The road to my ‘Rehearsals and Exercises’ methods and tools spans over thirty years. Today, thanks to guitar instructors Troy Grady and Chris Brooks, after years of losing interest, I finally have the confidence to master guitar playing. They revealed the once-hidden technical secrets of my favorite guitar players, Eric Johnson and Yngwie Malmsteen. But I still had a lot of practice ahead and felt lost in the thick woods with nowhere to begin. The information and exercises in front of me seemed overwhelming. I was not practicing because I did not have a practice plan. Thankfully, along the road, my practice plan was developing.

I started playing an acoustic guitar at age ten, taking lessons from a fantastic hippie guitarist. She taught me to record my practice notes and track my accomplishments in a notebook. But she taught me John Denver songs, and I wanted to learn KISS songs. I succeeded in learning the cowboy chords but lost interest in that acoustic guitar.

My grandfather bought me an electric guitar. A high school rock guitar player a few grades before me introduced me to my first alternate picking guitar exercise. He showed me what I now know is descending thirds using the minor pentatonic scale in the first position, a lick he probably picked up from Randy Rhoads’ solos. He also showed me how to use a metronome. I practiced this exercise repeatedly, hoping to play the run as fast as possible. But the metronome creep bored me, and I lost interest at around 80 bpm.

Without a practice method, I lacked the persistence to practice daily and the patience to repeat countless guitar exercises. I dabbled intermittently in guitar and piano for the next twenty years. Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises for the Piano inspired me, but I did not have a daily practice plan and would also lose interest in piano.

A few months before discovering Troy Grady on YouTube, I completed several courses at Zach Evan’s Piano University. Zach taught me how to practice to master the piano, laying the groundwork for my path to mastering guitar. However, I lacked the technical skill to master the guitar because my right-hand alternate-picking technique was still horrendous.

In the 1980s, watching a VHS tape of Eric Johnson burning up his fretboard on Austin City Limits ignited my desire to play guitar fast. But I kept losing interest. Many years later came YouTube. A few years ago, dabbling in music engineering, I found Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great?”  which led to Ben Eller’s “This is Why You Suck at Guitar” and finally to Troy Grady’s work at Cracking the Code, which reignited my desire to master guitar technique. But I was still not practicing. Coming up on my fiftieth time around the sun, Chris Brooks poured gasoline on the ignition. After reading Neoclassical Speed Strategies for Guitar: Master Speed Picking for Shred Guitar & Play Fast – The Yng Way cover to cover twice, I made a 100% commitment to play guitar fast like Eric Johnson and Yngwie Malmsteen. Inspiration from years of music instruction burst into flame; bringing together everything I had learned about practicing, I developed my simple but revolutionary practice plan to master my musical instrument, Rehearsals and Exercises: A Method for Playing Speed Guitar. Was the road to my Path to Fast ending, or had it just begun?