“The biggest problem of everyone practicing is that at the beginning of the practice session you don't know exactly what to practice. Usually you are there with this big list of things you should be practicing and you don't know how much time to devote to this or that. The Practice Generator helps you doing that.”

The Practice Generator creates a schedule for you that tells you how much time you have to spend on each element. This is EXTREMELY invaluable because it takes out all the thinking from the process. You just need to know where you are, where you want to be and the Practice Generator tells you how much you need to practice each element, what day and with what frequency.

This helped me immensely. It's like night and day. Before I was practicing a lot of course, but the results came very slowly. After using the Practice Generator, everything came way faster because my practice was more balanced, following my goals.

Tommaso Zillio, Professional Musician and Guitar Teacher, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

“The Practice Generator is just awesome! I wouldn’t be where I’m at today without Practice Generator.”

Tom Hess put his whole depth of knowledge into this one program. To have that man’s knowledge all in one system on how long you should practice, when you should practice for, how frequently you should practice for. It’s just you know, amazing in my eyes, I mean, I didn’t have that knowledge. I had no idea how to create practice schedules. But it’s more than that. I use it to actually keep track of beats per minute. I see how quick I’m getting. I use all the notes, I jot down what I’ve practiced and how I’ve practiced it… to what backing track, and it’s just all in one place. It’s just nice, not to have… to open up a million and one documents and say alright here’s my practice schedule for this one… here’s this one… it’s all in one simple place. Even on the custom items. If there is something there that you just really want to put in, you can even choose how frequently you want to do it, how many days and how frequently you want to do it in the time schedule. So if you want it to take up to 50% of your time you can pick that, if you want to do less, you can choose less time.

Dan Mayhew, Stowmarket, England

“To me the Practice Generator is the thing that keeps me on track. If I don't have the Practice Generator, I drift a little and I start wandering off and do my own thing, but with the Practice Generator in front of you, it really pulls the focus right in. ... The Practice Generator is a real motivator and a real measure of progress.”

It gives me structure in my practicing which is something that on my own I probably wouldn't do. So Tom's Practice Generator does it for me. When I saw the new Practice Generator and I started using it, I realized 'This is it'! It puts me right back on track.

John Magee, San Francisco, California, USA

“There is no way I would quit using the Practice Generator because it helped that much!”

I'm focusing more when I'm actually working on a topic. Now, when I work on Improvisation for example for 20 minutes, whereas before I worked on it for an hour, I'm actually getting more A LOT more out of that 20 minutes than I did for the hour.

Tom knows what he is doing. He understands how much you should be practicing each item or aspect of your guitar playing. If someone else made a product like this, they would just assign a random amount of time and make it look like it was pre-determinded, whereas with Tom's Practice Generator, he knows how much you should be practicing each item.

Lori Simpson, Pensacola, Florida, USA

“Generally I have a very hard time making schedules and scheduling my practice time for myself. I was struggling with that for quite a long time.”

I would have a rough idea 'this is what I should be doing', but I was never completely sure and I also had a very hard time with it. What the Practice Generator has done for me is giving me that structure. It gives me an exact idea 'this is what I need to be practicing today'.

Tom knows what he is doing. He understands how much you should be practicing each item or aspect of your guitar playing. If someone else made a product like this, they would just assign a random amount of time and make it look like it was pre-determinded, whereas with Tom's Practice Generator, he knows how much you should be practicing each item.

Graeme Whitecross, Saskatoon, Canada

“The Practice Generator is about providing structure. I think knowing what to practice is a really important part of the overall picture of effective practice, but without structure it’s really easy to raffle on something that’s not important or to spend way too much time on a technique that you just don’t need to spend that much time on.”

It’s about efficiency, and metal guitar is all about efficiency, so getting the practice time that you have to maximize the throughput. Examples with the Practice Generator would be not over-working sweep picking, having the right slice of time… whether it’s 20 minutes or 40 minutes, depending on skill level, but not just like spending 3 hours doing the same thing. So it’s about efficiency and it’s about structure. Those can be difficult for me to provide for myself.

