Michael Ploucha Lesson Materials

Hi Michael, here is a temporary page where we can keep all of your lesson materials until the new platform is ready to roll.

4/3/26 Lesson

1. Practice Time Division – Here’s a basic breakdown of how much practice time you should be spending on each area. We haven’t touched on arpeggios yet, but we’ll get there. This is a basic possible breakdown, feel free to keep it flexible and to adjust the times if you have less/more time to practice. This assumes a 60 minute practice session. If you have 30 minutes to practice just try and keep the ratios somewhere close to this as that will keep you progressing in each of these areas. 

   
   1) Warm up – 3-5 minutes
   2) Scales w/ rhythms – 10-15 minutes (new bending exercise can go here)
   3) Chord exercises – 10-15 minutes
   4) Songs (just Hide Away for now) – 20-25 minutes

   
   
2. Bending Practice – The new bending exercise sheet is below. Try and focus on the first one for this week, but jump to the second one if you want to. Take a look at the notes first and then the rhythm and try to play it in a loop with your metronome, repeating as many times as you want. 

   
   
3. Chord Rhythm Practice – I’ve added to the chord rhythm sheet and posted the new pages below. These are essentially the second and third page of the previous worksheet. 

   
   1) Exercises 3 & 4 incorporate the minor shape we talked about in two different ways.
   2) Exercise 5 is specifically for the hammer on pattern we’ve been working on. It moves it into different areas to help you get the hammer on pattern down while doing it on different chords and areas of the neck. If you have any confusion with this just focus on the first part of it and we’ll go over it next week.

1. Recording Yourself – Like we spoke about, a good habit to build is making regular recordings of your different practice exercises. It doesn’t need to be on a daily basis, but a weekly basis is a great way to track your progress. It can be just a short recording of you running through what you are working on. This gives you the ability to hear what you sound like, and to come back to older recordings to hear how much you’ve improved over time. It can also help you to critique yourself and notice areas where you’d like to improve. However, don’t be too critical. I’ve allowed myself to be discouraged before and that isn’t helpful. The goal is to be objective and to track progress.
   
2. Rhythm Guitar Exercise – The new worksheet that we went over shows the next steps in our progression from learning the key triad shapes to applying them in a context that is much closer to how you’d use them in a song. I’ve attached that worksheet below. Just like you did in the lesson when we first looked at it, try applying the same idea to the other shapes, moving from the 4 to the 5 by sliding the shape up a whole step and then settle into the new position on the 1 chord. We’re building up the connections between areas and you picked up on this right away which is fantastic.
   
3. Strumming Chords – The issue you brought up with chord strumming is a great place for you to use a recording to get a real sense of what it sounds like when you strum in different ways. Try to strum quickly to get all the notes to sound out together, but try to do it at a moderate volume with your pick angled away from the strings. This will allow you to strum with the speed required to get the notes to sound out strongly together but without it being overly loud or aggressive sounding.
   
4. Hide Away – You mentioned you were moving forward with the next section of the song, so let’s circle back to that next week and take a look at how it’s going. Keep coming back to that difficult section at the end of the first 12 bars a little each time you practice. It will keep getting more comfortable if you keep with it.
   
5. As for the rest of your practice routine, I can tell that it’s working well and you are making progress and getting more comfortable. Keep up with the note location and scales as we’ve been doing, and we’ll build on this more in the coming weeks. Keep up the great work!
   

1. Note Location – Keep up with this to open your practice time. 2 keys (G & D) for now.
   
2. Scales – Keep working on those rhythms with the G major scale shapes. If you feel like it’s too much to try all 4 of the different positions while trying to keep track of the rhythms, try focusing on that one shape to memorize the different rhythms and then it will be easier to apply them to the different shapes.
   
