Practise Schedule

Only a short one this week, but helpful!

When the first lockdown happened back in March, I really struggled with my practise. I’ve always performed better when I had a regular schedule, so once lockdown started and I wasn’t working as much, this went out the window. 

After being really ineffective in my practise for about a month I decided to make a practise schedule. I decided to keep it as simple as possible so I didn’t set myself up to fail. All I did was break up my allotted practise time into 10 mins and write down what I wanted to work on. Once I completed each 10 min slot I would just tick it off. It worked wonders and I even carried it on once I was back in the habit. It also means that I've practised far more effectively and made much better use of my time! 


Line 6 Helix Thoughts

I’ve been using the Line 6 Helix for about two and half years and I’m so impressed and happy with the versatility and sounds in the unit. The Helix has built in amps and effects and unlike the Kemper you cannot profile your own amps in, initially I was put off by this, but the Helix has 72 built in, why would I ever need to use that many? After playing through them all, I settled on about five different ones, not because the others were bad, just because they suited my needs. You can also pair up your own amp and cabs, change the emulated microphone and placement whilst being able to change really in depth stuff like the amp biassing, so you can fine tune any amp to suit your needs.

The Helix has nearly 200 effects built in, so you can find anything you want as well as frequent updates so there are constantly added new features. The Helix also has plenty of inputs and outputs so you can make your setup suit your personal needs, for example I have an extra synth run through the Helix so I can blend it with my guitar signal.

I honestly believe the Helix is the best guitar product I’ve ever bought and the fact I’ve used it for so long is testament to that! (My musician friends jokes how quickly I buy and sell my gear).


Why interests outside of Music are important.

First and foremost, I love playing guitar and music. But I am a strong believer that it is important to have other interests. Whilst I was studying music at University I was obsessed with practise, I spent any time out of lectures or lessons practising or rehearsing. Everything I was thinking or talking about was guitar. 

Unfortunately, I was over practising. I set my standards too high, every time I made a little mistake I would obsess about it days after the fact. It got me to a point where I didn’t even want to play anymore. It wasn’t until my friend (who wasn’t a musician) suggested that I found some hobbies. Being a Musician for a living is odd, as your love and hobby is also your stress and work, in any other job you would have other things to do in your downtime. My Dad worked in insurance, when he was at home he wasn’t filling more claims for fun! 

Me and my friends started playing Snooker and playing Football, whilst we are not very good, it’s nice just having something to do for fun and not have to stress about being good at. It has also had a positive impact on my guitar playing as I’m practising more effectively and not stressing about what I’m playing so I can play with more freedom!


Organising and running a band

Playing in a band is great fun, but with it comes a lot of work that a lot of people don’t realise and get a big shock when you get to it! I’ve run a number of successful original and covers bands both as band leader and willing participant so I have a good insight of what you need to do.

I personally believe it is important for someone to be in charge. I’ve been in bands where we’ve tried to make it a democracy and everyone has a say, but everytime, nothing gets done as you’re too busy trying to agree on something or compromise on every decision to make everyone happy. In my experience as long as everyone knows from the start that one person is going to be making the ultimate decision everyone is okay with it. Forming a band is like running a business, you need a manager to make those choices. 

Some tasks that takes a lot of work but you don’t really think about;

The branding; The logo/website/colours that the bands use. What does the band wear on stage? How does this fit in with your branding? If you’re playing 80s Rock, you don’t want to be wearing 3 piece suits on stage, that would be sorted to a Blues or Jazz band.

Website/Social Media; This takes a lot of effort to maintain and needs to be kept regularly updated. If you look up a band and their last posts are from years ago you don’t really pay attention to them, regular content is important! 

Promotional Material; Photo shoots, video shoots, audio recordings and anything you can think of to help your band be booked for gigs. These all take time and a lot of effort to sort out, from picking the videographer/photographer to picking the location.

The setlist/music; Does the band need charts written out, if so, who writes them out? Who picks what songs the band needs to learn? Who picks the songs for the gigs? Who listen to the radio and monitors the charts to see what is big at the minute so you can add it to the set?

Payouts; how does the band get paid? Who is responsible for invoicing? Does the band leader get a bit more money for all the admin work? Does the arranger get some money for writing out the songs? This stuff needs to be agreed before the band does it’s first gig, so there are no surprises! 

These are just some of the things you need to think about when forming a band. I’m not trying to put anyone off forming and joining a band, I’m just trying to help you avoid any surprise and to help you avoid the same mistakes myself and many others made when forming your band.


What you need to start recording at home.

Recording at home is great fun and can be really useful. Whether it is to monitor your practise, create your own backing tracks or compose tracks for yourself or band. However there is a few bits of equipment you need if you want to record at home! 

Disclaimer, I am not endorsing or not making any money from this blog or saying any of this gear is the best. I'm just simply listing some products that will be useful. Nor is this an ideal/complete setup (I will talk more about individual bits of recording gear and maybe a cheap complete setup at some other point). 

To get started you’ll need four key things, an audio interface (also known as a sound card), a DAW, some headphones and your guitar (or microphone).

