I started with Speed Mechanics for Lead guitar, which is mostly exercises.
Then I graduated to Licks from various sources.
But I find songs are the best because they motivate me to learn.
And frankly even the hardest pieces are 50pct or more easy.
By time you have learned a few songs u have encountered all the exercises.
Any value in exercises or individual Licks? Isn’t learning full songs always better?
No, because if you have a problem area you want to work on, you can isolate that problem area with a lick that focuses on that one thing (say, outside string changes). Playing a whole song won’t focus on that one thing nearly as well as a lick designed to focus specifically on that one thing.
I tend to think exercises are better for honing in on problem areas than licks, but the same general thought applies.
I’d say the major advantage of, say, thinking about licks when learning a solo, is that if you do a lot of improvising (99% of my playing), then it’s easier to string together lots of bits and pieces. I don’t really think in terms of pre-arranged licks, I guess, but little fragments of them that can be combined - there’s a surprisingly long thread where me and another guy here were discussing permutations of that 14B16 on the G, then 12 on the B and E fragment of a blues lick you hear all over the place in Jimi, SRV, and (on different places of course due to his tuning) Albert King’s playing, and I guess that’s more how I think in terms of licks - less sentences, or even phrases, and more little snippets of a word or two.
I’m probably making no sense here. 
they all have their place. You dont have to choose lol
they could also be combined. Lets say you want to play a song by Paul Gilbert. Unless you are a massive shredder then you will be playing some licks and exercises to play Pauls song
So I guess it depends on what level we are talking about. I have to agree with Claus Levin…we wont get to world class by learning songs. there will HAVE to be intense hyper focus on technique at some point. I dont think Eddie got to where he got by playing Clapton stuff…at some point he spent a zillion hours doing his own solo stuff etc.
Same for Yngwie. he knew all of Richies solos by the time he was 11 and he got bored. Between then and him becoming “yngwie” were a zillion hours of intense focus
Good point. Also, y’all keep in mind that exercises and licks aren’t mutually exclusive. The famous Paul Gilbert lick which has the three notes on one string, one note on the next string and then back the the original string is an exercise but it’s also a lick you will find in Paul’s songs. You’ll find it in other people’s songs too.
I actually prefer exercises that are musical enough to count as licks too. That’s why I don’t practice things like the chromatic four note per string exercise which goes like frets 5,6,7,8 on the 6th string, then on the 5th string, and so on. There are more than enough musical sounding exercises which can also be used as licks for me to want to spend time on things that can only be useful as exercises.
My experience has been that if there is a problem area, you only really discover that when you are working on a piece you want to play. If you get to a difficult section, you might shorten that section so you are playing it “as an exercise” until mastered, but the goal is to learn the complete solo or song.
In fact, if you can’t perform a section exactly as recorded, its much better to simplify or replace that part (temporarily) until you get it. If a song is good and the player doesn’t do the solo 100%, thats much better than if he never gets out of the basement.
One of the biggest regrets I have is spending significant time on exercises. For me it created a mentality where working on exercises was"productive", when in fact I really wasn’t developing musical vocabulary or repertoire.
I can learn to play any basic rock song in short order. I’ve learned a handful of Satch songs note for note and some Megadeth solos. Thats about the upper level of my ability. I’ve practiced AP and sequences for hundreds or thousands of hours. (same with arpeggios and sweeping) I have endless variations of exercises, sequences and ideas that aren’t fully developed musically because they came from exercises. You get good at what you practice.
If, instead of working AP exercises and sequences, I had been more focused on YJM songs, I would have them in my repertoire. Practicing things in isolation doesn’t guarantee you can actually use those things.
At this point my advice is to spend about 40-80 hours (top) on AP exercises, just enough to intellectually know the kinds of things you will encounter, and then focus solely on songs. If you cant do the song at 100% speed, just slow it down and learn/record it at 75%. Eventually it will reach 100% speed.
i agree with some of that but disagree with other parts My biggest regret is that I didnt FOCUS enough to really master certain techniques. I dabbled and improvised and had fun too much.
ive never had a burning desire to learn someone elses song. What…im gonna get famous playing Eruption?