3. Rhythm Guitar – play with the idea we talked about regarding string muting. This is the main way that you can clean up the sound of your rhythm playing. Let your fingers gently touch the strings next to them to stop them from sounding out, and then you can use your thumb or an unused finger to hang over the 6th string. That way you can strum all 6 strings with a full strum and you’ll only hear the notes you want to hear. It takes some time to get used to the feel of this, but once you get comfortable with it you won’t have to worry about getting notes that you don’t want sounding out. Stay loose in your strumming hand and angle the pick as you strum, gently rotating your wrist away from the direction you are strumming.
   
4. Chords – Stick with the chords we’ve been working on, those triad shapes are going to be very useful going forward. Set up a cycle where you can try strumming them in a repetitive pattern. That way you are setting yourself up to play them in a song situation. Work on the hammer on pattern that we talked about with the G chord with the barre hammering on to C. Move it around the neck if you want, this will give you the feel of it in different areas.
   
5. Hide Away – Set your metronome and try to loop the turnaround an a very slow speed. Try practicing it 10x in a row and then try playing the first full 12 bar pattern. If you do this once a day (or more if you want) you’ll definitely see some progress in the next week.

Here’s an outline of what we talked over today:

1) Note Location: Add a 2nd key to the note location drill when you start your practice routine. D would be a good one to add.

2) Scales: Run your scale a few times first without worrying about rhythm. We want to build up the muscle memory and this will help you not to have to think so much about the fingering when you go to practice the rhythms. Keep working on the same rhythms, you already seem a little more comfortable and it will just get easier as you keep working on them.

3) Chords: Apply a strumming pattern to the chord shapes we have been working on. Keep it simple, but try and play a strumming pattern that you know on each of the chords before changing. Spend a little time working on that hammer on pattern we talked about. You’ll need this for “Embryonic Journey” so getting comfortable with that now will speed up the process later.

4) Song: Hide Away is a great song to work on right now. Focus on the first 12 bar pattern, especially on the last two bars where it’s a little trickier. Below I’ve got the song slowed down to many different tempos. Start at 50% until you feel really comfortable with the notes. Then you can try a little faster when you feel ready.

Freddie King “Hide Away”

50%

55%

60%

65%

70%

75%

Keep up the good work! Sounds like you’ve made some progress with the rhythms we worked on last week. Below is an updated assortment of visuals. Take a look at the rhythm sheet, I added a 2nd page where we have the rhythms including the eighth rests. Add these rhythms to your scale practice.

Key Points From Today’s Lesson
– Accent the strong beats when you practice. This means picking a little harder on beats 1 & 3 as you practice any patterns. This helps orient your rhythm properly and will improve your internal rhythm.
– Practice the rhythms with the major scale like you’ve been doing, but also try them with the pentatonic scale (visual below)
– Start trying to create your own phrases for solos using a 4 part formula. This is great to spend a few minutes on after you’ve practiced your regular routine.

1) Play a very simple idea, for example a very simple rhythm on 2 notes.
2) Repeat the same rhythm on 2 different notes.
3) Repeat the same idea on 2 more notes but slightly change the rhythm.
4) Repeat the original rhythm idea on 2 more notes, landing on the root note of the scale.

This basic formula will get you starting to create complete ideas. Keep it really simple! We just want to start building this ability a little bit at a time.

1) Note location drill: use the fretboard map below to find notes on all 6 strings. Practice however many you want to to begin your practice time, but 2-3 would be a good number to do each day. Cycle through different keys throughout the week.
2) Practice pentatonic shape 1 as we played in the lesson, applying each of the 4 rhythms to the scale fragment. Start first from the lowest note and play all rhythms from there, then start on the highest note and do the same thing in the reverse direction. Try and do each rhythm 4 times before moving to the next one. Work up to where you can move on to the next rhythm without stopping. As usual try and do it to a metronome, and also try it now and then throughout the week without a metronome.
3) Practice the 1 – 4 – 5 – 1 chord progression as shown on the sheet below, in the key of G. Try it with different strumming patterns, but always in time and creating a full cycle out of the chords. When you feel comfortable with the shapes, try it in different keys by moving to different parts of the neck. These are 3 really important shapes, so we just want to get you very familiar and comfortable with them and we’ll build on this as time goes on.