I remember Batio saying about him practicing 1000 repetitions of some passage. I mean hell if you are such determined you just must get some results. Though not many guys are ready to practice that way. I’m definitely not )
the funny thing about that is…1000 reps isnt all THAT much lol
if you take a nice short repeating riff, it might take 2 seconds to do the riff. thats 30x per minute. 33 minutes of that is about a 1000
I understand his point though, he sat there and did those reps forever etc
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Here are my thoughts, about to head to work so can’t really elaborate but I think these are my best efforts on the topic in question. Worth a read given the positive reception:
I have been so busy but for a long time I have been compiling my thoughts on this matter. I don’t think the answer is particularly nuanced or even interesting. Building speed is fairly simple, “boring”, and predictable in the routine, it’s just the matter of trusting the process that so many guitar players, for whatever reason, tend to doubt.
Oh and what Troy said on the matter is near 100% correct in my opinion. I don’t think you get faster, you get more efficient and extremely reliable. The speed is inborn barring congenital disorders, mental or otherwise, and it’s a matter of fleshing it out.
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True, but he didn’t just get “some results.” He got spectacular results. Someone else could do the same thing and just get good but not great results because of having less aptitude for guitar playing. The work ethic is something anyone can develop though. As long as one doesn’t have extremely low aptitude for learning to play guitar, work ethic is what separates the guys who become good and those who become great. That’s my current opinion on the subject anyway.
For me, that’s going back to what my former guitar teacher, Dallas Perkins, told me one day. I’m putting the following in quotes but this is from 1988, so I probably don’t have it word for word. I do recall the gist of it: “I think most people have an average amount of ability - an amount of ability that will allow them to accomplish just about whatever they want to accomplish as long as they put in the work. Then there are just a few people who I’d compare to geniuses who learn incredibly fast and just a few people who are basically musically retarded - unable to learn.”
If we just suppose that we’re in the big middle range, our work ethic and our passion for music will determine how good we get.
I also have a quote from Michael Angelo Batio: “Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice does.”
This is basically a high intensity interval training approach to guitar… And, at least in high performance endurance sports (competitive cycling, running, triathlons, the like), this is considered a fairly effective approach of maximizing gains from limited training time. It’s usually paired with some amount of lower intensity “base training,” and I think in that mindset it makes sense to combine your approach with occasional incremental practice sessions as well, as they likely help build picking endurance better than an interval approach like this, but it seems to me that your approach should be effective (and, I mean, I’ve heard you play, lol).
Speaking purely anecdotally… As a cyclist, I got a LOT faster when I started picking “sprint” Strava segments and chasing the KOM time on them. Not just in pure sprinting ability, but my overal average pace started to kick up materially when I began doing the occasional quarter mile to mile max effort sprints, and just totally gunning it on a stretch of road.
Only thing I’ll add to your approach is I’ve had some success with “overshooting,” when I’m struggling with a tempo, putting the metronome quite a bit higher at a tempo I know I can’t pull a drill off, and then flailing around like mad trying to. 
Then, when I set the metronome back to where I was trying previously, suddenly by comparison it seems a lot easier. This is kind of the antithesis of “slowly increasing speed,” but it seems to work.
I understand what you are saying, but this “boring” routine you allude to can be 1000 different things for 1000 different players. Some guys put in 2 years of practice and they are shredding nicely, others not so much. (regardless of fast twitch capabilities)
I guess in the end though its a lot of hair splitting. If a person has decent speed capability and they are spending quality time practicing and they arent making TOO many errors, then they should end up pretty good.
My thing is, there is a VAST amount of stuff one might want to be great at:
scales and fragments (endless subject in itself)
pedal point stuff
sweeping (endless)
2nps stuff (to me,entirely different than 3 or 4nps stuff)
tapping
interesting harmonic content
in the end we have a finite number of hours to practice. Im “lucky” in that Im single with no kids and I only work 4x per week. So there is tie to practice. That being said, I want the most bang for the buck
That is what this other thread was about: Is there a master list of skills for picking?
