Practicing Cumulative Material

This was in response to Roxine, who wants to know how to practice material in the Rhythmic Lead Guitar book/CD and the Guitar Fretboard Workbook at the same time.

I get a lot of inquiries on how much to practice exactly which items in specific order, when to move on to a new exercise, and so on.

The main advice is that whenever a topic is new for you it needs to be practiced for at least 2 weeks in order to enter your long term memory and for you to be able to use it without stopping to figure it out again. It could be 4 weeks or 6 weeks. The test is whether you know it enough to use it easily.

That means you should review any unfamiliar material in one chapter of any book every day for 2 weeks before moving on to any other topic that has that material as a prerequisite. This way you're not figuring out two things at once. When you feel this happening it means you are advancing too quickly.

I believe this applies to any educational process, not just music.

For these two books in particular, there's no worry about pacing one to match the other, because the two books cover different areas. I always write a book to stand alone as much as possible. You can study one for 10 minutes, then the other for 10 minutes, doing that once a day for several months, and see a lot of improvement in both fretboard knowledge and rhythmic command of music.