Fast practice vs muscle memory

Playing Technique
#12

For sure, I know we can “bake in” habits, probably to a point of where it feels natural… It takes a good 30 days to “start” a new habit, so maybe it’s a month of just doing something different. Especially if what you are doing doesn’t work, or if you have hit a tempo wall. Don’t worry, you won’t forget what you have already worked up to with whatever motion currently employed… Also, if you try something new - don’t be surprised if the yield is… different than what you expected.

Myself, I find that I get in my own way to the point of absurdity. Preconceived notions, ridiculous expectations and not being receptive to what “is” leads to not being able to take advantage of what is actually probably really positive… lol Don’t be me!

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#13

I’m sorry, I’ve read this a hundred times and I have no idea what it means. It’s this an autocorrect issue?

#15

Man, I just want to say I think your post had a bunch of points that are well worth considering - no need to have deleted it!

#17

So are the piano teachers with the proven ability to churn out impressive musicians just making this stuff up? :face_with_monocle:

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#18

Sorry about my two earlier deletes.

I just wanted to mention that many technical guitarists have commented on the importance of slow practice to achieve their high speed playing.

Yngwie I believe has stated that he started learning the guitar string by string. So he would spend months on one string starting off slowly and when he felt he mastered it he would move to the next string. It doesn’t get slower than that. And as everyone knows, later, he very incrementally built up his speed by listening to a tape recorder of his playing that was a little fast and he would then try to play that fast. He has remarked, never stand up in a canoe.

Steve Vai constantly says playing slow and relaxed and with good sounding notes (not fast ones) is the way to fast playing. Build it up very slowy.

MIchael Angelo Batio states that playing slow is the most important thing. To develop accuracy and good coordination with the hands so this way you can play fast cleanly and know what you are doing.

Shawn lane stated that he thought playing slow kept him in a rut and he would instead play at a tempo and then sometimes as fast as possible just going for it and it was pretty sloppy at first but over time he worked on cleaning it up whatever that means. He also has said he had a very fast nervous system and I think he said that playing the piano helped his guitar playing in general.

#19

I’m not sure I believe this, I’ve heard him say the complete opposite in an audio interview he did in 1983. I shared it on the forum before Yngwie copyright-striked it:

I was an insanely dedicated practicer and still am to this day but I didn’t learn how to pick fast until I was 27 - 11 years after initially picking up the guitar despite insane amounts of slow practice, it wasn’t until I tried to go fast that I actually got something that worked :grin:

I’ve since repeated the same process and learnt another motion that can go just as fast in the space of 5 months. Seems a lot better innings then 11 years to me, so I would definitely urge everyone else to do the same!

#20

I think I read about the way his playing developed in his autobiography. This is when he was a young kid when he first picked the guitar up. He says he learned each string one at a time, spending months on a single string IIRC. I think he said his brother was initially much better than him and might have been a better guitarist than hm if he had kept it up or words to that effect. But Yngwie stayed with it and with incessant practice, surpassed him. This was in the very early days of his learning the guitar.

And he has talked about how his speed developed. Which was incrementally. Maybe he wan’t deliberately playing slow and working it up as a strategy. But in effect, this is what seems to have happened. Even just recently he briefly mentions this:

#21

I don’t see any evidence of an abnormally fast nervous system in Shawn’s playing.

Since I’ve analysing his movement patterns and training them myself, and deciphering the line constructions principles which built his vocabulary, I’ve been able to achieve similar speeds. That was less than 3 years ago.

Just last week I discovered how to synchronise his fastest picking movement.

The “freakish nervous system” line that Shawn used was based on stories of the pianist Simon Barere, who Shawn admired.

From having watched and listened to a lot of interviews with Shawn, it seems that this line was a prepared response used as a deflection to steer conversations or questions away from how he achieved his speed.

He may have felt that he wasn’t able to give a satisfactory answer in the environment or at the time the question was asked. He may have been tired of the question. It’s also entirely possible that he didn’t fully understand how or why he achieved his speed.

In other interviews he was very candid that he felt that what he was doing was achievable for others and that he wasn’t some bizarre anomaly.

In any case, the line has become part of his legend. Personally, I wish he had never said it. It’s probably done more to discourage and distract from meaningful analysis of his playing than anything else.

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#22

Like I was saying though, he has also said that he never did the practice slow and build up thing, so if anything we’ve proven that we can’t take him at his word on this :laughing:

I guess I’m more inclined to believe him when he said he didn’t do that because that never yielded any results for me! I hate the thought of people wasting as much time as I did on this sort of thing.

