Free Guides

The 7 Minute Practice Routine

If you’ve ever sat down and not known what to practice or how to organize your time, this guide is for you.

It will help you diagnose where you are in any material you might be working on, and figure out how to make progress.

The strategies in this guide are modular, so you can use them whether you have 2 hours to really drill down on your playing, or just a 7 minute break between other things in your day.

The best guitarists know how to practice more efficiently and get more done in less time. The principles in this guide are some of the most helpful things I’ve learned in all my time playing guitar, and they’re what I want to share with you.

See it on YouTube

Fingerpicking Freedom

If you’ve ever had trouble fingerpicking (hard to aim, fingers get tired, can’t play fast enough, notes pop out and feel uncontrolled, patterns feel choppy), this guide is for you.

Every guitar student I teach fingerpicking to goes through the 4 exercises in this guide. Even for college guitar majors, these are the first and most foundational exercises we do.

This guide shows you exactly how your hand should be moving, shows you the most common mistakes people make, and helps you trouble shoot and know what to look for to make sure you’re moving your hand as effortlessly as possible.

Mastering these exercises will make any fingerpicking patterns easier and will make you more in control of your own playing.

See it on YouTube

Event Map

If you’re singing and playing at the same time, working out a complex fingerpicking pattern, or playing a song where your hands just keep doing different jobs, the problem is coordination. The fix is mapping out exactly what happens and when.

This blank “event map” is what I use with all my students when we’re putting together anything that’s hard to memorize or coordinate. Fill it in with strumming patterns, finger picking, or whatever else you need to put together and visually organize.

See it on YouTube