It’s not just a calculator, because you’re inputting things like how much experience you have with a technique, how familiar you are with it… as a result, you’ve got Tom’s experience in knowing that if you’re an advanced student you shouldn’t be training a certain technique more than a certain amount of time. It’s a really efficient timing mechanism, so if you get really into your practice, it’s going to tell you when you’re done and you can move onto the next thing. And it will incorporate rest periods, not overly long rest periods, you know 5 minutes or so to cool down between something and think about the next thing you’re going to work on. So I think that while you might look at Practice Generator and think “Oh, I can do this myself”… you’d be hard-pressed to consistently do it on your own. Again, consistency and efficiency, structure are things that a calculator doesn’t really give you.

Brandon Reinhart, Seattle, Washington, USA

“The Practice Generator is great… really really good. I find it’s so much easier to be able to get up, get your practice set for the day and you just have to look at the screen, the spreadsheet it can put it into, and just know exactly what you’ve got to do. I used to sit there for a long time and think, what should I do? You know.”

There’s so many things it was just overwhelming for me… it’s like should I be doing this, should I be doing that, then I’d be doing something and thinking about something else I should be doing. It just lays it out for you, so that’s great. You can set the time that you want, and it’s specific to what you want to work on too, so you can change it up each week… it just helps to give you structure to your practicing each day, so you know what you need to do. Even the little countdown timer, all that visual thing, but I think that makes a difference too… funny enough... to see that counting down you sort of think, ok I really got to use this time. I think if you’ve got less time, you use it better. So, just seeing that sort of ticking down and beeping at the end, sort of makes you think I’ve got to use this 10… 20 minutes whatever it might be and you get a lot done. I also find it great, because I use a similar thing with my students as well with the Practice Generator.

It’s going to ask you what you want to work on. Like you can select from present things that are in the program, techniques, songwriting, theory, lots of things. Or you can put in your own things that you want to work on, and then it’ll ask you a bunch of questions, whether it’s a long term, short term goal, whether or not you’re close to mastering this particular skill or concept you want to work on, or if it’s something that’s totally new to you… I think there’s a lot of advanced settings as well that you can select whether you want it to be something that comes up daily, or if it’s you know… you want it every second day… there’s a ton of things in there that you can do to customize it further. But you can save it and it spits out a schedule for you. It’s not something that’s just sort of, you know, been calculated off something that’s not relevant to you. You can see very specific times to work on things, and you can get… it just makes a lot of sense when you see it.

I recommend the Practice Generator because it’s going to save you time. It’s going to save you so much time. You’ll get more done in 20 minutes I think… that’s a minimum, than 2 hours. It’s very direct and it sets it all up for you, so you don’t have to sit there investing time into thinking about what to do, you just do it.

Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia

“Before the Practice Generator, I might have been at worst, I wouldn’t have had a plan at all and a lot of my practice time would be fritted away kind of burning energy thinking about what to do next. At best, I might have had a plan for a practice session, but it would not have been based on anything.”

So certain items need to be practiced in different ways. Maybe some things are best practiced in big chunks, some things are best practiced in lots of small chunks separated out. The Practice Generator can take this into account. And it can plan out your whole next week of practices based on that.

So maybe this item based on Tom’s experience and how they programed it... it’ll know ok this item would be best in little chunks every other day is how he’s going to absorb this information best… these items he needs to be doing for an hour every day to be… to be getting it. Practice Generator takes care of all of that so even if I had a plan, I wouldn’t know why my plan was that way, it wouldn’t be based on anything. Whereas Practice Generator it’s all based on Tom Hess’s experience as a guitar teacher, which is formidable. So I went from often not having a plan and wasting a lot of time thinking about what to do to not only having a plan, but having a very intelligent plan to make the most of every second I spend practice guitar.

The Practice Generator takes into account how different items, different subjects should be practiced. And it does that because it is programmed with everything that Tom Hess has learned in his long career instructing guitar very successfully. So it’s not like the Practice Generator just divides up your time evenly between the items you're practicing, it takes into account how things need to be done. In order to do that yourself… I mean, assuming you could magic... you could snap your fingers and magically make a program that did what you want it to do... wouldn’t even get into having to program it yourself, you would need to have Tom Hess’s experience and success rate… I mean really Tom Hess’s understanding of how to learn guitar… how to master guitar in order to be able to create something like that which very few people… very few people do understand that. Very few people have that experience and that understanding so I don’t think there are many people who can create something like that and it wouldn’t be easy to do even if they could.  