#23

…or could they benefit from looking at it a different way beyond “This is how we’ve always done it…”

The idea isn’t that conventional methods are completely ineffective - it’s that they aren’t as effective as they could be. Just because you can ‘churn out’ players doesn’t mean you can’t get them there more efficiently while knowing “Why?” these things are (or aren’t) efficient.

#24

Honestly, I have to question if the method is really “proven” at all.

I know many people (myself included) who went through years of classical piano instruction, most under accredited teachers. Many who completed the full course of grades. Some went on to get performance diplomas or teaching diplomas.

I knew one person who was a genuine virtuoso as a teenager. He went to a conservatory and became a concert pianist. However, I don’t feel that his success can be directly accredited to his classical training. He told me once that he started playing piano by figuring out simple pop songs by ear, and he practiced as much jazz as classical. Keith Jarrett and Michel Petrucciani were his favourite pianists. I genuinely believe he would still have been outstanding even without his classical training.

Exceptions aside, I don’t think the median outcomes are particularly impressive.

The players who go on to conservatories are the few outliers, not the typical cases. It’s entirely possible that many more could reach that level with a different pedagogy.

This isn’t directed at @kgk specifically, but I think there’s a lot of guitarists who hold the classical piano and violin traditions as the ideal, and that these traditions cannot be wrong.

Drumming and percussion pedagogies have existed almost totally separate, for just as long. They also get excellent results and much of what they do is directly contrary to the approaches of classical piano and violin. Let’s consider what they can teach us too.

EDIT: I want to make it totally clear that I am in no way suggesting that there are no benefits to slow practice.

I am very strongly against the idea that slow, “perfect” practice and incremental increases in tempo are necessary, sufficient or optimal for developing speed.

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#25

It is important to note that context is relevant and in many cases, what one would oversimplify as “playing slow” is, in reality, playing slow, fast, which seems to be a well-regarded concept among some of the top circles of music education.

As a mere music hobbyist, I interpret the statement like this: the only way to develop a fast motion is by doing it fast, and the sense of playing slow that gives you space to think and adapt comes from the time separation between notes rather than a slow speed in the motion itself.

I can only speak about my experience but I’ve found that approach to ”slow but not slow” practice quite beneficial.

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#26

I’ll admit it, I’m guilty! But I was reflecting, perhaps there are two different problems here:

  1. “I cannot play anything at the required tempo.”
  2. “I can play other things at the required tempo and need to master a new piece.”

For problem 2, the idea behind slow practice seems self-evident: One has to know exactly what it sounds like, how one wants to play it, etc., and then methodically build it up. So slow practice makes a lot of sense.

I’d say that most of the interest here is in problem 1. Note that the piano student faces both problems: They have to play (say) Three Blind Mice at the necessary speed and quality level, hence they certainly need the slow practice. I’m not that familiar with how piano teachers address problem 1, and I’ll ask about this, but it must be very clearly reflected in their teaching materials. I’m curious to know how long it takes them to get somebody to play scales at 200 bpm, that seems to be “fast enough” for most music.

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#27

I’d be very interested to hear the response you get.

I didn’t complete the full course of piano grades here in Ireland. I only completed four of eight before losing interest in the piano, but my fiance completed the full courses for both piano and violin and has her performance diploma in violin.

I totally agree that distinguishing between the two problems here is critically important. I’ll ask her about the violinists’ approach to problem 1. I have a suspicion that what typically happens is that students who don’t intuitively “get it” just get frustrated and self-filter or flunk out of the grading process.

Also, I think it’s super important to clarify what we mean by speed. We tend to conflate notes per second with movement frequency, but they’re absolutely not the same thing.

Pianists and violinists score highly on the notes per second count. Much faster than the average guitarist (though significantly slower than the fastest guitarists). I haven’t seen anything to suggest that pianists or violinists are demonstrating particularly high movement frequencies.

On the other hand, drummers absolutely demonstrate very high movement frequencies. It’s actually a pretty shocking. Every drummer is fast. Fast drumming is totally normalised. We’ve all heard it our entire lives.

Guitarists the world over are struggling to pick a few bars of 16ths at 200bpm. Any competent drummer can play single stroke 16th note rolls at 200bpm. They have two hands, one stroke per hand. We have one hand, two strokes per hand. It seems like we should be roughly comparable, but the average drummer is much faster than the average guitarist.

