Getting Faster - Are Speed Bursts Effective?

Playing Technique
#46

I was (in another life many many years ago lol) a collegiate level sprinter. I was not a beefcake runner, but skinny as hell for a sprinter, still am tbh. Being able to lift weights has (almost) nothing to do with being fast. Although quite often the faster you get (above a certain threshold) the more your ability to lift heavy things increases.

All of this is to say as an amateur back-seat unqualified internet commentator, I would wager that speed bursting beyond your comfortable maximum on guitar has more to do with coordination and adaptation moreso than any actual muscular “training”. Being able to use only the necessary muscles to sprint at the expense of everything else so as to allow the constant contracting and relaxing of opposing forces sounds a lot like what needs to happen for higher speed guitar playing. Obviously not from a strength/force standpoint but from your muscles and brain needs to learn what it has to do to fire only those impulses that are needed for the coordinated motion of your arm hands and your hand fingers?

I dunno what is guitar anyway?!

#47

Can you tremolo pick (a single note on a single string) 16ths at 190 for the duration of the exercise? Or does that fall apart too?

#48

I think I see where you are going with this lol! But yeah, I can sustain the tremolo (so long as I am warmed up) at 190 on one string for the duration of the exercise. I am pretty sure this is the same motion I’m using when playing the whole thing at 180 or the chunks/bursts at 190. This may address Troy’s point of the semantics of me asking if this will help me get faster. What if I word it differently? Will the short bursts at 190, combined with some progressive forward chained chunks, help me eventually play the whole thing at 190? If so, could I then bump it up to 200? Then 208 etc until I reach whatever my speed limit is.

#49

This is the use case that I was recommending forward chaining and bursting for. It’s not about increasing the maximum speed of your picking hand, so much as increasing the speed that you can cleanly execute a specific piece of music. Synchronization and accuracy, rather than raw speed or endurance.

But don’t take my word for it. Posting a video will probably get you more specific recommendations from the experts here.

#50

I have felt some success by over shooting my speed - that is going for it at 200 sloppy as hell for a few minutes, then backing to 185 and finding much more control.

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#51

6 posts were split to a new topic: Petrucci Exercise

#56

Absolutely, all the time. I can’t think of a practice technique I use more than forward chaining with small chunks. There’s a neuroscience explanation behind it that I will save for my longer post, but it’s sufficient to say that versus metronome torture, it’s far more efficient. Higher-volume training is something you save for when you can’t rely on existing knowledge of prior mechanics to deduce how a phrase will work. Repeated exposure to a problem area on the instrument will expose tension, which is something speed bursts can’t do as well. Anything done quickly will feel “easy” because it’s over before your brain has a chance to examine it. Barely touching a boiling pot of water for a nanosecond with your finger doesn’t register much if any pain, but submerging your hand in the pot of water certainly does, to make a crude analogy.

I always try to get as much as I can at my current goal speed. So, hypothetically, if it’s 200 BPM, I will literally play one note, then two, etc. For you, I’d recommend just getting that first chunk of four on the low E. Or, even 2 notes.

In the interim, if you are really set on 200, I’d drop all practice at other tempos for now.

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#57

Again, as a former track team captain, this is not what “faster” means! This is endurance. If you can run a quarter mile in 75 seconds, and someone else can run a half mile at the same speed, they’re not faster, they have more endurance than you. However if you can only run a quarter mile in 75 and someone else can run it in 50, they are definitely faster. Likewise, if you told me you wanted to increase your picking speed to 220bpm sixteenths, I would agree that you are trying to “get faster”. But if you tell me you can already pick at 190 and you just want to do 190 better in some way, that’s not faster. Again, apologies for the nit picking. But if we’re not on the same page about this then you might have someone reading this thread and thinking “get faster” means a totally different thing than what you’re asking for.