I want to practice the stuff that has the greatest carryover to other stuff as opposed to spending many hours on some white elephant lick that has no carryover.
But even within that, is still HOW to go for that gradual speed improvement
I know in strength sports (probably endurance too) one doesnt simply go to the gym and max out every day lol. if there is a powerlifting meet in Sept one might start specifically training 10 weeks out and he builds to make his strength peak on that day
I understand guitar isnt exactly like that but one still wonders the best way to approach it. If my max speed on a lick is, say, a sloppy 200bpm, maybe I can do it smoothly at 188 but even then I cant last forever on it lol…it starts to get sloppy as I tire. in that case should one spend a ton of time “building a base” at 160 etc. Then as time passes one moves that base point up to 170 and he has almost guaranteed his peak speed capability will have increased too.
That is sort of how strength sports work so I am interested to know if guitar is in any way similar.
Something in me rebels at the notion that we have a certain preset speed limit. Yes I agree in theory but the problem is WE DONT KNOW WHAT THAT LIMIT IS!! lol People get stuck benching a certain weight for years and they r told they have reached their limit. Then they find some technique or mechanical thing or method and next thing you know they pass their “limit”
for me specifically, moving my fingers fast is generally NOT going to be part of my problem lol. The problem is more like having a wide enough repertoire of licks and abilities etc to where I can improvise freely without being massively sloppy.
Ive spent most of my time just on scales and fragments and some sequences etc but now I want to add sweeping and stuff like the Yngwie style 2 string arps and some nice pedal point stuff
So maybe I shouldnt really be saying im curious about SPEED (its confusing). I dunno, I guess its confusing for me because my abilities are sort of at various levels. I feel i am at pro level on some stuff, but then I go to do fast 2nps pent stuff and all of a sudden im a newb and am wondering why my fingers dont want to go faster lol
Specifically I think what I have done is build speed on licks that DONT move around a lot. if I stay in sort of one spot maybe on 2 strings I can wail pretty good. But the problem comes in when I have to start moving positions rapidly etc. Im not as well trained at that
So even just thinking out loud I start to narrow the problem down some
Of course the muscles are getting tired when having to do fast motion for a longer period. Trying to relax as much as possible is the key to get a faster motion going on for a longer period. But, to get that superfast motion going on you need to tense up a bit. Take for instance al di Meola. When he goes into that superfast runs from high to low E uses a different motion. He tenses up and uses more forearm motion and i see that with lots of players.
This of course will take more energy from the muscles.
DiMeola uses forearm motion for his fastest runs? So he uses his elbow? Or do you mean forearm rotation? I’ve seen him in concert once about 20 years ago, but I never noticed that he uses either forearm rotation or elbow. Or I forgot it. I remember reading interviews with him where he says he uses wrist exclusively. When asked what he thinks about players who use their elbow when picking he said “They usually sound as bad as they look.”
Al DiMeola has some very strong opinions doesn’t he?
You know sometimes progress stalls for a while and your playing just sort of stays the same…until one day you notice improvement and when this happens sometimes the improvement is huge. Progress isn’t perfectly linear. It doesn’t just increase at a steady rate. I have a feeling you might be at a plateau now and about to start noticing some big improvement in the fast 2nps fast pentatonic licks 
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kind of a given because I only just started working on them. Like ive said many times. ive never had 5 cents worth of focus lol
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This is what i mean.
From about 1:30 he starts with wrist/forearm movement then he builds up and then he goes into hyperspeed and changes to ellbow motion.
So, yes i meant elbow.
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I think the issue here is what people mean by “speed”. We get tons of forum posts and emails about people saying “I can’t play fast”. But when you start digging, we continually find no evidence of any of these players actually lacking hand speed. Ask them to tap on a table - all of a sudden, they are fast enough to play just about anything in the shred zone, which let’s call it loosely 160-200bpm range, give or take.
