Life challenges and depression can get in the way. But I can tell you most of the leaps happen in a short periods of time. Just have to rearrange life and your mind to figure out how to make it happen. And when you figure out THAT, then figure out how to make it happen every day.
What gets me in the right mind is listening to my favorite albums when I started playing. Its regressive but it does something.
good luck.
Although I tend to agree, there is nothing worse than when people hand you a guitar saying âyou are a really good player, play something we knowâ and you are like âHow about a sequence of sweep arpeggios and some cheeky harmonic minor shred???â - tumbleweed ⊠Its sucks when you cant use the âbut can he play Smoke on the Water?â Knowing that actually, you couldnât even get past the intro lol.
and the flip side of THAT is the million people ive heard play half ass versions of the intro to Sweet Child of Mine or Stairway or anything by Metallica. I dont want to add to that list lol
In this decade?
In the prior TWO decades?
Last time I heard radio songs butchered on guitar was late 90s in a Guitar Center.
well yeah obv those r old references but u get the point
Haha! Touché!!!
Youâve been very fortunate indeed, then. 
I believe all are valuable.
I like licks, and I donât care for learning a 6 minute song when all I want to learn is that 20 second riff, you know?
Isolated Exercises are useful for brute speed or technique training, but no need to do them for longer than 30 minutes a practice session, most often I take fragments of songs I want to learn and treat those as exercises.
I feel like a concrete answer is hard to find, as it depends entirely on your goals. So I feel like the best answer is âDependsâ, haha.
Hey, I may be interested in this sort of thing, but I am not too sold on that particular song - the licks are cool but I feel that the whole thing doesnât stand together very well as a musical piece. Incidentally, At the start Andy seems to have found a strategy to play the Glass Prison arpeggios without going 1 note per string! I like that.
It would be cool to find some intermediate/advanced shred songs that are musical and âeasyâ to transcribe. Sometimes with the shredders itâs nearly impossible to decode some passages - particularly when legato is involved and/or runs that donât subdivide the beat in a conventional way.
I shed many a tear trying to transcribe pieces from my guitar hero Vinnie Moore. In some cases I decided to just focus on the target tones and feel the space in between with my own licks.
I have been working on this the past couple days. Iâve almost âlearnedâ the first half although its not up to speed. The âglass prisonâ arpeggios are 2nps string skipped. You can pick them or mix with hammer ons.
Iâm going to focus on getting the first half to reasonable speed before doing the second half.
The reason I picked this song is because its packed with concepts, every inch of the song has useful licks. Most actual songs have alot of âfluffâ, motifs, melodies, etc, things that are easy to play but donât physically teach you anything.
Also⊠the backing track is simple enough to record by yourself if you want to modify it.
This particular piece is full of multi octave picked arpeggio forms that arenât sweeps, which is something I havenât done much before. And it has some outright blazing AP runs.
If you could pick a song for a study group, what would it be?
Thatâs a good point, probably a reasonable compromise between an exercise and a song! I may try to also learn the first half, although I donât have an ETA at the moment 
Iâm currently studying âThe Thinking Machineâ, âDaydreamâ and âIn Controlâ by Vinnie Moore. But as I said above, a lot of the fastest bits are not really intelligible to me (even when I slow stuff down to 25%), and none of the tabs I found seem to make much sense. I think the VinMan was just wiggling his fingers on autopilot in these passages 
(the result is still cool though).
So yeah, the one you picked seems to make more sense for a study group!
I think you can learn it pretty easily by slowing it down in youtube player. The lesson is pretty old, I wouldnât be surprised if the actual lesson parts are hosted on youtube or somewhere else out there on the web.
Iâm not proud, I have found I get the best results when I can actually see a song played at slow speed or can slow it down using software. Learning a song from tab and audio (which Iâve done) comes with alot of indecision; am I playing this right? How did he pick this?.. Its always nice to see someone else doing it.
Iâm totally with you on this one 
I wish I could find a good video for each song I liked.
This has been one of the problems with guitar education. Historically, music was either learned by watching someone else play it or (later) by written score.
Guitar is ambiguous in the way phrases can be played. Scores donât communicate fingering and sight reading hasnât been a part of most guitar education. Folk music and less formal styles were always taught by showing/seeing, and most guitar music falls in this category.
While its possible and useful to transcribe from audio recordings, seeing is believing and turbocharges learning. Rather, it puts it back to the place it was when students could apprentice and learn songs from band mates. Its no surprise to me that there has been such a wave of great players after the advent of youtube.
Anyway, Iâm still interested in the study group idea. Maybe a study group could have several songs it was working on, (show progress along the way by recording early failures/progress) and encourage other people to join and help them learn the songs. I do think any songs chosen by a group should have clear video instruction. And this would be an advanced shred group, so songs in the style of Petrucci/YJM/PG/etc.
