What should you practice? Well, this is hard to determine with no prior knowledge of your level.
Most people just practice songs they want to play. which is great! There is much to be said for pursuing your passion by playing the artwork which gives you joy but let’s consider what is required to play music successfully. There’s no guarantee that you have the necessary skills to play the songs you wish to play, even though you may think that you do.
One needs sufficient playing technique, hopefully, proper playing technique which should allow many years of pain and injury-free playing at a high level. I feel that if a player has developed a proper playing technique after the initial phase of learning, that technique can progress through the learning of proper musical content. One should not strive to just have fast fingers. It’s like trying to be good at Spanish by learning how to roll your tongue really well.
I think that if you cannot read standard musical notation that you ought to learn how to do so. Etudes are a great way to acquire this skill. Etudes are typically short musical examples designed for your instrument written for the sole purpose of improving you on that instrument. These etudes should be at the optimal difficulty level for the learner. Improvement is guaranteed via this method.
And it takes a long time and it’s a big investment. It’s a hard sell. So if you have no interest in reading music and are not ready to break the shackles of tablature (guitarists and bassists?), you may need another path.
Another way is by practicing what I call “meta-music”, mainly scales and chords. ‘Meta-music” is musical material that is not literally a song or an etude but is an element in which songs and etudes are made of. Scales are good, I practice scales all the time, but let’s consider what a scale is before we go full bore into practicing scales tirelessly for hours on end. A scale is a set of tones that gravitate towards a tonal center. There are many, many types of scales but let’s not get too lost in the minutiae just yet. You sometimes have occasion to literally play a scale like in The Can-Can or The Man Who Sold The World, but you don’t literally play scales that often in a song. It’s like saying “ABCDEFG” while having a conversation. The alphabet is not words, the alphabet is the set of letters that words are made of. So, what are the words?
Chords. These are the “words” of music in my analogy. In my opinion, you gain the best return on investment as a musician by practicing and understanding chord tones on your instrument. Especially if you’re resistant to reading music (guitarists and bassists). When you practice chord tones you are learning how to express tonality on your instrument. Scales are like using a Thomas guide to get to your tonal location, chord tones are like using GPS.
The pedagogical history of piano instruction informs how I practice the guitar and the bass as well. I play major, minor, diminished, and augmented chords in root position, 1st inversion, 2nd inversion, and back to root position an octave higher. Forward and backwards. I am practicing how each of these chords lay out within a two-octave range.
On the piano I like to practice each of these chords chromatically in 12 keys because I like the feel of the augmented chord leading to the major chord the next key to the right. On the guitar and bass I like to practice in the cycle of 4ths. I do each key in major, minor, diminished and augmented. I want to be familiar with the sound, sight, and feel of each of these chords. The end result of practicing in this manner is that you will be able to recognize when you’re playing a C#m chord at the beginning of Moonlight Sonata or outlining a Dm, Bb, and C chord during the cool part of the Sultans of Swing solo. All of this informs you as a player and makes you a better asset as a musician to the players around you. There’s nothing like sitting in a rehearsal with a group of people with the same intimate knowledge of harmony that you have. You speak a common language and can fit your parts around each other. It’s a beautiful thing.
You can have a free download of these exercises at www.philromo.com/theory
There’s a piano, bass and guitar handout. There are no tabs for these exercises because piano players don’t use tabs. If you want a bass or guitar tab version it will be $5 from my premium transcription section because your obstinate refusal to read music should invoke a penalty that I wish to profit from. Thanks for listening and play those chord tones! See you in the next lesson.