I always figured that once you mastered the techniques, then you could play anything you want to play, especially considering 95% of songs are pretty easy
if “getting out of the basement” is the goal then id say work on songwriting, unless you want to be in a cover band.
I dunno, I sort of always trip when someone says “work on songs, learn some Yngwie stuff.” Id say “working on” Yngwie stuff is simply out of reach for a lot of people and even for the best it will be a 2-4 yr period of intense and focused work. Then we are back to my earlier point…wow, you know how to play a 30 yr old Yngwie song? and? lol
I guess it depends on the persons goal. if they just wanna have some fun, cool, learn songs. I want to leave behind some nice original music but I want it to have world class soloing etc. No way to get that without thousands of hours of exercises or licks or at least thousands of hours of improvising or jamming out.
One can always build repertoire as they go by soloing over jam tracks or writing original stuff and composing solos etc
Thats what I thought too, but the issue with learning things outside the context of a song is that you will forget them or that they will never become muscially useful. A song is a vehicle to capture all the technique you learned, and it has the benefit that you can actually perform something. I should qualify that modern players should be learning PG, Petrucci, YJM, etc songs to develop their chops even if they don’t break them out in live performances.
I’m not against exercises, but I feel that they are more useful as a way to demonstrate the things you will encounter.
Something like CTC actually shows you how to overcome those challenges. The old school way was (like) Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar, where they gave you hundreds of exercises, and you discovered the issues and then hopefully came up with solutions. IN retrospect, much of that was a horrible waste of time.
I did the Speed Mechanics thing early on. And I also had PG Intense Rock which was humbling and frustrating. My technique and playing took off when I started conquering actual songs.
I love that! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I really don’t think there’s a single right answer here, you know. If playing other people’s music isn’t a musical goal of yours, then it’s probably not going to be an objectively “better” way of practicing than, say, making up musical sounding technical exercises and studying harmony.
I started with Troy Stetina stuff in 1988. That got me going to a degree but I was oblivious to stuff like how to hold a pick etc. any type of ‘run’ I would do would have plenty of legato thrown in to make it sort of work
I also got Intense Rock and saw how logical the 3np scales were laid out etc, but I simply could NOT do the Paul Gilbert lick. It just wasnt going to work. of course I didnt know why until I saw the CTC info around late 2014.
so TBH it wouldnt have mattered much to me whether I “learned songs” or “learned licks”. I simply wasnt going to be able to play fast scales until i understood picking mechanics thru CTC.
Even NOW I have to check myself because (for me at least), knowing CTC theory simply isnt enough. One has to somehow get it into the fingers.
I posted some playing vids earlier today. In one way im glad because my playing is getting better than ever. On the other hand im humbled and disgusted and feel like quitting because ive been playing longer than Rick Graham. Yet I still feel like a beginner
I saw the CTC stuff 4 years ago. So why am I not world class today? 4 years is PLENTY of time. Im not because ive never learned to focus and practice. Thats a unique skill unto itself
I guess it is what it is. Reality could care less how I feel about it lol. reality is reality
That described me early in my playing. I wanted to “do my own thing” and thought that if I learned all the exercises that masterpiece solos and improvisation would spring from nothing. Maybe it will for some people.
A few months ago I saw a retro PG video from mid/late 80s where a young Gilbert was note for note shredding YJM songs. He had somehow got an early version of the tapes before they were released to the public and had figured out much of them by the time the album was releases. PG is one of the greats and he paid his dues learning Yngwie. This was pre GIT, maybe even pre RacerX.
IOW, all I’m saying is PAY YOUR DUES!
We’re here for the same reasons, more or less; we made mistakes in our progress. The whole premise of CTC is that the landscape was not favorable to learn these things early on because the information was not available.