That being said, all these athletic training analogies you’re making, we have no evidence that picking motion actually works that way where you have to intentionally stress yourself so hard physically that you need “recovery”. Anecdotally I can tell you that nothing I’ve learned on a guitar has ever felt this way. Fine motor skill learning that I’ve done feels like the opposite of that, where the joints tend to almost move on their own with very little exertion. This includes things like metal downstroke rhythms that you might think of as requiring lots of exertion. For example:

I spent about twenty minutes on this a few months back. When it started to click it felt light and springy and fast, like the hand was moving faster than I could control it. It looks more athletic than that, but I can tell you it doesn’t feel that way. I didn’t figure this out right away, I had to sit there kind of tooling around with this for a while until I was able to get the springy thing happening. The time I spent before the springyness felt athletic and tiring, and not in a good way. When I started doing it what I think was the “right” way, the athletic feel went away.

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#58

I don’t know for sure. When i was trying to develop USX I used ‘start slow, increase speed gradually’ approach. It worked. But I don’t see why bursts can’t be useful too. It’s just that I don’t remember if they helped me. People are different.

That’s why I sometimes start with fourth notes countdown before playin some fast lick. Though recently it became not so important for me. If I like how it sounds I don’t care whether I’m cheating. From my point of view there’s nothing wrong with beeing able to play short phrases faster than you play long licks. It always gives you an opportunity to show off before your friends which increase your self-esteem ))

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#59

Hey,

running was an analogy that came to my mind while scanning through this thread.
Of course no one has proof that running is a good analogy, but the following question came to my mind:

Was Usain Bolt as fast as he is just once he figured out the right movement? Or did training increase his top speed.

While my hypothesis is that, muscular force is not necessary for fast picking, I also think that playing as fast as you can, on the edge of failing (whatever that is) can lead to expansion of the maximum oscillation speed, beit by neuronal changes or finhoning of the movement, I don’t know. At least that is what I observed in my own hummingbirdiness.

Thomas

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#60

Hah, man if I truly “knew” that I’d be a rich man. The lengths and breadths people have gone to try and wring hundredths of a second off their personal bests is borderline (no not borderline at all) definitely destructive, in many cases.

I would hypothesize that he (whether consciously or not) figured out how to run fast at an early age. Like, he was world class before he was 16, which is BONKERS but also there are a lot of flash in the pan superstars at 18 years old who go pretty much nowhere afterwards. So he was also blessed with incredible resiliency, and a technique and training that didn’t grind him down.

He was 6’5 at 15 years old and ran 20.58 to win the world Juniors. Like he was always fast. He’d have been fast with no coaching, he’d have been fast with a diet of pizza and beer and he’d have been fast on the worst day of his life with garbage shoes and in shitty conditions.

Physically he matured far earlier than his peers, but I think that allowed him to get to world-record class levels. He was already (always) fast and probably would have just naturally been faster than 90%-95% of the rest of the world without any outside input.

So to circle back around to your question (I’ve still no idea lol) but I’d wager that like a lot of other athletes in their prime, the more time you spend out on the bleeding edge of performance (provided it’s not destructive to your body) the better and more comfortable you’re going to be out there and the easier it will be to reach those heights on a regular basis with less effort. It’s a positive feedback loop, your body spends less effort to get to X so attaining X+1 becomes simple and routine and all of a sudden you can do X+2 at a push and so on and so on.

By and large though, sprint training is mostly trying to ingrain the CAPACITY to repeatedly run at high speeds. Like, allowing your muscles, tendons and Nervous System to support that kind of maximum effort. So whatever that means with regards to guitar, I’ve no idea. But it’s fun talking about because I love it lol

That’s my theory anyway @Tom0711

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#61

@tommo I hate you! man, that sounds fantastic!!!

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#62

Wow,

sorry, it took me a while to answer because your knowledge and passion for running is just so overwhelming I didn’t know what to make of it :wink:
So we can conclude that there are exceptional naturals in running and I think that’s also true for guitar as we know a lot of the greats didn’t practice, yet of course they played a lot.
I support that once you find the correct motion and ingrain it, you become fast,
still I’m sure there is some process of changing slow twitch muscle fibers for fast twitch ones or something similar and also some neurological going on with practice (or playing) to increase max speed after one has crushed the “150bpm barrier”.
At least for me speed bursts helped, as I could not sustain some motion for longer than 3-4 beats because some other motion started to creep in. So I think it helps with getting used to fast playing.
Aside all this science discussion, I think YJMs “to learn how to play fast you have to play fast” pretty much sums it up, be it in bursts or “tremolo first, one string sequences later and so on”.

