Getting Faster - Are Speed Bursts Effective?

Playing Technique
#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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#70

There very well may be players with huge fast twitch abilities. But for I guess arbitrary reasons it doesn’t really matter because many of the tempos we consider “fast” are actually doable by a large percentage of people if they’re willing to learn the techniques. So that’s good news, every kid really is a winner for once!

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#71

Much of this thread falls into TLDR but in my personal experience as well as working with students myself, I find bursting to help with the ability to mentally sustain coordination between the two hands at high tempos. It’s pretty much just like what Martin Miller describes in that video someone posted above, and in all of the practice pedagogy written for classical instrumentalists that I’ve read (on no specific instrument) the #1 most common exercise I keep coming across for developing sustained control at fast tempos is some variation of bursting. Sometimes it’s called playing in rhythms, sometimes is called “add a beat” but the idea is always the same: do small bits of the passage and gradually chain them together as you feel capable of doing so, at a challenging tempo.

I believe just having the raw speed in either hand doesn’t mean someone can automatically coordinate the two perfectly and with no mental discomfort. Maybe some people can. But the idea of being able to increase mental capacity to “control” or “align” these faster movements for longer and longer stretches of time is aided by burst practice. Mental discomfort = physical discomfort. And I’ve literally seen students isolate individual hands at the same fast tempo, say a single string lick, to where they can play a single note just fine, they can legato just fine, but as soon as I ask them to pick fast with the left hand it’s like someone slammed on the brakes.

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#72

i think the burst exercise should be swing tempo to sextuplets/triplets that way at least during the slow down phase you are still working at tempo for two strokes (down and up, you could burst one triplet and flip flop this to up and down to cover all aspects, or just do one sextuplet grouping to get it back to down and up) then a slight pause. finding that sensation of being relaxed while still accomplishing a tempo that just seems so far out of reach if you are trying to rapid fire triplets in succession for beats at a time for 20 seconds long. you have to start somewhere and 2 notes at tempo is still 2 notes so that way you dont get discouraged. i havent really practiced speed in this sense though for like weeks or months. and i am actually pretty certain it will build up speed as this is a rhythm style both jazz and blues utilizes so it likely will just build speed on its own if you just play in swing rhythm often. and i probably hate to be the bearer of bad news but however high you can swing tempo something is probably your cap with whatever motions you are using with your body. now years and years of playing live, you might can get faster, but if you don’t regularly play that won’t occur. everybody is likely different in this case, unless you start forcing the speed via tension then you can get it higher.

but i will be clear this will work magic for single string stuff, the cross string stuff good luck. haha that is another can of worms you will have to work on. the only solution i can see for myself is to wear a thumb pick that has a nice pick shape like a dunlop flow, and learn to flamenco so i can economy pick both ways with extreme speed. :smiley: or just get good enough with my thumb nail to use it like a pick. that ultimately i feel is as far as you can take it. i await the day we see the next big gun doing this kinda thing then i will be shocked. :laughing:

but this swing rhythm burst trick might only work for players who have played awhile so they are more consistent with how they play, and know some stuff that feels good under their hands. this probably wouldn’t work for beginners.

#73

I’m curious to know if you still believe this now after you’ve discovered your 250+ bpm DSX reverse dart-thrower movement.

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#75

There’s not enough data to say conclusively, but if you ask me to guess, I think there are likely differences, and some may even dictate differences in ultimate performance in some skills that can’t be eclipsed by training. I’ve read the Ericsson stuff extensively, and lots and lots of recent motor learning research. That’s my gut feeling just based on the evidence so far.

Longer answer:

There’s no solid data to disprove the existence of individual innate neurological differences that affect things like performance and learning. But the reverse is true, and the body of that research is growing. We’ve talked about some of this before in our lessons, like the studes done by Maurice Smith’s lab at Harvard, which investigate innate differences in motor system randomness. Bence Olveczky’s lab, also at Harvard, did a gangbusters study on rat learning with millions of trials that not only supports this, but teases out the actual circuitry of randomness, and shows strong evidence for innate individual differences between individuals that affect learning speed. If these types of neurological differences exist, I see no reason to assume others don’t unless you prove it to me. So I think as time goes on we’ll discover more effects like this and that there are, in fact, some biological roots of both learning and performance.

Does this mean the effects predict or prevent ultimate performance? In some cases maybe, in other cases maybe not. Again, I see no reason for there to be a one-size-fits-all here. However I would also guess that the differences, where they exist, are likely to exert their most powerful effects on an untrained population, controlling who does and does not make it through the filter and ‘discover’ efficient ways of playing.

The filter effect is at least one of the factors, along with chance, that explains the spotty distribution of great picking skills in self-taught populations. Just keep in mind that I also think it’s probably responsible for selection bias even in populations with lots of training, like people in music conservatories.

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#76

That’s all very reasonable, thank you for the detailed response. I’ll think on it.

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#77

I know people tend to get worked up over this kind of stuff so I’ll also add that’s it clear that most people can learn to do most things they want to do on a guitar. People mainly worry about questions of “natural ability” when they have trouble doing something they want to do. That’s when they start to wonder if maybe they’re not genetically cut out for it. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when people show us actual video of the problem, it’s not genetics — they’re just doing it wrong. Once you eliminate that, they start to care a lot less about whether guitar hero XYZ is 15% faster at some super top-end speed that they never use.

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#78

I just thought this sounded very genuine, and wanted to tell you this because sometimes I have my doubts about the methodology here. But this paragraph should be somewhere on your subscription page. :rofl:

I like that 15% faster sentence because I can 100% guarantee if someone was to listen to an average player cover this guitar heroes song at 85% speed they wouldn’t really be able to say hey that is not up to tempo in the moment. :rofl:

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