Practising Guitar While on Holiday
The most important factor in consistently improving at your guitar playing is to consistently practice.
When we take a week off here, several days off there, practice shifts from helping us make progress to getting us back to where we were.
Which is frustrating.
At the same time, life happens and we can’t be glued to our studio or home practice space 24/7, and in fact, that would probably end up being a bit miserable.
Whenever I go on holiday with my family I like to take my guitar and do a bit of practice. While it isn’t the same as my “at home” practice routine, I have picked up a few ideas on getting some effective time in while still enjoying the holiday.
If we’re away for a weekend, then I’ll just take a theory textbook or do some composition on my iPad, but if we’re away for a bit longer I’ll take my guitar and find a few days to get some serious practice done.
Here’s an outline of how I approach the problem, which will hopefully give you a few ideas you can use.
Gear or no gear?
At least take your guitar with you. If you are going by car this is easy, get your electric guitar in a semi-decent gig bag or hard case and put it in the back.
You can get some decent practice done without your full pedal board, amp or rack just using your guitar unplugged.
If you want a good amplified tone, there are a huge range of modelling pedal boards available on the market.
For a cheap and mobile solution, I really like the Headrush MX5.
While I wouldn’t use it to record an album, I can get some pretty nice tones with it (even stereo lead tones) and second hand it’s a reasonable price.
If you get a nice impulse response or two for it, the tones go from being ok to being pretty good.
If you want a more pro level sound solution, then the Line 6 HX Stomp is awesome, as is the Axe FX FM3.
If you want a cheaper solution, then Valetron and Ampero both have cheaper units that sound incredible given their price points. I’ve seen a few reviews on YouTube and these units have a very impressive sound for their price.
Most of these units come with an Aux In and headphones out, so you can plug in your metronome or backing track from your phone, mix in your pedal and use your headphones for silent practice.
If you have an iPad you can go one step further and have a mini-recording setup with an external sound interface such as:
- Focusrite Scarlett
- Behringer U-Phoria
- Depusheng RX2
I wanted a cheaper solution interface to use with my Headrush and iPad a while ago, and used the Depusheng 2i2, Headrush MX5 and iPad Pro together without any problems (albeit with a lot of cables!).
For recording programs, you have a few options, such as:
- GarageBand
- Logic Pro for iOS
None of these are ideal solutions. After using Logic Pro on my desktop for years, I find GarageBand to be too childish and frustrating to use, and LPX on iOS is a subscription which seems unnecessary - and doesn’t have the score editor.
If you have a laptop then you can always take that and run full desktop versions of your home studio programs - or if you run your home studio from a laptop, you can effectively take it with you!
In fact, if you want a mobile solution, a M1 MacBook Air will probably do the job quite nicely.
What to practice?
What you can practice depends a bit on what tools you have available. If you are taking your home setup on your laptop, then you can simply continue with whatever you were working on at home.
As you may not have as much time as normal, you may want to put together a cut-down routine that focuses on some technique and training exercises.
Half an hour of focussed technique practice through two to four exercises will help keep your playing sharp.
If you are in the middle of a big creative project then there are a few options. This is the situation I found myself in last week - I’m currently working on a 13 minute piece of music which runs in Logic Pro X on my iMac, and went on holiday with family for a week. I had an iPad and a Headrush MX5 and there were two things I could work on:
- Memorising the piece
- Metronome training specific sections
I put all my sheet music on the iPad (forScore is a great app for view and organising your music PDFs) and had my metronome go into the aux input on my Headrush MX5, using the headphones. Hey presto, I have a neat practice setup where I could do a few hours focussed practice that was very beneficial to moving my project forwards.
I chose a section of the music that needed some work and simply trained that to a metronome, using the PDF to check I had the right notes.
When to practice?
I always recommend practising early in the morning when possible. When on a family holiday I usually find I’m up early we don’t leave to do anything until the late morning, so finding anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple of hours on a few days is reasonably possible.
I quite often just have a black coffee for breakfast, so making a coffee and doing some practice while everyone else has breakfast often works well.
Practising in the late afternoon or evening is not ideal, you’re tired, might be a little sunburned or had a few beers and you are not going to be in the right mind to practice effectively.
I’ll find a spot where I can be alone, practising around other people is distracting and irritating. This might be in my room, or sometimes in an AirBnB there’ll be a study or games room I can barricade myself in for a bit.
I’ll usually say I’m about to do some practice and ask to not be disturbed unless there is some important reason.
Conclusion
If you really love playing guitar, then being without it for a week or two is awful. If you are highly focussed on making progress then you do not want to suddenly stop playing for a week or two.
At the same time, you want to have fun and relax.
There are always going to be some exercises or approaches you can use that will be more effective than others, and by choosing the highest impact practice element you can still make progress with your playing, even if it is for 30-45 minutes for a few days a week.
As with a lot of things, you have to:
- Look at what you have available, and
- Figure out what you want to work on, then
- Set aside a bit of time to do it
And you’ll find a nice balance between getting some solid practice done and having an enjoyable holiday.