First and most, the Practice Generator will help you to make sure that every second of your practice time is organized, efficient and effective. It’s really easy to use. It does not take squat for time to set up, you’ll have your next week of practice planned out so you don’t have to think about it in a couple minutes. And it’s cheap. There’s really no reason not to do it. It costs maybe a few dollars a month for all that benefit. It’s a pretty obvious choice to me.

Leo Smith, Iowa City, Iowa, USA

“Before the Practice Generator, I knew that I had a lot of things to practice, but I had no way of really having an idea how much time should I spend on this one thing? How often should I do this one thing? And I’d spent so much time wondering that, that I wouldn’t practice guitar.”

So what the Guitar Practice Generator does is it makes it easy. You plug in the things you know you need to be working on, hit the button, there’s your schedule. You can sort it out depending on how much time you have and there’s your 8 days to practice, it’s right there. And so if you follow that, you’re going to be getting better. So there’s not that time waste of wondering what should I be doing?... How often should I be doing this? And really, it’d be easy to use that in your guitar teaching business too for your students. Just run them through the same program that you’re doing.

Neil McCammon, Maryville, Tennessee, USA

“Day one was just like 3 times better than any other practice… 5 hours of practicing can be cut into you know… 30 minutes… an hour. I’ve progressed so fast because of the Practice Generator.”

I don’t practice without the Practice Generator it’s just like you know… you’re focused all the time. You’re not just doing some random stuff, and then getting side-tracked, you know playing your favorite song or whatever… and 2 hours later you feel like whatever… nothing happened you know. It’s like 5 minutes you do this… 10 minutes you do this… and in those 5 minutes you feel improvement… you really feel it. It’s not like you sit there, and after like a week you get something… it’s like after 5 minutes.

Matteo Miller, San Diego, California, USA

“The thing that the Practice Generator does for me is it helps me to organize my schedule without me having to put a whole bunch of thought into how I’m going to break down the schedule. Since I’ve only been taking lessons with Tom for two years now, prior to that I just did all that myself… and I just never really could figure out how to get it in a way that worked well for me.”

I usually spent too much time thinking about how to organize my schedule. So the Practice Generator takes a lot of that time out of it, and just makes it easier for me to jump right into what I want to do.

The way I look at the Practice Generator, every time you choose a topic, there’s a series of questions that you have to answer that they use to kind of help you figure out how much time you should be spending on what particular area or another, and it’s really dependent upon what your goals are and what you’re trying to do on the guitar.

The Practice Generator is definitely a valuable tool to be used, because one, it’s going to help you organize your time… especially nowadays, we all have limited time, we all have a lot of commitments and things we have to do. So when you sit down to practice, you want to make sure that you’re getting the maximum amount of time out of that hour or two hours that you might have in a day. And the other thing is it helps you just stay organized. It helps you actually keep track of what you’ve done, so you can look back over the course of the last week and have a sense of you know what you did.

Andrew Tintle, Richmond, California, USA

“The Practice Generator takes the guesswork out of your practice, because you just punch in what you want to practice… it’s there, it punches out a time.”

It works with that whole geometric concept that Tom teaches where you learn from a little bit at a time, but you’re building up all areas of your playing abilities. So you’re not just improving your lead, you’re also doing rhythm, all the other stuff, integration, all other concepts as well...

For the price of it, it’s absolutely an invaluable tool.

Allen Hopgood, Gold Coast, Australia

“I really like the Practice Generator. I found it really fantastic to work with. There are so many things on the internet, so much stuff to work on, so you just feel lost.”

The Practice Generator is brilliant, it organized all the work and you just know what to do.

Nicholas Remy,  Paris, France

“With the Practice Generator, it basically helped me improve by just helping me manage my time just better.”

The top reasons I recommend the Practice Generator would be for 1 – obviously what you have been doing hasn’t really been working for you and usually the results speak for themselves… and it really helps you better manage your time. I used to just do this: “Ok, I think I want to do scales today” and I would run through a scale that I normally do and I would get bored really quickly… and before I knew it, like an hour has gone by, and I just kind of wasted that whole hour. So, I mean, it’s very good for having the structure there instead of it kind of being all over the place. So that’d be one of the reasons.

The other reason too as I said before, just the organization. And all the different subcategories… I mean, a lot of people think you just have rhythm, music theory and just like two hand synchronization. But it had some stuff in there that I didn’t even think about using as practice. Like chord knowledge was another one that when I saw it I was like “Huh? Chord knowledge?” I’ve never ever thought about really like, I should do something just besides a G power chord or something like that. So I mean it definitely helps you practice not only in a timely manner, and sets your schedule hour by how many hours you have per week.

