Indeed!
Something Troy and I have talked about is how I would experiment with different motions, positions, etc. when trying to hit higher and higher speeds. He and I have talked about the importance of experimenting with new and different things to find what works.
I don’t think this is what @Troy did, he may of had bad motions (like stringhopping) but he discovered different, more optimal motions. I don’t think he improved any bad motion, I think with all his successful motions it was more a matter of learning to stay locked in and coordinated with the optimal motion.
Isn’t that what he’s saying here:
I would argue that @milehighshred’s tall ergonomic mouse DT motion was always capable of the speeds he is able to hit and that his practice helps more with the coordination aspect of his picking and syncing up his left hand.
In that case, I think the classical teacher would be implicitly assuming that the student already has the correct motions in place, and that the maximum speed of these motions is sufficient for whatever the target tempo is. So the task in that case is my second scenario: to bring a new piece of vocabulary up to a speed that you already have.
I believe this is exactly what John was doing in the two examples he “metronomed-up” at the start of the livestream. Both examples were clearly below John’s speed ceiling, so again it was a challenge of learning or “cleaning up” vocabulary rather than increasing speed.
Nah. I couldn’t hit those speeds in the beginning. I had to push things further to get faster.
This discussion is reminding me of people saying there’s no such thing as over training, only under recovery. It’s the same thing.
That riff/lick is not something I could ever do my fastest picking/fretting speeds. But, I increased the speed of what was played. Cleaning it up to play it faster sounds like I increased the speed. Two sides of the same coin?
Well, as I’ve said, if we can increase sprinting speed, why is picking speed excluded from this?
At the end of the day, if you can play something faster now than you previously could, then you increased your speed. Whatever you want to call it, you got something faster.
I also get the impression people are saying there is no way to increase speed, you just unlock the potential that was already there. If that’s the case, then it sounds like you’re just chasing your genetic potential for how fast you can move. Same thing with chasing your genetic potential for strength. Either way, you learned how to go faster, so you increased your speed.
Honestly, I don’t think questions like this are that useful. You have to remember that most people who ask these things are asking because they are having some type of performance issue. And in most of these cases, we already know what to do to address that. We can take measurements, we can look at their technique, we can address issues with the current technique if there are any, we can look at different techniques, and so on. Once you do all this, you’re probably already getting the improvement you need, and if not, you probably know why.
I definitely didn’t do this. Anything I’ve learned how to do was to some extent by stumbling across techniques which do what I was trying to do, becoming aware of what I was doing, and streamlining from there. There was never any sense of improving a “bad” motion, whatever that even is.
I don’t think this is what happened. John has a very specific set of techniques he uses to reach these speeds that requires a certain form and certain muscles to engage. Training was no doubt critical to improving coordination and endurance, but I think it’s clear that he discovered the technique first and then polished it with training.
I’m sure there were some speed inreases as he did this, but again, I don’t think this is the reason people ask this question all the time. They ask because they are having performance issues and want to know how to fix them. Is the answer to slowly raise the metronome to reach John’s speed? Almost never.
I know you know this because I’ve seen your reverse dart motion after we released that lesson and it’s awesome. Of course it takes training to develop useful coordination with these techniques. But it’s clear that you have this performance from doing that technique because of the extreme range it operates in.
TLDR I think this question of training is mostly settled in any way that really matters. Most people who ask it are asking about large gaps in performance that are more likely addressed with things we already know how to fix.
Okay, so what does “polishing a technique with training” mean? If I can tremolo at 200 bpm for 4 measures before tensing up and slowing down and I want to increase my stamina to 16 measures, how do I do that?
Excellent question! This is my point. Most of the time these discussions really mask more practical concerns which are more easily addressed. So asking the theoretical question is less useful to me than just asking about the thing that you’re actually working on.
Ok so in your case, I’d want to look at the test results and technique first. Which technique is it, is it being done optimally, and is it already at or near the maximum. Because if you can’t move much faster than this then there’s not a whole lot of room to ask for more performance in terms of endurance either.
By comparison if you’re using John’s technique which has 100 more bpm in reserve, asking for measures of 200 is a lot more doable. In other words, not all techniques are created equal. This is why when you look at players in speed-focused styles like extreme metal, you see all these adaptations for fast playing and endurance playing. They’re not just doing the same thing everyone else is doing plus more training.
Finally, we have some tips on improving endurance with wrist motion in this lesson here:
As a companion to this, we also have this lesson on speed but you could argue they are essentially very similar - performance:
The thing about the speed lesson which is important is that it shows you, visually, that what someone calls “tension” may not really be lack of relaxation. It could be the technique varying in ways that only the camera can see, causing muscles to work against each other, pulling in opposing directions, leading to rapid fatigue.
The solution to this particular problem isn’t so much relaxation as learning to trigger the motion the same way all the time, without the random variation and internal conflict. My point here is that even when training obviously helps, it’s important to know what specifically is being trained. Just doing more reps of something doesn’t guarantee anything.
In your case, all of this only works to increase your endurance if the performance is actually available. Sixteen bars of 200 is no joke. I’m personally much more likely to get that if I use the higher-performance reverse dart technique in the “tall mouse” lesson, or if I’m using a purely rotation EVH-style motion, than I am using other motions I know how to do. Elbow can probably do that too but I never learned it.
