Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for musicians, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is it efficient to alternate practice session like every other day,
eg.
MWF - Warmp (10 mins) - Scales (10 mins) - Applications of scales / Licks / etc (10mins)
T TH S - Warmp (10 mins) - Chords (10 mins) - Rhythm (10mins)
Unfortunately because of life responsibilities i could only have an hour for practise excluding playing..
This is somewhat dependent on what your warm-up is. But - spending 10 minutes doing it seems like a bit of a waste. Athletes need that sort of warm-up time as they need to warm up most/ all of their muscles, ready for vigorous action to follow. Guitarists have hands and fingers, possibly arms, that need to work, and at your stage, nothing will be that vigorous after!
Much better to just get on with it, let's face it, playing through a few scales and chords is an effective a warm-up as any.
Unless you're the sort who needs a regime as rigid as this appears, ease off somewhat, and you'll find that some days there's no scale practice, or you spend twice as long as the last time putting a chord sequence together. So what? We don't put ourselves under the stopwatch with most activities: why here?
Also bear in mind that if you appear to have learnt something, it won't be much use practising it to death any more that time. Leave it for a few days, then re-check it. Correct 1st or 2nd time? Yes? Then leave it for a week; try again. No? Then last time was a fluke, so try practising it again. BUT - your mindset isn't going to be the same every day, so why should practice regime be? Sometimes, 10 mins into practice time, is a good time to stop, others, you could do 45 mins. We're human, not machines!
It often isn't practical - and past a certain point: impossible - to practice everything every day. Eventually, we have to make some choices as to how much practice we are going to put into various aspects of our playing and the schedule you have outlined looks very sensible.
What I especially like is the way you take care to ensure that both lead and rhythm playing aspects are given regular and equal weight. I presume from your wording that you will also be simply playing, in addition to your practice schedule, so you needn't worry about your existing chops getting rusty.
The thing to look out for is picking out a good choice of practice material for your sessions, since you don't have a lot of time. You'll want to achieve a balance between really developing the things you already know and learning new things as you go along.
At some point in the future you might want to consider mixing the schedule up a bit: for example, getting scales and rhythm in a single session so you can practice new rhythmic approaches to single-note lines and chords and licks in another, to explore interpolating harmony and melody. Plus, it makes the whole thing more interesting.
