Guitar Lessons in Tulsa | Daily Piano Practice Routine
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Hi, this is Andrea with Curtis Music Academy with a podcast on my normal practice routine throughout the week. Curtis Music Academy offers piano lessons, vocal lessons, and guitar lessons in Tulsa. So I love sitting down and playing at the piano and I just really enjoy sitting down and playing pieces that I’ve already learned. And I see a real need in my own personal life to keep things fresh at the piano. So I’m just going to go through what I do on a normal basis. First things first. I explained in my last podcast that I might not be able to sit down and play 30 minutes at one time. I might just do a segment, a five minute segment at the piano, and then I go about my business.
And then later on I come back to the piano. I do my next step of practicing the piano, and I think that is totally great. And I recommend that to my students as well, because sometimes it’s hard to find a 30 minute block of time throughout a normal day as an adult. So you might have kids or you might have a crazy work schedule. So anyway, splitting up the practicing is a great way to make sure that you still are practicing throughout the week.So normally I sit down at the piano and I warm up my fingers and this is more of an intermediate way to explain how to warm up my fingers. You can apply this to guitar lessons in Tulsa as well.
If you’re a beginner, this this is something you’ll work into. But I sit down and I pick a key of the piano, so it might be the key of C. And then, of course, it’s not always C, but let’s just say I want to spend a day working on the key of C, so I pick that the next day I might pick C sharp and work in the key of C sharp. The next day I might pick the QB and work in the cubed and so on. There’s twelve different keys so I just keep rotating again. You might want to pick a week to work on the key of C, which that would be great. Usually I just take a day, even with guitar lessons in Tulsa.
So the first things first is I do my major minor scales, I do three octaves of that and I usually just do the minor harmonic scales. I don’t know what’s just something that I’ve always liked to do. So three octaves of that second thing I do is chord inversions. This is the one of the most valuable things ever in my piano playing in all my years of playing chord inversions.I do major and minor again, and I do blocked and broken chord inversions. So usually the broken chords are a little bit easier because it’s one at a time. But then playing the blocked is a little bit more challenging. This can apply to guitar lessons in Tulsa as well.
Ok, after that I make it a little bit harder and I do the forty four finger chord inversions. So like let’s just say I’m talking about a C chord. My, my right hand thumb is on C then two finger on E, three finger on G, five finger on the high seas. And so I do the blocked and broken chords with that as well. Talk about strengthening your fingers. That’s pretty intense and usually I have to really slow down in order to do those four finger chord inversions.So that is another thing. After that I do major and minor arpeggios. That is a really great skill as well.
And again, I make sure that I’m playing slowly enough so that it’s steady, inconsistent. If I find myself slowing down and speeding up, then it’s a sign that I need to actually just slow down and maybe even set a metronome and keep going. OK, after that, I do my diatonic scale in whatever key I am in. And so that is actually something new I’ve just added within the last month or so, but I already see fruit of doing that. So I think it’s going to be really helping me in terms of understanding certain keys and understanding how to compose music in those keys.
You can also do this with guitar lessons in Tulsa as well. The next one I do is a blues scale. In that case, let’s say, for example, where in the key of C I do the C blues scale. That’s just something I want to work on. Personally, I feel like it’s going to help me as I improvise and especially in the right hands. So that’s that’s something new I’ve added as well. The next thing I do is Seventh Chords. Again, that’s something that I haven’t really done a whole lot of in my musical career.
So I added that to really help me be more well-rounded in my playing. So my thoughts are if I do it in my warm ups, when I’m required to do it later, when I’m playing, it’ll seem more natural. So I just start off with Major seven. So let’s just say, see Major Seven and I do the broken inversion and so I invert it the second time in the third time. And then I go back to the root and then I come back down descending as well. And then I will also do it. Blocked, blocked is a little bit more challenging.
So I do that. After I’ve done the major segments, I do dominance of the same exact thing I do, the broken all the way up first and version, second version back to reposition, I come down back to the previous position and then I do the blocked cords, OK? And then the last one I do the minor. So same thing. Both hands going at the same time. You can apply this to guitar lessons in Tulsa as well. And that’s another thing.
If you find yourself struggling to do both hands at the same time with one of these warm ups, you can just do one hand at a time and that will help you kind of learn it. And then your muscles create muscle memory and it works in that way. After that, I’ve been working on plurality and about extended cords. So we’re talking about seven, nine, 11, 13, 15. So I’ve just started digging in to doing those and understanding how it’s built, understanding how to keep extending it. And so that’s pretty fun as well. I do really both hands for this, but for one exercise I focus on the right hand, the other exercise, I focus on the left hand.
And so I was actually that’s part of my guitar lesson in Tulsa that I’m learning as well, is how to make extended cords. So basically you start, you know, honestly, for example, and you just do the first, the third, the fifth, the seventh. You just keep going. The ninth, the 11th, the 13th, the 15th. So that’s the basics of it.And after that, I end with either a finger power or a hanon, and these can be really, really good or really, really bad. I always grew up loving finger powers. I don’t know if that’s usual or unusual, but it’s something I always enjoyed even one time. Like, this is just a story. But I think I was probably 11 or 12 and I was practicing some scales and some warm ups.
And my mom went to the grocery store and she came back and I was still practicing my skills and my warm ups. And she said, holy cow, you’ve been practicing this whole time on scales and warm ups. So I don’t know if that’s normal. That’s probably not. So most people probably don’t enjoy them as much as I do, but I really do enjoy them and I see a lot of benefit from it. First of all, understanding theory, but also just developing finger strength, which is so important. And so I’ve seen the fruit of it, like when I haven’t had time to really do my finger warmups, I can definitely tell in what I’ve been consistent several months in a row, practicing my finger warmups, my fingers just fly over the keys so I notice the big difference. You can do the same with guitar lessons in Tulsa.