Practice: warm up, practice and study

Warming up is making the joints, tendons and muscles of the fingers and hands ready to play. Use exercises that strengthen and make supple your fingers and hands to avoid injury (tendonitis).

A simple rubbing and stretching of our hands is enough to begin to achieve this aim. After this, short studies of scales, arpeggios, rasgueos and thumb work at various speeds will give a warm up sufficient to begin study.
There is a difference between playing and studying. When we study, we practice to train the hands and fingers whilst when we play, we use the skills learned in study to express our music. This distinction is important because if we tried to play a falseta without us having previously technically prepared ourselves for, we will simply be repeating our defects and making them become habits which will later need to be unlearned. All study should be done at a speed so we can perform the material cleanly and with control, after having analyzed the technical difficulties and devoted time and energy in careful study (and reflexion) to the parts that give us the most trouble.

To study one needs to be relaxed in order to focus the whole force of mind and body (not inconsiderable) into our fingertips. Each note needs to be played with the same volume and tone, excepting of course accents. To do this, each finger needs to move totally independently from the others without any force whatsoever, with a natural position and with only minimal excessive movement of either hands or fingers.

Study is:

• concentrating in technical details;
• making each stroke identical in strength, tone and volume;
• clarity;
• economly of movement
• marking compas cleanly.

Playing is:

• putting all our attention into the the music, melody and compas;
• paying attention solely to the music and not on the fingers.

To play well, we must study well and spend a lot of time doing it. Hands and fingers must always be in the correct place in order to attack the next note(s) with the minimum of force and tension.
There is little question that the guitar is an instrument that repays technical study but this is a study of many hours and requires dedication and consistency. But practice must be effective if it is to be reflected in our playing.

Good study involves:

• having the hands and fingers always ready to play the next note;
• practicing relaxed without any body tension whatsoever;
• slow practice.

Not following these simple rules will leave us worse that we started because we will have spent hours teaching our muscle memory to play “perfectly badly”. The resulting sound only serves to make out audience feel stress and tension. At best, these vices will be extremely difficult to correct later on, and at worst will be the cause of eternal frustration at not being able to play what we would like to in the way we would like to play it. Under those conditions, improvement will be impossible. Please don’t ask me how I happen to know this… I just do [;)].