When I ran track and cross country, just as you’ve experienced, I had to train at consistently high levels of aerobic failure to maintain peak form. For reference, my best mile was 4:56 and my best 5k was 17:40, which was three miles back to back at about 5:50. My best marathon was about 3:15 so a little over 7 minutes 26 times in a row. No way I can touch any of those times now. Even at the time, if I were to take a couple months off it would all evaporate. But on, let’s say, piano, for example, since it’s an instrument I play infrequently these days, I can go without playing for months on end, and my ability to play fast lines does not change.
So I think when it comes to athletic style exertion, getting into the “shred” zone of 160bpm to 200bpm just doesn’t require it. It’s a coordination thing and if there’s a building up period, I think it happens quickly and early and then isn’t needed again. After that point, everyone who thinks they need to build up to speed is getting confused between hand speed and coordination.
I’m totally willing to be wrong on this! But this is what the observations we’re all making seem to point to so far.
Overshoot from what, a hand speed perspective or a cleanliness / accuracy perspective? Again this is the question I feel like I’m always asking in these conversations.
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the comeback for that is the ever classic “you know what i mean” lol
has anyone ever seen a rank beginner flailing away sloppliy and said “wow, dude is fast”?
You’re probably kidding but I see this all the time! In fact, Brendan on our team has some very fast elbow picking abilities when he’s tooling around on the instruments we have in the office, but isn’t really a guitarist per se — although at some point if he keeps at it I’ll probably have to stop characterizing him that way.
More generally, there are clips that get posted here where the accuracy isn’t up to scratch but the motions are fast. These aren’t usually beginners, but it’s the same idea.
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Damn, a 4:56 mile? I’m impressed! 
I didn’t know you were ever into sports. I was very into weight training in high school and there was a gym class we weight trainers took where we’d lift Monday, Wednesday, Friday and run a few miles on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is relevant to the point I’m about to make.
You say that at the time, if you were to take a couple months off it would all evaporate. Well, I had a double bodyweight bench press in my senior year of college and just like your running, if I took several months off from training, my max lifts would drop considerably. Here’s where it correlates to guitar playing: If I had taken a few months off, and say my bench press max dropped by 50 pounds, I could have regained my max lift in probably 3 or 4 weeks of training. This is what we weight trainers refer to as “muscle memory.” It’s as if the muscles remember being stronger and they are able to get back to where they used to be much more quickly than people would be likely to think.
The principle of muscle memory states that it is much easier and quicker to regain strength you had before than to build a level of strength you never had before. I bet that you would go from your 6 minute mile back to the 4:56 mile a hell of a lot more quickly than it originally took you to improve from 6:00 to 4:56.
This relates to guitar playing in that if you were to take several months off from playing, and you found yourself unable to play faster than running scales in 16th notes at 170bpm, you’d get back to your previous maximum tempo of playing scales in only a tiny fraction of the time it originally took you to go from playing scales in 16th at 170bpm to whatever the maximum tempo is at which you can play scales in 16th notes.
Regarding building speed vs. coordination, speed alone without coordination is unimpressive but by the same token, coordination without speed is unimpressive. It’s developing the ability to play fast and coordinated that people seem to be referring to in some of the posts in this thread without knowing for sure quite how to state it. They can all play fast and sloppy… They can all play slow and clean. It’s doing both at once that they’re referring to when they ask “How do I get faster.”
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Yes,
This is where I am now.
How to play fast and clean.
Im working on sanitarium and the
Last part of the solo has a single string run that is very fast.
Picking speed is not the issue
Its my left hand.
Im addressing it like most other stuff.
1 play it super slowly until I have it memorized.
2 try to play it slowly but in time
3 try it faster a few times
4 go back to slower but as fast as I can cleanly
Then try to go way faster
Etc…
For me this approach works
But some things still take a long time.
