Hi friends, and welcome to my first lesson. This week I want to talk with you about how to practice.

One of the most common mistake of guitarists is to start playing without knowing where they are going to. A new guitarist, usually, will always prefer to learn "Enter Sandman" instead of the notes of the fretboard. My suggestion??? Try to split your time. Play "Enter Sandman" for a while and then try to learn some notes on the fretboard.

I readed a long time ago a John Petrucci's lesson and it changes completely my point of view about how to practice. In that article he explains the importance of dividing your material in folders. What's this? Simple. I'm sure you have some material related to guitar. For example, the notes you take from WholeNote, some exercises a friend gave you, a magazine, etc... The idea of Petrucci is to separate the material in logical folders, letting you to know exactly which material you have and more important, you save time searching for a particular exercise. Are you getting the idea? You don't need to separate the pages of your favorite guitar magazine to put them into folders. What you can do is in a simple Word page, take note of all the material you have, divided by category.

You should have three main categories and many sub-divisions. The three main topics should be: Technical side, Musical Side, and Creative Side. Inside Technical side, you should have all your warm-up, arpeggio, and tapping exercises, just to mention some. Musical side refers to the theorical side, like chords theory, your staff reading exercises, and all musical theory you have. And inside the Creative side all your licks, chord progressions, and songs.

Believe me, this will help you a lot, because in the moment you want to practice your bend, for example, you open the Technical folder, then the Bending folder and now you have all your bending exercises.