And you can have multiple ones which is cool too, I liked about it. I’ve got one that’s just my lead week, and I’ve got a rhythm week and then I’ve got a composition, theory week... because it saves the schedules that you make. So that alone is a really good, another top reason why I’d recommend it.

It not only gives you the structure of what you already know, but there may be some stuff in there that it’s going to tell you to practice that you may never thought of practicing.

John Paul Estrada, Morgan Hill, California, USA

“The Practice Generator basically takes a group of skill sets, breaks them up, and actually gives you a focused time or puts you in a timeline so you won’t spend too much time on one thing and you become top heavy on maybe technique when you also need to develop other skills like aural skills, songwriting, things like that… improvisation. That’s basically what the Practice Generator does, it’s a great tool.”

You put what you need in there, it sorts them out, it gives you an 8 day schedule and you go from there. So I think it’s a great tool to have. And from there you’ll progress a lot faster, because you’re hitting everything as far as what’s needed to be a good player if that’s your goal. And not just focusing on some things that you really like or... it’s some of your strengths, because you know a lot of people, myself included tend to lean towards strengths, and I’m just technique heavy... so when it bings off, you say ok, you need to move onto aural skills… you know it’s a great tool to use.

Leon Rahmann, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, USA

“Using the Practice Generator has helped me become a better guitar player faster in several ways.”

The main thing for me was... I’m an organized person. I made my own schedules, I was pretty organized... I had things divided well. I thought I did a good job at it. So I was practicing according to my schedule and I was doing ok. But then, when I used the Practice Generator, with Tom’s idea of what I should be practicing, when, and how often... it changed a lot of the things that I had thought were important, and made other things more important.

And what I noticed was that I was starting to improve quicker in some areas, well all the areas... even though I was spending less time on some… and some things that I was struggling with… I started to see some more progress because I was spending more time on it. So the Practice Generator was really critical in dividing my time properly and being more effective.

Maurice Richard, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

“I really enjoy the Practice Generator. It really lights a fire under me to stick with it and get the most out of it and I like the fact that it gives you a way of keeping track of how much time each practice item was worked on... plus it’s got a countdown timer, so I don’t even have to use my own timer, I can just use the program, it’s all self-contained.”

It really is addictive. Addictive in a good way. Addictive like I wanna keep practicing more. There's something about coming back to it and seeing like you know can I knock out today.

So there’s the addictive quality of it, which guarantees that you're going to get your money’s worth out of it if not a lot more. Then it’s got the time saving device. I’ll give you a for instance about how I learned to trust Tom Hess Music Corporation as my sole online source for information… and that was, I was reluctant for a number of years actually to invest, but I sent an e-mail… Tom Hess was sending e-mails to promote the Practice Generator, and I answered one of them and I said, you know, I had some questions about it... Part of his answer was I guarantee you if you start using this program, you will get addicted in a good way because you want to be a better guitar player. You will be using this thing. You’ll be practicing more. And I was like okay, you know it’s not a lot of money, I’ll try it. And within, not even two days, somewhere around a day and a half, I told my wife, I said this thing is exactly as awesome and addictive as Tom Hess said it was going to be. And I just was really really pleased. And that’s why it took less than 2 weeks to start signing up for correspondence lessons. And then when I started taking correspondence lessons, it wasn’t long before I realized everything Tom Hess is offering is very high in value.

Grant Shinto, La Vergne, Tennessee, USA

“The Practice Generator makes you much more organized than you would be without it really.”

Some people have their own methods for practicing and they say do this and this and this... Usually what they’ll do is repeat it over and over again every day... which is not bad. But the Practice Generator makes you do something different every day so it actually targets everything instead of just a few topics. Instead of saying “Ok, I’m just going to work on my technique for like 4 weeks” or something, and you do the same thing every day, which is good, you’re going to improve. But the Practice Generator gives you things that you wouldn’t work on in those 4 weeks, and it makes you do something different, and it targets a bunch of different things. It makes you grow faster, because it’s more of a geometric way of practicing than a linear way.

I would recommend the Practice Generator because it makes you very organized. It makes you practice in a geometric way, and it helps you reach your goals much faster than you would on your own.

Phil Henein, Huntington Beach, California, USA