Another thing besides right hand left hand sync for me is targeting
What I mean is if you are traveling up the neck on an em single scale in trips. Deciding which note to target for landing in the next position.
Hard to explain but but until I have that nailed down I cant expect to sync up because my brain is still unsure of what we are doing and starts calculating again.
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I take that as a given lol. I hope next we all wont be splitting hairs between “fast” and “quick” lol. Fast and sloppy doesnt count for much
The muscle memory thing. To me that could be huge for guitarists wanting to build their repertoire or add totally new skills.
Lets say I am already solid on 3np scales but im a newb on sweep arps. Fine, I can go into some serious sweep practice and maybe only do some tiny amount of 3nps stuff to maintain some ability there. Knowing that whatever I “lose” in 3nps skill will quickly come back with some refocus
In that regard I think we could start to think about Soviet style year long programs that have different phases. We maintain one or more skills with minimal time while we deeply focus on other skills
Im preaching to myself here mainly. With a program or even a vague plan we have a chance to show solid improvement if we have this conversation next year. Whereas if we just drift and do whatever, maybe we wont make any actual progress. maybe we even regress
Damn you, lol. Admittedly I’m a much weaker runner than cyclist (my 100 mile PR on a bike is just under 5 hours), but my 5k PR is in the 25 minute neighborhood.
Overshoot hand speed, but then see improvements in accuracy/coordination. I’m not sure if this is an actual or a perceived improvement, but if I’m struggling with a line at 160bpm, I’ve found that trying, and badly failing, to play it cleanly at 195, and then dialing back the metronome back to 160 makes it at least SEEM easier.
To your broader points - I’ve found guitar speed is a lot “stickier” than running or cycling speed (this was the story of my year, basically, having shoulder surgery on my picking hand shoulder in January, and I was back in playing shape a LOT faster than I was in riding shape), but that it DOES decline over time if you’re not practicing much/at all. Some of that is probably muscular - I can definitely feel it in my fretting hand forearm when I’ve been doing fast repeated runs - but some of it may just be coordination getting sloppy from disuse. I’ve actually never thought much about why it’s happening, to be perfectly honest, just that in the fall when I transition from spending most of my free time on a road bike to spending a lot more of it with a guitar, I definitely have to do some woodshedding to get back into playing shape.
I think there’s a certain muscular component of it - if nothing else, if you hand a novice a guitar and a pick and explain to them how to alternate pick, it’s going to take at least a couple weeks before they can consistently bust out 160-220bpm 16ths along a single string and have them come out even and in time. And, speaking personally, my pick stroke itself isn’t terribly fast or even and I’ve been working on that the last couple weeks and I think it IS getting a little faster. But, the low hanging fruit is pretty quick to acheive, when it comes to picking a single note fast on a single string.
After that… I agree, it’s 100% a matter of coordinating your picking and fretting hands. And I think that what tommo’s describing, speed “intervals,” seems to be a pretty good way to do it, though I think you’re probably going to want to combine that with occasional steady incremental drills, too. I think the variety helps.
But, while the analogy is imperfect because you’re dealing with different issues - cardio conditioning and power output as a runner or cyclist, coordination as a guitarist - I do think that a lot of your gains seem to come from pretty close to the top of your current limits.
Idunno. Does that make any sense?
I have heard this so many times, and I just don’t buy it. People have speculated that “his nervous system is just faster than everyone else’s” for as long as I can remember, but I have seen zero evidence that such a thing even makes neurological sense. (Like the chemistry of his neural sodium-potassium pump mechanism is different from everyone else’s, or what?)
Yes, he could play very fast, and he had skills that most people don’t. He may have even had the ability play things that some others could never learn, no matter how much they try. (Call me skeptical, but I’ll admit it’s possible.) But, why is everyone so convinced it’s genetic? Why can’t it be that he figured something out that most people don’t?
