Streamline your practice time with a guitar solo practice file

This idea falls squarely in the category of “I wish I had done this years ago” but also at face value, one might wonder why this makes a difference.

Many years ago, when I would practice the harder guitar solos I played with my cover band, I would put on a cd that I had made with those songs on it, and I would play through the whole song before getting to the guitar solo, which was the thing I really needed to rehearse.  With one band, that cd had songs like Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin, My Sharona by the Knack, Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd, and so on.

It occurred to me one night that I could make better use of my practice time by making an mp3 of the guitar solos, and only the guitar solos.  So I did just that: I used the Transcribe! app to extract an audio clip all of the hard guitar solos I played in the band, and then I used the Audacity app to combine all of those clips into an mp3 that was 20 – 30 minutes long.

Within a few weeks, I started to notice a big improvement in my playing.  Spending 20-30 minutes playing hard solo after hard solo is better than spending two hours playing scales.

NOT THAT I AM SAYING PLAYING SCALES IS BAD.  PRACTICE YOUR SCALES EVERYONE!!!!!!

I also had a better memorization of the solos, which made me more relaxed at gigs.