Thomas

Edited for messy language and spelling

#63

Hah yeah I got a bit carried away there, but you DID ask! ; )

As for the conversion of slow twitch to fast twitch muscle fibres, I’m not up to speed (hurrr hurr) on biological research on how effective or possible that is. Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline! But I DO know that part of training (even if you’re slow to begin with) that I forgot to mention, helps the body learn how to recruit as many of the fast twitch fibres it DOES have into the sprinting movement over time.

As for how THAT applies to guitar, I don’t believe it does. Like has been mentioned, if you’re playing guitar and requiring the forces a runner would use, I don’t believe you’re doing it “right” you know? I’d almost equate it more to how someone learns to draw. You start by making a mess and feel like you’re terrible and actively working against your best interests and then over time, with focused practice you learn how to keep the GOOD habits and produce more of the imagery you prefer and less of what you don’t, with significantly less effort.

#64

I’m sure there are differences in raw athletic ability among guitarists. I’m sure Yngwie is faster than me in terms of raw joint speed if were somehow able to measure that. I’m sure Shawn Lane was faster still. And I would also bet that both players learn physical stuff faster than me if all three of us are given no information on how to do something.

But when you look at athletics versus guitar there’s just no comparison. A world class marathoner runs a 4:45 mile 26 times in a row. I mean, the gulf between that and what average people do in the marathon even with tons of hard core training is so giant, it’s not an ocean, it’s a planet. I ran track for four years and I took pride in never missing a practice and pretty much always giving my all. There was simply no amount of intense, vomit-inducing training I could do to get anywhere near the best runners on my team. Nowhere near them. They were all just born that way. And many trained way less, and way less hard, than I did. After four years of it I became convinced that running ability is almost entirely genetic and based on physiology. Training improves it, but comparatively not by much.

So I think physiology-dependent athletics like running and swimming are not great analogies for guitar playing at all. This forum is full of people who can play Yngwie stuff at full speed. Any time you ask people to move their hands and arms fast, they almost all end up somewhere in the shred zone between 180 and 220 or so. This is where most of the “hard” rock music on guitar lives, and most people can already move their hands this fast with very little or sometimes no training.

If we really went hard on trying to find guitarists with very fast athletic motions, like the Olympics, we might discover that there are genetic freaks like Usain bolt out there who can go way, way faster than the average person. We might discover that, or we might not. My best guess is that the distribution for fast joint motion still isn’t as wide as it is for O2 processing capability. But either way maybe it wouldn’t actually matter that much because music itself still lives at the same range of attainable tempos from 90 to 220 or so, if we’re talking sixteenth notes. Even the Usain Bolts of guitar would still likely be writing tunes in that range, which means the rest of us can still play them.

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#65

Quarter milers in the house!

#66

We certainly ran them in practice but that wasn’t my event, I get better as the distances get longer. Not good enough to really matter at a team level though.

#67

As you mentioned in your earlier post, what gets scary is how fast the splits of world-class guys are at longer distances. And while the 400m guys I was around loved to chirp about how hard our distance was, none of us wanted to run 800m. And we mostly tried to pretend 400m hurdles wasn’t even a thing. :smiley:

#68

We’re in agreement on this. I probably got a little carried away talking about speed and how it relates to running so maybe my point got lost, but yeah I 100% agree with this. You don’t need a boatload of fast twitch muscle fibre to play speedy guitar, you’re not asking your body to do heavy lifting or to launch its entire mass across 100m or more of distance as fast as possible, you’re asking it to move finger and arm joints at a quick pace which like you say, I feel is accessible to near everyone.

#69

I feel this sentiment in my bones. Which after long speed workouts, I would happily have given away to someone freely, if they’d offered to just take the pain away.

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