So those are the steps I would take. If you’d like our assistance, just make a TC in your account - we’re happy to take a look!
Well, let’s think about this. Initially, you presumably couldn’t do USX, DSX and DBX (all three!) fast enough for your wishes, so you presumably went through phases of introspection and incremental improvement. You turned the laggards from “bad” (in the sense of “sub-optimal regarding speed”, but I should have likely typed “insufficient,” sorry about that) to “good” (fast enough)! I still find that quite impressive.
There are endless variables with each technique from one’s posture in the chair to details of the pick to grip pressure to… and one has to keep on pushing their particular technique to go faster. Naturally, the law of diminishing returns comes up (progress slows), and people asymptotically reach their physical limit, but there is a methodical process of improvement.
Right, get the basic motions exactly in place, and some students will be fast, and some will never make it, but they have to try; there is a system of regimented practice that the classical people have perfected, and it involves incredibly good sequenced practice material, metronomes, and years of particular practice to steadily go faster and be able to engage increasingly complex material. It’s like a selection process, really. The students just cannot play fast at first, that comes with time, and improvement (where a huge amount of it is in their brain, as well, to better manage the increasing demands). Indeed, some of their brains (if they start early enough) develop perfect pitch, that cannot be developed by adults, if I understand.
No I didn’t do this. That’s what I’m trying to explain. There has always been a period of trial and error resulting in stumbling across some specific overall technique that “just works” for whatever type of phrase I was trying to play. So I wouldn’t say I made gradual improvements to “USX” or “DSX”, because these aren’t techniques, they’re just ways of describing the motion path of a pick. The technique is a specific way of holding the instrument and moving the pick. And by experimenting with these variables, you can find different techniques you can do, and the escape is going to be whatever it is for that technique.
To use a recent example, I figured out that I could do a very fast technique with a particular form and type of wrist motion that uses a trailing edge grip and looks like tapping. Due to various factors which we now understand, it happens to be a DSX motion. We featured this in our lesson, and once other players learned that this particular combination of ingredients works, many of them were able to reproduce them and achieve similar results.
Thanks for explaining, this makes a lot of sense.
So approximately how many overall techniques do you use?
So let me share a picture of a kid that, as an adult, is one of the world’s best pianists. Let’s consider him as a kid. Did he improve his technique as he became an adult? Or was he constantly shedding his old “techniques” and creating new ones? What do you think was going on here in the process of starting as a kid and becoming a Van Cliburn winner? I have answers to all of these questions, but I’d love to hear your take on this. Finally, like all piano students, he was surely a slave to the metronome and going up one click at a time; is this because his teacher is stupid with that slow practice stuff and it’s just a waste of time, or, could it be, that it’s a necessary step in their process to create artists like this one? You tell me! 
My guess is that he found something that worked (DT motion? I have no clue about if any wrist motion is used on a piano) and each day he would come back and try and replicate it. Some days it wouldn’t be there because he was doing something differently but over time he would get it working again more and more frequently (as neural pathways form) until he is able to play at high level on command.
Slow-ish realistic practice is great for memorisation but if your motion is not efficient it’s pointless.
So here is he is at nine, note the lack of sheet music, etc., he doesn’t need it. He has perfect pitch, of course. His teacher is a monster, and I suspect that his technique (in terms of where he put his hands, etc.) was firmly established from day one by his teacher. In short, he had none of the guitar struggles:
I also have a theory for why they do slow practice, but I’m not exactly sure. I think that they need to determine exactly what they want it to sound like, even to the point of what a chord sounds like (after all, one can play one note a bit louder than another, put one finger down a bit before another, etc.). I think they figure that out, and then they have to do it a bit faster, and faster, until they can eventually reach speed, but they want to preserve the sound (?). I have definitely spoken to a lot of very famous artists (not this guy, at least not yet), and it’s not like they have a secret master plan… but, I think that what the classical teachers do is most likely the best way to create superior musicians.
My hypothesis is that if somebody wants to be the best at guitar, they should see if they can find a guitar teacher that is as close to a piano (or possibly violin or cello?) teacher as possible, but that is likely not so easy to find.
Anyway, that’s my two cents, for what it’s worth.
Are the rest of his teacher’s students Van Cliburn winners? Or at least the majority of them? Or is Yunchan Lim the exception?
My guess at why there is higher success rate on the piano is because your hands are almost directly aligned over the DT motion path. On guitar it’s not as natural to move along the DT and RDT pathways, or at least there is more room for error. Troy has advised people tap on the body and strings of the guitar to help with this, that tapping motion seems counterintuitive to how most people conventionally play the guitar but WAY closer to what a piano player would be doing
Nope, just one! But I suspect the others are amazing at a minimum.
I think it is because a teacher is there to whip away anything that is deviant. They do very well with violin and cello and these are arguably more demanding than guitar and don’t even have frets!
Indeed, I will speculate that the flamenco teachers in Spain likely have a good training system going… do they?
I think the difference is that the piano code was cracked centuries ago whereas we still have professional guitar players telling people that the key to fast playing is performing microscopic motions while using as little of the pick surface as possible. Thankfully, the CTC community has confirmed that such considerations have absolutely nothing to do with playing fast.
I estimate that as Troy’s discoveries become mainstream, playing sequences of sextuplets at 130 bpm will be considered fairly basic for guitar players in the next decades.
