Follow with the same material or change to other material?

Playing Technique
#1

Good people from this forum,

What do you think that is the moment to change of material?

These last 4 months I’ve been working with the method “Chop Builder by Frank Gambale” to improve my technique and accuracy. Although I can’t play all the exercises at the speed that Frank plays them (between 96 to 120 bpm), I can play them at a decent speed (something between 80% to 90% of their real speed).

The problem is that after being practicing these exercises for four months I’m stuck and a little tired. I can’t reach the Gambal’s speed and I’m starting to get bored of practicing the same material too often without seeing any result. Is time to change of material or should I still practicing these exercises until I reach their real speed?

Before working with the Gambal’s method, I worked with the method “Speed mechanics by Troy Stetina” for at least 5 months. “Speed mechanics” helped me alot, but I couldn’t play the exercises at their real speed.

What should I do?
Should I work with “Speed mechanics”again?
Should I use other material as “Rock intensity by Paul Gilbert”?

I’ll apreciate your help.

#2

First, I absolutely love that Gambale video and not being able to play along to that video is actually what drove me to Cracking the Code! Now I use it as a warm-up at full speed! (Although I alternate pick everything instead of using economy like Gambale)

In my opinion, you only need one shred method! The Gambale one is a fine one. Rock Discipline is also awesome and free on youtube. But they basically all have the same information. Now start learning songs!

If you watch interviews with the best musicians you’ll realize pretty quickly that most of them don’t have a whole lot of discipline, they just have a crazy amount of passion. If you can play along to that Gambale video at partial speed then it sounds like you’re getting pretty good! Think about what songs would be the most exciting for you to learn and just go for it!

#3

I think variety is good for your brain. I think if you’ve been systematically working with one method exclusively for over a month and you find yourself asking “should I try something else?” then the answer is yes. You can always come back to Chop Builder down the road. Working with other things in the meantime might help you get more out of Chop Builder when you work with it again later.

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#4

Thanks for your advice. The last three years I’ve been so busy practicing exercises that I forgot to learn how to play songs. I learned scales, arpeggios, theory, music history, etc, but I didn’t learn almost any song to play.

The problem is that I felt that I wasn’t ready to play the songs of my heroes (eric johnson, hendrix, Yngwie, etc) because everytime that I tried to learn them I discovered that I lack the technique and musicality to play them correctly.

These last 3 months I spent some of my time to learn some Hendrix’s songs. My goal is to play those songs correctly at the end of the year and to gain some real music experience.

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#5

You’re right, I think that I need to spend some time away from the Chop Builder and to practice different exercises.