You can’t compare a pre-internet player to a post-internet player. The volume and quality of material was completely different.
My major sources of practice “shred” material in the first ten years of my playing (pre internet) was Speed Mechanics, PG Intense Rock, and a Paul Hanson Arpeggio video. (Also had a six cassete rock riff program with tab from him that was useful.) I also later got Rock Discipline but that never really resonated with me because I wasn’t a DT fan.
Speed Mechanics was practically useful because of all the sequences it taught. I got pretty fast with most of those, surprisingly. I used to ponder the finer points of pick movement, had pet theories about what was going on, and realized that the angle of the guitar body influenced my success with certain techniques (changing pick slant based on angle of guitar body lol… I remember I had the most success by keeping the guitar body as vertical as possible.).
Intense Rock is a bit of a sham, in a way. Some of the techniques are really hard to pull off and frankly don’t have any more musical value than similar, easy patterns. They are hard for the sake of being hard, imo. Showing off in a way. Other parts of Intense Rock are good and show that PGs speed is based around 3nps shredding and organizing sequences around easily picked 3nps patterns.
But neither of those methods taught songs. I really think that the techniques need to be learned in context of a song, even if its not a commercial song. There are so many amazing resources today that make that possible.
well Intense Rock is ideal for people who just so happen to take easily to 3nps stuff with tons of outside picking
that wasnt me lol.
here are a couple of my jams from around 97 to 2004ish? So it wasnt like I COULDNT play. I just wasnt going to be doing any fast continuous scale work. Hell for all I know I was better then than now lol. Im getting pretty depressed thinking about the thousands of hours spent
BM Aeolian jam 1.mp3 (382.0 KB)
blues_intro.mp3 (939.2 KB)
Eh, we can agree to disagree. If you enjoy learning other people’s music, then learn other people’s music. If you don’t, and would rather work on exercises, then do that. We all have different musical goals, and because of that there’s no one size fits all answer. I don’t think you can dogmatically say “A is better than B” and just because Gilbert spent some time learning to cover Yngwie as a kid doesn’t “prove” that that’s better - lots of other people spent a lot of time learning Yngwie covers, and only one of them grew up to be Paul Gilbert.
And hey, I’ve definitely learned a few solos note for note in my day too - I just don’t think that’s the ONLY way to learn.
For me, the last step of learning exercises and licks is practicing incorporating them into improv. I start with note-for-note repetitions over backing tracks, then I just jam and try to throw the lick in a lot of places. Then I take it apart, modify it, convert it to another scale, shift it within the scale (e.g. start on the 2 instead of the 1, etc.), subsample in multiple ways, invert it, abstract the logic of the lick or exercise and reapply it in a different way, etc.
I do it religiously if not methodically. If I skip this step, the lick or exercise never gets incorporated into my vocabulary. I can recite it for a while until it fades away for lack of use. But when I explore the musicality and physicality of the lick this way it converts from a lick to vocabulary, and provides additional vocabulary and musical ideas along the way.
I don’t learn exercises that I don’t see musical applications for.
Do you want to join a study group with me to work on a complicated shred song?
I recently purchased the Andy James Quick Licks Petrucci DVD which I am going to work through. I have watched it but haven’t started practicing it (maybe tonight!)
A study group would help me stay disciplined and would force me to setup my webcam so that I can share my weekly progress. Someone posted the song on YouTube and with the slowdown feature, you probably don’t need to purchase it. The program doesn’t have tab, just Andy James showing each part. Watching it at 50% is probably just as good as what you get with the video.
I appreciate the offer but ill have to pass. ive got too much going on right now just trying to get my technique together. Im pretty sure God just brought me to guitar to keep humbling me over and over…and over…and…etc
No worries. It seeming like you might be around the same skill level and looking for a way to improve fast.
evidently im one of those that sucks and dont realize it. kind of makes it silly to keep playing. if 20k + hrs hasnt worked, whats another 2hrs of practice tonight going to do? ya know?