Hi guys, Andy here again and in this lesson I'm talking you guys through how to organize the songs that you know into some kind of practice routine and talking you guys through how I design practice routines for my private students and Skype students and how I can help you guys out with learning again through the beginners course that's online or help you organize a practice routine absolutely any level that you're at so there's kind of when it comes to practice and sometimes people can feel a little bit lost now there are two common scenarios that I see day in day out with my private students and online students as to why people feel lost and so if you're right at the beginning of my beginners course or you're just starting out on your guitar journey you can kind of be thinking how many songs do I need to learn before I can move forward and do I need to master everything that I take on before moving forward be it kind of all the chords that you should know or be just one song that you trying to learn should I master that one song all the way through along to the record which is what I recommend all the time should I do that for every song that I learn going forward or if you already know a whole bunch of songs and maybe it's quite a high level on guitar but you just know all of these things how can you possibly maintain say 20 or 30 songs do you need to keep all those songs and play them forever and how can you possibly kind of go about that and then that kind of all boils down to the one question which is should you master one thing before moving on or can you kind of take on numerous things but when you do how do you know which one's the focus on to help you guys out with that what I've done is I'm going to show you guys a recommended practice routine for one of my students called Chris who's been taking Skype lessons for about six months now he's kind of towards the end of the beginners course really but there's still a couple of things that we're working on such as riffs which he finds more difficult in particular and I'm going to show you how I've structured his practice routine and then give you a practice routine blueprint which is kind of appropriate for anyone at any level and we'll talk about how I've kind of broken it broken it down so the big thing I definitely want to get across to you guys is you should not take on any more than 10 songs that you're going to continue to maintain and keep you know keep playing day after day time after time practice time after practice time if you have more than 10 songs it's it's going to be impossible to maintain or get through them all basically so you need to pick and choose but those 10 songs should showcase the range of your guitar playing so that means that some of those songs say two three or four might be quite easy for you and they might be say if you're at level five of my beginners course some of those songs might still be from level two but you have to be quite savvy is to which ones you keep and which ones you're gonna let go which ones are kind of serve their purpose so there are certain songs from my beginners course or any songs that you will have learnt or riffs that you've learnt which work on multiple things just in one say riff or one prep one chord sequence so songs such as from say level two of my beginners course chasing cars and I can't explain have all three chords at that level E&D but also work on speed of chord changes with a higher level strumming pattern or a higher level riff and there's still going to be good ones to keep even if you're working on say you're E minor pentatonic scale right towards the end of the beginners course okay so you still want to keep certain ones especially if you can play them along to the record and it's sounding good and you can get along to the end of the record and you enjoy them you need to keep exercising that skill of playing things correctly otherwise if everything that you take on say choose ten songs but they're all the absolute hardest ten songs and that all right at the edge of what you physically kind of capable of at the moment then you're practicing kind of everything being done a little bit slowly and you're practicing things that aren't quite quite developed yet techniques that aren't quite developed yet so you need to keep certain things which you're doing absolutely spot on to to make that transferred over to the new stuff and this skill of playing on to the record as well is so important and as I say with the range of you guitar playing there wants to be some songs there in the songbook style which is following a chord sheet and maybe without bar lines at all and you just have chords sporadically spaced out and you change chord on a certain word and there wants to be some short recognizable riffs in there now depending on whether you're taking on acoustic or electric guitar kind of one of those styles tends to suit one or the other you know electric guitar we've got more riffs to pick from for example but you still want to showcase that range just so that you're not only improving say just your riffs or just your songbook songs we need both to go together to get full benefit of this course and so let me show you I've got Chris's permission to show you this practice routine that we picked out for him last time so you can see that we've got ten songs written but I've split them up into three categories songs that are perform and standard which Chris is very confident with and these were the ones that he can play most of the way through and take on towards the record maybe they just need a little bit of polish with them you know a couple of the changes out as solid as there could be but he can do a good job of them and then the other songs from his repertoire we split into just trying to showcase this range so single note playing is something that he particularly struggles with so I've been sure that I've included the minor pentatonic scale which you should cycle four times to make sure that you can play properly seven nation army and misty mountain hop just a couple of single notes electric guitar riffs that are short repetitive recognizable and with a little bit of practice he will be able to get them along to the song it's just a case of learning the structure of the song and making sure that you can hear the riff in the song so they can play along to it and then the songbook songs at the end three songs which are quite the highest level compared to some of the other songs they these are so a level seven level level eight songs most of them really and we've included them there to round his repertoire up to ten songs the one that I added to his practice routine was can't explain by the who which he hadn't learnt from just taking the online course just from you know picking which whichever songs he wanted from the list of songs that are on the website and I added that one because it was the riffs that he struggled with so I chose a much easier rift to take on but that worked on all those same skills again you've got par muting in this song a bit of silence in there faster chord changes faster strumming and a short recognizable riff that you should be able to play along to the record all those different things in one song rather than making sure that he keeps going with a song such as knocking on heaven's door which is just three chords repeated over and over again and quite slow the strumming's okay but it's not as high level as it could be it's not as challenging for the same short amount of time we'll get more benefit from that one in my opinion