Intermediate To Advanced Practice Template - Guitar Course

Intermediate To Advanced Practice Template

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Nick Jennison Tutor, Professional Guitarist

Lessons Included in this Course

Course Content Overview

Every section is built around one specific reason intermediate players stop improving, and each one arrives with the technique work needed to fix it. Work through the template in order the first time round. After that, it is yours to rearrange, shorten or extend to fit the time you actually have.

• Measuring your progression. Speed is meaningless until you can measure it honestly. Nick shows how to benchmark tempo, accuracy and consistency, log the results, then retest under identical conditions a week later. You finish with numbers instead of impressions, which is the difference between guessing at progress and tracking guitar progress properly.
• Interval scales and groupings. Runs up and down a scale shape sound like exercises. Grouping the same notes in intervals of a third, fourth or sixth turns them into lines, forces your picking hand to work across strings, and builds the fretboard awareness that later sections rely on.
• Finger displacement exercises. Familiar shapes get shifted onto unfamiliar string pairs and positions, so your fretting hand has to solve problems rather than repeat patterns. This is the section that builds genuine finger independence and exposes any hidden tension in your grip.
• Virtuoso variations. Modern fusion and technical rock players reshape simple ideas into sprawling lines. Nick borrows those devices, then slows them down far enough to own them, using hybrid picking and string skipping to reach intervals a pick alone cannot manage cleanly.
• Guided limited improvisation. Improvisation improves fastest when the options are restricted. Deliberate constraints on note choice, rhythm and register force better phrasing decisions, and the vibrato and bending work in this section gives every phrase a vocal quality instead of a mechanical one.
• Zones of the fretboard. Instead of thinking in five boxes, you learn to see the neck as connected zones. Slides and position shifts become the glue between them, which is how players move freely across the fretboard without losing the thread of an idea.
• Musical structures. Technique only counts when it survives a chord progression. This section puts arpeggios, melodies and phrasing inside real harmonic contexts so that your practice translates into solos and rhythm parts that fit the music.
• The demo practice session. Watch the whole template run start to finish, with timings, transitions and decisions explained as they happen. It is the closest thing to sitting in the room while a professional works, and it shows how to keep a session focused when time is short.
• Troubleshooting. Tension, inconsistency, a plateau that will not shift, exercises that fall apart on stage: this closing section names the usual causes and gives each one a practical fix, so a bad week becomes a diagnosis rather than a reason to stop.

TECHNICAL SKILLS YOU WILL DEVELOP

• A repeatable intermediate to advanced guitar practice routine that fits into 30 to 60 minutes
• Clean alternate picking at tempo, with speed bursts that build headroom above your current ceiling
• Legato control through hammer-ons and pull-offs, for smoother lines and less pick dependence
• Hybrid picking and string skipping for wider intervals and more dynamic phrasing
• Interval-based scale groupings that turn fretboard patterns into musical statements
• Accurate string bending and controlled vibrato, the two techniques that make a phrase sing
• Arpeggio and chord-tone awareness for soloing over changes rather than over one shape
• Stronger timing and syncopation, so fast playing still sits in the groove
• A working method for measuring guitar progress instead of relying on how a session felt

This Course is Ideal for Players Who...

This course is written for guitarists who can already play. You have barre chords, a few scale shapes, some solos you can get through, and enough technique to know what good playing sounds like. What you may not have is a system, which is why the progress has slowed to something you can barely measure.

If your practice currently consists of playing the things you can already play, the template replaces that loop with a weekly structure: what to warm up with, what to push, what to review, and how to know when a section is finished. That framework is the missing piece for most players stuck between intermediate and advanced guitar playing.

It suits guitarists who want to break through a guitar plateau without changing teachers every three months; who prefer measurable goals to vague ambitions; who are drawn to modern fusion and technical rock, and to the thinking behind players such as Guthrie Govan; and who want lessons from a working guitarist rather than a generic exercise book. Nick Jennison's teaching is precise, practical and refreshingly free of mystique, and it assumes you are willing to do the work rather than watch it.

The same structure works for the player with a crowded week. Because the routine is modular, a 25-minute day still counts and a long Sunday can carry the deeper sections. Nothing collapses if you miss a session, and nothing is wasted when you return.

What will I achieve from completing this course?

Most practice advice fails for a boring reason: it hands you exercises but no order, no measurement and no exit condition. You end up collecting drills, playing the enjoyable ones, and quietly avoiding the rest. A template removes those decisions, and that is where the Intermediate To Advanced Practice Template earns its place among LickLibrary's practice routine courses.

The measurement thread runs through the whole course. Tempo, accuracy and consistency are recorded, retested and compared, so improvement becomes visible even in weeks when the guitar feels unfamiliar. Guitarists who track their practice this way tend to practise less and improve more, because they stop spending time on material that is no longer doing anything for them.

Technique is also placed where it is needed rather than bundled into a separate warm-up. Hybrid picking appears because string skipping demands it. Bending and vibrato appear because constrained improvisation exposes weak phrasing. That order matters: you learn each technique at the moment its musical purpose is obvious, which is when it sticks.

Finally, the routine ends in music. Constraint-led improvisation and the musical structures section pull everything back into progressions and melodies, so the speed you build has somewhere to go. That is the difference between a workout and an education, and it is why players return to this template long after the first run-through.