You are right that identical is impossible. But I’m sure that a lot of people don’t know if they’re swiping strings or not, for example; that’s the kind of thing that I believe is the point of the slow practice, to get the detailed game plan together.
I’ll posit this: certain forms of slow practice will transform, slightly, into a viable movement at speed. Can you skip past the slow movement and go straight into training the fast one? I don’t know, but I lean towards no.
1 Like
Seems like practicing fast things slowly requires identical forms for maximum benefit, but practicing slow things slowly doesn’t have the same requirement.
I recall Troy pointed out that EJ advocated his ‘bounce technique’ (aka stringhopping) at low speeds for a better tone.
1 Like
If you mean slow as in learning the motion/sequence and getting it in your head….I agree. You can’t just floor it from the start.
After that - push it up to, as Tom Gilroy has said countless time, up to a point where you can still lock in with your internal clock….but barely before going off the rails.
So we have a minimum speed, and a maximum speed; but why are there no speeds in the middle? That seems suspicious?
Of course there are speeds in between. If your movements are connected to your internal clock, you can drive to anything below your error threshold without difficulty.
You just don’t learn anything by doing that. You’re creating a false positive by telling your motor system that what you’re doing is “right” when it isn’t. If it were right, it would work. You need the failures to learn, they filter out “wrong.”
If you can’t play at an intermediate speed (in fact any and every intermediate speed) then, speaking plainly, your movements aren’t strongly connected to your internal clock or your internal clock itself is weak and you need to develop your sense of rhythm.
This might be contentious among guitarists. Drummers see this as blatantly obvious, to the point where it almost goes unsaid.
“The desired effect is what you get when you improve your interplanetary funksmanship.” - George Clinton (The Mothership Connection).
2 Likes
I met Ruth, and she had a special-order mechanical metronome that went up by 1 beat per minute. Why did she need it? 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2024/02/03/ruth-slenczynska-rachmaninov-piano-student/
And what about this, why was he doing it?
As they approached Rachmaninoff’s apartment in Paris, Slenczynska said she heard someone practicing the piano very slowly and thought, ‘My goodness, this student isn’t very good.’”
90 years ago, jets didn’t exist, horse drawn artillery was still employed, television sets had yet to become commercially available, the electric guitar wouldn’t be invented for another three years and the polio vaccine was 20+ years away from being discovered.
But learning methodologies from the same time period? Those can never improve.
Bull.
I’m sure that the piano teachers are trying to innovate, but has anything really changed? I don’t think so…. it might be that they are close to optimal? I don’t know!
That said, I wish that I could take a pill and get perfect pitch! 
If we accept the assertion that traditional piano pedagogy consistently produces desirable outcomes for piano students, it’s reasonable to conclude they are doing something right, but not necessarily that they are doing everything right. That is, some elements of traditional piano pedagogy are almost certainly beneficial to piano students, but other elements may be a waste of time, or even harmful, but have their negative effects obscured by the net positive effect that occurs in the presence of the beneficial elements.
Whisky and soda will get you drunk. Vodka and soda will get you drunk. Gin and soda will get you drunk. Clearly soda is what gets you drunk, right?
4 Likes
This times a thousand.
The idea that it’s either this or that, in totality, is not what anyone has ever said. People attempt to generalize this to all of music practice…… when that’s never been the argument presented.
CtC doesn’t attempt or claim to reinvent all music practice. Just guitar technique……specifically right hand efficiency when using a plectrum.
I know you aren’t making this argument in bad faith, but this is absolutely a loaded question. There is an unjustified assumption in the question itself. The question is wrong.
Michael Jordan wore his UNC shorts during every NBA game. Why did he need them?
I would say that this probably isn’t the case as if somebody discovered an instructional variation that was more efficient, people would eventually adopt it. Now, technology changes things: today, somebody could only play in the key of C and the computer could transpose, etc., hence there is no reason to learn so many scales!
I suspect that they were very psychologically important to him, but I don’t know why.
Then why did Ruth have that special metronome?
She felt that the regular metronome sometimes increased too much with a single click, and she only wanted to go a tiny bit faster.
Perhaps she practiced at the edge of her technical/rhythmic understanding and increased when it moved up.
2 Likes
I’m going to wade head frst into a debate that I can kinda see is already playing out to a certain degree in the subsequrnt comments, but, well, here goes nothing. 
I see two possibilities here.
- The guitar is a “less mature” instrument from a technical instruction standpoint, with a far less codified approach to the physical act of executing a note or series of notes.
- the guitar is singularly suited to idiosyncratic and unique technical execution than “more mature” instruments that often have several-hundred-year-old repertoires and pedagogy.
Honestly, these don’t have to be mutually exclusive, either. But at a minimum, I think just because #1 is probably true, doesn’t mean #2 is necessarily false. Crosspicking lends itself to a different repitoire than USX, in ways that I don’t think are necessarily going to ever be true of the physical act of playing a piano. This is before we even start to talk about the tonal differences between sweeping and alternate picking, or heavy use of legato vs strict use of alternate, which have major tonal implications beyond simply if the notes are slurred or not.
tl;dr - I don’t know if CtC has “solved” anything, so much as revealed entire systems of technique that were never really well understood in the past. That’s huge… but it’s also not like we’ve found a “one technique to rule them all” tat if you just learn it a single way you can do anything. Rather it’s more like - from my standpoint, at least - if you can understand why a technique works in a certain way, then it can really help you optimize what you can play effortlessly and what might take a different approach or maybe should just be avoided.
And, I mean, for a VERY long time now, even pre-CtC, I’ve believed that after a certain point, your “style” is as much driven by what you can’t do, as it is what you can.
2 Likes
You seem to believe that the “eventually” in that sentence would have happened by now, rather than being an “eventually” which could be currently unfolding before us. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Many great ideas in a many fields have been prematurely crushed under the weight of dogma and arguments from supposed authority.
I don’t know either. I don’t even know that he actually needed them at all.
Should current NBA players wear their college shorts during pro games? After all, Michael did it and he’s the greatest of all time.
Could it not be the case that the special metronome was something Ruth wanted for her own personal psychological reasons, rather than being something the rest of us should be be concerned about?
I’d like to stress again that I’m not suggesting that there aren’t benefits to slow practice or that a metronome isn’t a useful training tool in certain situations.
I am specifically arguing against the idea that slow, “perfect” practice to a metronome with gradual tempo increases are sufficient, necessary or optimal to develop speed.
1 Like
Player: I can’t play the Paul Gilbert Lick. Should I practice fast or slow? Interleaved, randomized, or in blocks? With or without a metronome?
CTC: You’re using stringhopping.
I’m kidding but only slightly! What I’m getting at is that nine times out of ten, questions about “how to practice” aren’t really about how to practice. They are about some specific problem a player is having. These problems almost always have concrete answers that don’t involve worrying too much about what conventional wisdom says about practice, how motor learning works, etc.
Instead, start by putting a camera on the phrase, seeing what is happening, and go from there. The answers are very often really straightforward. Even when they aren’t, the process for investigating the problem is straightforward. We’ve seen so many of the most common issues so many times at this point that there’s a good chance we’ll see it and know what to do about it.
TLDR I wouldn’t worry too much about optimal practice strategies until you look at the technique and try to fix what isn’t working.
7 Likes