The most important thing is your interface, this is what you’ll plug your guitar and/or microphone into as well as your headphones. For most home setups one or two inputs are enough, unless you want to record drums or a whole band, but that’s a more complicated setup. Your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is your software that you use to record your audio and your Headphones are obviously what you’ll listen to your audio back on.

My favourite bit of recording software is Presonus Studio One. Presonus makes a pack for around £180 that comes with everything you need, including a light (but very functional) version of their DAW. They also make a version that is around £250 that comes with some speakers below. Studio One comes with some amp simulators as well as well as some drums loops for recording too. If you’re looking to upgrade the sound card, Focusrite has a series called ‘Scarlett’ which are excellent for the money, but do not come with the bundled software and I do not think the audio quality is that big of improvement to justify the extra cost.

Disadvantages of learning another instrument 

Whilst learning a new instrument can be extremely rewarding, there are also some disadvantages. 

‘Jack of all trades, master of none.’ I’ve met many musicians that play every instrument under the sun, but I have never met one who excels at one or all of them. When you need to practise 3+ instruments you can end up spreading yourself too thin. It takes a lot of time to reach a high standard on an instrument and we’re all busy people. Say if we only get roughly 45 minutes of practise a day, rather than focusing on one instrument at that time, we’d have to split that between multiple instruments. 45 mins a day, can turn into 15 mins a day, which will stop you reaching your maximum potential as a musician. 

The other issue you might run into is that if you could end up confusing yourself, say if you learn to play something like the trumpet or saxophone, which is played in a different key to the guitar. You could get confused whilst you develop the theoretical knowledge needed to understand the relationship between the two instruments. 

I found this blog hard to write, because personally I believe learning another instrument is a good idea, as long as you can either balance your practise time effectively or you can prioritise what instrument you want to play and you don’t learn too many. I just wanted to warn you that it can have a detrimental effect on your music!

What I thought of the Kemper Profiler unit.

Around 5 years ago I switched from using a real guitar amp to a modelling rig, you can find more information about this here. I decided to switch over as my pedalboard was getting larger and larger and I was sick of carrying everything around! (You can see why I bought a modeler in this blog post).

I started off on a Line 6 Floor POD XT, I found this modeller not to sound too great and to be really complicated to use and create patches. I bought the unit cheap off eBay and it was old technology, the oldest review I could find 2002, the idea behind the purchase to see whether I would like a modelling rig, which it provided enough to show me I would. However I wouldn’t recommend this unit.

The next Unit I bought was a Kemper with a Foot Controller. The Kemper has a very interesting approach as it isn’t technically a modeler, it is a profiler. It works by recording the sound of an amp and creating a snapshot of the sound. This creates a really accurate sound and one model comes with a built in Power Amp so you can run it into a standard guitar cab. It sounded fantastic and running it through a guitar cab gave it a ‘real’ feel. The effects built into the Kemper are brilliant as well, particularly the Modulations and from what I understand, a recent update has introduced some fantastic Reverbs. There are a lot of distortion/overdrive effects built in and whilst having a solid group, but some feel not as good as standard as the rest. The foot pedal was really well built and easy to program, it was also lightweight which helped with the portability. 

The downside to the Kemper was that if you couldn’t tweak the amp sound, you have an EQ on the front of the unit, but it works more like a PA as opposed to an Amp. Whilst you have a plethora of brilliant built in effects, you are very restricted as to where you can place them in the effects chain, so I felt like I had to use my pedalboard still with it which made the rig less portable. It also came with a case which broke within 6 months. 

The only photo I could find of my Kemper setup with a Pedalboard.

Overall, I think the Kemper sounds fantastic, if you want to have just one amp sound that you don’t want to play around with, and you will either use a simple effects setup with the ones built in or if you want to use your own pedalboard. For me though, I wanted to have just one unit to cover everything. 

I understand that Kemper has released a floor unit now, which seems great and I have not used a unit in about 18 months so software updates may have changed the features I had issued with.

Why Loop Pedals are great! 

A loop pedal is a fantastic tool for a guitarist. The pedal allows you to record in a phrase and have it playback on a loop, you can also layer records and on more advanced pedals you can even take layers in and out. I would say it is the one constant every time I practise, no matter what guitar or amp model I’m playing through, I always have a loop pedal setup. 

It can be immensely helpful to practise with your timing as well. Most people aren’t interested in practising to a metronome as they don’t see the point. I get all my students to use a loop pedal at some point in their course of lessons with me, so they can see how important timing and counting is. If you’re not counting, it’s impossible to get your loops in time!  

The main use I have for a loop pedal is for practise over a chord progression or riff. As a guitarist it can be quite hard to practise your soloing/lead riffs without any harmony (chords) underneath, though this can be a fun challenge to try. A loop pedal can be the perfect tool for this situation as it allows you to play your chords/riff into the pedal to quickly create your own backing track. 

A loop pedal can be so much more than that though, singer-songwriters like Kate Tunstall and more recently Ed Sheeran have utilised it in a much more complex fashion to create complete songs on their own. 

Recently I recorded a couple of loop pedal videos of my bands tunes, you can check one of them out in this post. Overall, I can’t recommend buying a loop pedal enough, it’s the perfect practise tool and also it’s great fun messing about to see what you can create.