Introduction

This is intended as supporting material to the AdvancingMusician.com disadvantage exercises article.

Thank you for checking out this cheat sheet. You'll find a quick summary and enough disadvantage exercise suggestions to keep you busy for a long time.

So, continue reading at your own risk. ;-)

Quick Summary

You create disadvantage exercises by placing (temporary) limitations on yourself in order to gain valuable new insights you would not notice otherwise.

Best of all: it's not as complicated as it sounds.

Benefits Of Disadvantage Exercises

• They are interesting/fun to practice.
• You focus on one area of your musical development.
• Therefore, there is less danger of feeling overwhelmed.
• The change of perspective leads to a gain of new insights.

Mindset

From my personal experience, the best approach is to view disadvantage exercises as experiments or short-term challenges. Don't approach them with a set outcome in mind or a specific goal you'd like to reach. Actually, this would be counterproductive to some extent. Let's face it, nobody cares how many minutes you can play using only two fingers or if you use only one playing technique exclusively.

Rather, ask open-ended questions with no attachment to a pre-determined outcome. Questions are truly valuable, and that's why you'll find my suggestions in this e-book in the form of a question.

When you keep a playful attitude while practicing disadvantage exercises, there might be lots of new ideas showing up in your playing.

And this could be quite interesting, both to you as well as your audience.

Where To Start?

Keep in mind that not all suggestions will be practical on all instruments or will apply to your musical goals. That's ok and to be expected.

Simply use what speaks to you at the moment. Six months down the road you might find completely different exercise ideas calling you.

With that disclaimer out of the way, here are some suggestions to get you going ...