Hello from Utah

Introduce Yourself
#1

Hey everyone! I discovered the CTC series on YouTube a few weeks ago, and I started practicing my technique a few days ago. I’ve been forum lurking for those same few days, but I thought I’d go ahead and actually introduce myself.

I’m going to go ahead and get the magnet soon, post a video, and generally spend some time in technique critique, but in the meantime any thoughts on building raw speed on a single string?

I started going through the Primer, and realized very quickly that even with absolute flawless string changes, I would never be very fast with my current single-string speeds. I think I have a semi-decent tremolo speed, but I lose the vast majority of that speed when I try to sync up my hands. I started working on the six note per string pattern, mostly with a metronome but sometimes without, but I basically have two questions.

  1. Is there an ideal practice structure for building speed? Should I try to increase a certain bpm every day, or try to spend more or less time on better synchronization and form at relatively lower speeds, compared with trying to increase the absolute speed?

  2. Are there some objective milestones or guidelines for when it would be best to move on to the rest of the Primer and other material, or is it all relative? I would love to get into more stuff, but I want to have a solid foundation and efficient progress, even if I have to spend a few weeks or months just drilling one exercise.

Apologies for the short intro and long question, and thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice!

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#2

First off, as someone who has been following CTC for a long time, I’m almost envious of how much good stuff you have ahead of you, kind of like finding out someone hasn’t seen your favorite movie yet. :smiley: Oh, and welcome. :smiley:

My take is that you need to come at it from both ends. If you don’t have good low-speed accuracy, you’re bound to engrain bad habits if you get too ambitious with the fast stuff right away, but on the other side of it, I think that the movements at “shred” speed are qualitatively different in ways that you won’t appreciate unless you spend some time trying to move really fast. So in my opinion, you need to spend some time experimenting with high speed to get an idea of what fast looks and feels like, and then try to tweak your low-speed practice so that while it is clean and accurate, it is also compatible with what the movements will look and feel like at high speed. That is, yes, get your accuracy cleaned up at lower speeds, but throw in some faster experiments to help you refine what “shred-compatible” movements should look and feel like, so that as much as possible, the lower speed movements are truly “slowed down” versions of the movements you’ll be making when it’s time to shred.

I’m a believer in getting as much context as possible to inform what you’re doing. You know those books that say “read the whole book before you come back to the beginning and try this”? That’s the philosophy I subscribe to. Especially where there’s a risk of going down dead ends or developing bad habits, I believe in getting as full a grasp of the state of the art as possible, then bringing that knowledge back to square one and applying things from square one with a richer understanding of what’s ahead. I guess that doesn’t really answer the question of “how long should I spend working six note patterns on one string before adding other things?”, but I’m not sure there’s a hard and fast answer to that question. But I definitely think that locking in the two-hand coordination of that is really fundamental to other things, so it’s something you’d probably benefit from not skimping on. One idea might be to start your own thread in the “technique critique” section with a video asking for feedback on the current state of your six-note-per-string stuff.

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#3

Very helpful, thank you!

I’ll get a video up on technique critique hopefully by this weekend.

I’m excited to be here!

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