Chords for D'Addario: Robben Ford on His Practice Routine

_ So a question from William. _ _
William is asking,
_ _ How much did I practice?
What did I practice when I first started playing?
And what is my practice routine now?
_ _ You know, it's a good question and
_ _ _ it's _
It's been one of the aspects of my my whole
Development as a guitar player, I think perhaps largely due to being incredibly lazy
_ as a young man
_ _ And I had a little bit of talent that kind of kicked everything into gear I
_ _ _ Had kind of a jumpstart when I picked up the guitar
I just excelled at it kind of quickly and I have a good ear so and I like the blues
So it was relatively easy for me to start imitating
You know the blues guitar players that I liked not exactly sounding like them.
But
Even if I even if I tried but I could hear the notes and I could hear the phrasing so _
you know
it was relatively easy for me to
_ _ To you know duplicate what I heard
Again, because the music was simple that's important listening to simple music
In my case, so I didn't really practice
I listened to the get to you know guitar players that I liked and I played the guitar
I listen I try to place what I heard, you know
It wasn't practice exactly, but I played the guitar all the time
That's even more important in a way to have that instrument in your hands, I think
_ _ But eventually and this is really not until I got into
_ You know my late teens.
I started playing guitar when I was 13 _ _
So at about age 18, I got a guitar.
I got a chord book and
I learned all the jazz chords that I was hearing my favorite jazz guitar players play and
_ _ Anybody can find a book and learn chords out of it and the book that I got which was Mickey Baker's jazz chords volume 1
I think I
learned all those chords and it shows you how to use them in a very old-school traditional jazz style and
So I learned the chord voicings and I started applying them to the music that I was playing which was Chicago blues
and BB King and _ _
those things matched up very well and
_ _ so learning chords and
Then later _
Like with a few years later.
I decided I should probably learn the scales that run through these chords
So I got a book and I looked and I found these scales and I started practicing these scales
_ And I started practicing them with back-and-forth picking technique to get that thing going
Which was you know in order to increase my speed?
So for me, it wasn't like I had a routine.
It wasn't like I had a lot of different techniques.
I was working on I
_ _ Just listened and played a lot of blues
_ learned a bunch of chords learn the scales that run through the chords and
Then again just tried making music out of them.
I didn't take licks off of records and
I would _ listen and I that sounds kind of like this and I would try to find it, you know _
_ _ so
That hasn't changed.
That's the way I've I've worked my entire life and I've never been terribly drawn to
complex music to play complex music
like Chick Corea, you know or a
_ Lot of people who you know play music with a lot of chords.
I stayed away from it
Stayed closer to simpler forms of music and _ _ _
Instead of trying to develop a million things to play over all these things I've tried to play
music
_ Through you know, whatever _
form of music I choose, you know, and I rely more on my ear and a melodic sense and _ _ _
I'd say yeah relying on your ear not knowing and actually relying on your ear to try to get someplace
That helps you develop your ear and for me
That's the number one thing is developing your ear to be able to hear what it is
that you know is being played by someone else and _ _ _ _ _
and
You know then be able to reproduce it, you know _
So as advice I would say keep the music kind of simple, you know
_ _ Enjoy the music that you're playing and you don't necessarily have to overtax yourself
You need to get a foundation, you know, and that should be accompanied by
You know a sense of you know playing music as opposed to playing a lot of things on the guitar _ _ _