Humans are capable of learning all kinds of amazing stuff, and there’s a great degree of variation between people that is not genetic in nature. Just because someone’s an outlier doesn’t mean they’re a mutant.
I see the attractiveness of believing it, psychologically. I just don’t see any reason to think it’s true.
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I think you have the answer. It’s comforting and even reassuring to convince yourself that someone has something you don’t as a means of preemptively avoiding the difficulty in reaching a certain level. That said, I won’t downplay the insane practice time of the greats. Most people cannot and will not replicate that dedication, and that’s likely a result of being ordinarily passionate and not because of any inborn genetic predisposition to shredding notes on a piece of wood with plastic in your hand, which is the reductive and highly simplistic version of what most of us do.
But yeah, the original point of this thread was to answer “Do we actually even know how to get faster?”
As a response, I linked two of my posts. In one of those posts the answer - or at least the most scientifically indisputable one - is there: Dr. Frank Wilson has objective, scientific experience, and in his experience, the cerebellum supplies all of the speed necessary for motor patterns. You don’t need to “build” speed per se, you need to facilitate the environment in which your brain will operate to wrangle speed and make it inseparable from your desired accuracy. Your job, as the controlling guitarist, is to make sure the inputs are appropriate and of a certain quality. Of course, there will be plenty of failure along the way and experimentation to produce the desired result. You can’t hit notes at high speed with “perfect” inputs from the get-go. This would be the “practice” component and obviously, you don’t get anywhere without practice. The mistake many guitarists think is that practice needs to be perfect. It doesn’t, and I can attest to that.
What are the inputs?
They are:
- Correct pickstrokes
- Correct volume (i.e., not repeating a lick for ten minutes straight which is something I actually see people advocating on YouTube)
- Correct notes
- Reasonable mechanical replication - i.e., If you’re playing something from the Antigravity seminar, don’t try and put your picking hand to pick the notes on the middle of the guitar neck. Just be sensible and imitate Troy’s hand placement.
Quality:
- Are you huffing and puffing? Tensing up like crazy? This can compromise movement quality and feed to your brain a level of tension that will be learned and engrained. Why would your brain have any reason not to replicate the tensing up of your right leg every time you play if you don’t make a conscious effort not to do so?
- Quality is harder to pin down and I think this component is more or less a self-assessment that every guitarist goes through. How do you define quality? Yngwie famously says “You know it’s good when it sounds good.” Not very helpful, but there’s a certain amount of genius in that statement; a simplicity that might on some level explain why he is as good as he is. Because his understanding of quality is something many people appreciate, and for that reason, independent of the level of speed he possesses, he is placed on a pedestal above most guitarists. Think of it like this: Many guitarists can spazz their hands, but they are not selling out halls and arenas, because while they have raw speed, they haven’t tamed it.
- This last part about quality is probably what @JonJon refers to when he mentions the abundance of many guitarists who try and build speed and fail. Self-assessment is practically unquantifiable. We try to introduce metronomes and other metrics in an effort to quantify but instead miss the larger points about mechanical smoothness that you’ll see @Troy bring up. Surely many get fast, but accuracy is key.
That’s basically how I think about speed.
There are also psychological parameters. I’d put the smart money on most high-level guitarists fixating on the same challenges over and over, even if the inputs are different (e.g., different scale patterns, but still drilling alternate picking across those patterns). In that regard, worth a read. @Brendan had posted something similar a few weeks back:
The only other resource I can think of is Claus Levin’s channel. He does a fantastic job of tackling psychological implications involved in preventing your average player from reaching excellence. It’s a bit more “wishy washy” than Cracking the Code, but I think if you marry CtC’s obsessiveness with mechanics and Claus’ obsessiveness with psychological mastery you’re more or less set for getting as good as you want in the technical sense. On their own neither of these two things is going to get you to a desired end result of technical excellence.
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