When it comes to training movement frequency in music, I’m following drummers.

Of course, high movement frequency isn’t the full story. High movement frequency in stringhopping is still slow in a note per seconds sense, essentially achieving only one note per movement cycle instead of two.

There are other ways (with both hands) of achieving more notes in the time without increasing movement frequencies. Some of it is just combinatorial (picking and fretting sequences) and some of it is based on movement “hacks”, almost like instrument specific musical sleight of hand.

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#28

Drums are a little bit different because they take incoming kinetic energy and bounce it back in the opposite direction; a guitar isn’t like that.

#29

In a single stroke roll the movement is primarily driven by the drummer’s muscles. Drummers can perform the movement without sticks on non-rebounding surfaces.

The rebound isn’t sufficient to return the hand to it’s original position (as some energy has been transferred into the drum head). The return to the surface after rebound is totally through muscular exertion, it’s not done through gravity. We as guitarists are able to use the collisions with the string to assist us in our deceleration phases.

There are certainly techniques that make use of the rebound (such as the Moeller technique) but the basic single stroke stroke roll (especially empty handed) is a close analogue of single escape picking technique. Certainly closer than anything which appears in piano or violin playing, for example.

Of course there are differences between individual instruments concerning acceleration and deceleration phases, recuperation of mechanical energy, reactive shock, etc.

Drum and percussion pedagogies don’t answer every question that guitarists have. However, at the basic level, every instrument requires that we move in rhythm. Nobody knows more about that process than drummers.

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#30

Interesting thread. I most definitely agree with Tom; we have had many discussions on the topic and from that as well as my own experience with music and music practice I have to say that there are some things that need to be changed in regards to “how we get there”.

I play drums, terrible keyboards and a semi mean violin at times as well as trying to develop a voice on guitar…

For #1, “I cannot play anything at the required tempo”. Nothing? Can you play random gobbledygook that is harmonically and melodically INCORRECT, but rhythmically on the ball? My biggest hangup is that it’s tough for me to accept this, and difficult for me to allow it to be superfast first, and then refined over time at that superfast tempo. You know? The brain just can’t seem to accept rhythmic accuracy as a win when the rest of it is a jumbled mess. Even worse is that we have something that SUCCEEDS at that slow tempo, and because it succeeded we continue to try to recreate that success at a “slightly” faster tempo, but it never gets faster because it’s a completely different set of “untrained” muscle chains.

Some stuff works as a “start slow” and gradually build tempo. As a coordination developer? Sure. Rhythmic refinement? Absolutely. Complicated chord changes? Yes. Memorizing an awkward fingering? Sure. But I have learned that if the motion you use has a potential speed that you can devise almost immediately via the “table top tests” type thing.

Piano is a really, really different set of movements from guitar playing; plectrum in particular. Most people can get to a keyboard and play a Cmajor scale (white keys) super fast on day one with no experience; it’s pressing buttons and all of us have played a video game or two or typed in this day and age…

As far as #2 goes, well you have to first get to a state where you can remember what it is you play. Tempo is irrelevant, but it’s best if you can give yourself time to try and recall the steps. The brain is doing the playing, the body is just the tool that executes it.

Violin is different as well; bowing NEVER gets trapped under the string. In guitar, the pick can. That’s just one of many differences.

Just my .002

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#31

And… I think that I have learned (finally) that if a motion can only go “so” fast then likely it may be difficult to eke out more bpms by doing battle with the metronome via slow practice and gradual tempo increase. That has been my experience so far!

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#32

I think that you are right and this is why the techniques taught to traditional music students are known to work.

Perhaps popular guitar is an upside-down world full of self-discovery that is fraught with risk, and this does not seem to be the case with most other instruments.

#33

I’m not sure that I follow… the left hand of the stringed instruments seems relatively similar (lute, banjo, guitar, violin, etc.). The right hands for many of these instruments can be played with fingers and/or a plectrum. Somehow, I view the bow as being different than a pick (because the bow is brilliantly designed to drive a string instead of delivering a percussive hit), perhaps it’s the analog to a Fernandez Sustainer. I agree a piano is pretty far out there, although I wonder… can they tap on a guitar neck like monsters? I’ll have to see if I can find a willing pianist, that would be a riot!

But in general, I embrace your thinking about finding analogies and other instruments to borrow from. Indeed, I think that I would benefit from drum lessons… perhaps this is a sign.