Its often groups of friends that propel each other to greater heights when playing together. Doing it alone in your basement is not the best way. I donât have any RL friends anymore who play, let alone shred.
Pausing only to agknowledge, in the spirit of friendly ribbing and not being a jerk, this comment from someone preaching the value of songs over exercises⊠
I actually disagree, but not for the reasons you think. One of the things that I DO think is useful in learning songs (and, thinking about this thread, one of the reasons I started working out Andy Timmonsâ âDeliver Usâ over the weekend) is because of that âfluffâ - little things like the fact a melody is almost never played âstraight,â but that there are often a bunch of little ornamentations and ghost notes, or the use of quick bends to pitch rather than fretted notes, or places where the timing is pushed or pulled a little bit, etc, and really learning to capture those and really get inside the âfeelâ of an otherwise fairly simple line can be incredibly instructive.
One of my favorite examples is Vaiâs âLibertyâ - the main melody line is played pretty straight on the first pass, but on the second, thereâs a ton of slides from nowhere or ghost hit-ons or pull-offs and the like that are subtle (and I think every tab Iâve seen misses them) but really help bring the line to life. Itâs THAT stuff that I think you can learn as much from as the pure technical aspects in the âharderâ sections.
I wont disagree with this. I would still take a âreal songâ over exercises any day of the week, but if the goal is to really expand your technique, learning something like the piece Iâm working on, IMO is the best.
Those embellishments and stylistic things, if you copy them you might be in danger of really sounding like a clone if you take it too far. Iâve heard this before with both Andy Timmons and Eric Johnson clones. Timmonâs bending technique is so unique to him that when people copy it⊠itâs like⊠OK, you are cloning Timmons. Players who lean too heavily on EJ pentatonic groupings sound like they are cloning EJ.
The techniques in the video Iâm working on donât scream Petrucci so much, they are a bit more generic, maybe because they are outside a DT song.
In favor of âreal songsâ is that they are usually mostly easy and you can knock out at least 50% without much work.
Exercises I wonât do any more, I have got lost in them.
Eh, I think thereâs a difference between trying to âcloneâ someone, and simply being more aware of some of the phrasing decisions that really help a melody line come alive, that youâre not going to pick up or really develop from simply working on exercises. That phrasing and articulations, in other words, are something that youâre not really going to âpracticeâ and develop an ability to deploy musically, unless youâre forcing yourself to try to learn a part that employs them. What you then choose to do with that awareness is a different matter - Johnson and Timmons are probably less obvious examples than the number of guys whoâve spent so much time learning the intricacies of Vaiâs vibrato and bending and phrasing that even their original songs sound like Vai tunes, but that might be entirely a product of the fact that Jemsite was the first internet guitar community I ever joined back in '99.
Itâs that, or I really donât get the distinction between learning exercise-like patterns in a song, vs just working on a musical-sounding exercise. Still, I guess whatever works for you.
I would wager that there havenât been any top modern players who got to that level without covering the best songs that came before them.
I would also guess there are hundreds of thousands of players who spent as much total time as the top players on exercises (a little bit of this, some of that) and never had the breakthrough to creating high quality, top-level work.
I can only speak to my own setbacks early in my playing, but I spent 100x too much time on exercises and minutiae, basically because the learning materials, backing tracks werenât there early on. If I had spent that much time learning challenging songs, my youtube channel would be full of great covers and somewhere along the way I likely would have started writing my own.
The reality is that there are right ways to practice and wrong ways. So few people âmake itâ. Exercises I put firmly in the wrong category. There are songs (etudes) that accomplish the same thing in a better way.
I would think Paul Gilbert songs would be tailor made for study. I had considered Paul Gilbert âThe Curse of Castle Dragonâ as an ideal song to learn
Pretty sure most of Pauls techniques are straightforward etc
of course, then there is this lol:
Iâm not sure I agree with that. Perhaps unconsciously, most of his songs contain what I consider âintentionallyâ difficult licks that only other guitar players will understand the difficulty. They have peculiar picking patterns or wide stretches that will cause grief for many players. While he is affable and a great teacher, he was born of a very competitive guitar scene and I believe he intentionally included technique that say F-U! (just my own personal opinion.)
IOW, you donât have to master Intense Rock to write solos that would work in Mr. Big or even Racer X.
More food for thought, but in Piano tuition, how many lesson plans are there of âjust exercisesâ? It seems that the dominant way to teaching piano is learning to perform songs.
I have a new rule that whatever I learn, it needs to be performed. I have a wasteland of orphaned techniques and ideas in my vocabulary that were born of exercises and experimentation. I used to call this âimprovisation trainingâ, but what I actually improvised was at a lower level than all the technique I practiced.