This short course is conceived as a state-of-the-art simple practical guide for PhD students willing to tackle the challenges posed by a multi-technical approach to provenance studies. We will illustrate the problems posed by sampling in the field and the choice of the size window for analysis to the complex issues associated with data interpretation, illustrating the general criteria that should guide provenance studies based on heavy-mineral suites and bulk petrography. The aid of statistical techniques has become indispensable at a time when the flourishing of new technologies allows the collection of bigger and bigger datasets that make objective interpretation by visual inspection impossible. We will also introduce through real case histories innovative ideas for identification of detrital minerals by Raman Spectroscopy, a user-friendly tool that allows targeting detrital minerals as small as a few microns in diameter, thus opening up a new frontier for provenance studies. Last but far from least, we will describe an application of Raman spectroscopy combined with heavy-mineral and zircon U-Pb analyses to improve the resolution of provenance analysis with implications also for the correlation of hydrocarbon reservoirs.