in this piece and other totally different pieces that you will play in the future. This is how a professional player sees a musical challenges... The barre at C 9 is actually made up of smaller parts that have to be mastered separately and than bonded together in what is wrongly approached as "C 9"... Once the main melody has been played, -remember we have just saved the most important part of the sequence-, you are left with the other MODELS to deal with... the good news is that none is so important musically s the one you just mastered...   This is exactly like the previous MODEL. You add the Bass on string 5. Notice that the barre is a curved one...I am only pressing the low C# with the tip of finger 1 and the high C# with the base of finger 1... Again, I take the MODEL all the way up to first position to make it harder and help my hand incorporate the new moves. 
Animation, allow a few seconds to
load
It is here that you are performing a C 9 for the first time. The reason is that you want to play the arpeggio notes located on the inner strings E A C# F# Notice that finger 3 does not go down until frame 3 which is a millisecond prior to playing the F#. You will practice this MODEL all the way to position 1. This is the most tiring model because of the barre. RELAX between positions and stop playing when pain starts building up. Guitar playing has nothing to do with the "no pain no gain" slogan from the 80s. What you learned is that the 2 measures pose more than 1 challenge and that the player can easily be fooled in thinking "ok, the first thing I have to put down is a barre 9..."...WRONG ! The phrase can and has to be broken down into 3 parts. We learned to call the parts MODEL because it is a pattern that we will move up and down the fingerboard... Once all the MODELS are dominated separately, we put them together... Unless you use this approach with classical guitar playing, you will feel like you are banging your head against a wall over and over without improvement and this can be very frustrating... the key to master playing is master practice. The people you see on stage have worked out so many MODELS in their careers, that eventually, they will find the same models over and over in different pieces of music. This explains why they can make their repertoire larger and larger in a relatively short time. Eventually a new scenario appears and the master will go back to the MODEL approach...making his own exercise....just like you and me. You will realize that is is a new
approach, a tiring one at first requiring concentration...You will only
be able to apply this amount of concentration for short bursts until the
whole system becomes your system of practice and, eventually, you
will understand why masters do not practice more than a couple of hours
a day...if you are practicing hours and hours, you are not practicing correctly.....
just so that you know, when I worked with the masters, we would get stuck
on a MODEL or 2 for a whole 45 minutes lesson.
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