Crap I have a lot to say about this.
Ok, first, I’m going to go into teacher mode and propose an exercise, and it’s a little hippy dippy but my hunch is you don’t have anything better to do right now, so here goes:
Close your eyes and focus on your breathe for a bit, try to clear your head of anything you were just thinking about, thinking about earlier, worrying about for later, etc.
Imagine one of these two scenarios, take your pick:
- You are watching yourself get on stage, and then play the best show of your life.
- You are in your perfect music listening environment (maybe that’s in your car on a long drive, maybe it’s in your room with nice audio equipment alone after work, wherever you really like listening to music) and you pop on your own album, and it sounds perfect.
In either scenario, can you have a general ‘vision’ (really, audiation) of what this music sounds like? Will there be climactic sections, that really represent your playing and your music at its best? What do they sound like? Is it tight alternate picking? Lot of sweeping and legato?
Then go find a metronome with a tap function, tap it in, figure out the rhythmic value, and whatever the hell it was that you were imagining, and there’s the real goal from a creative output perspective.
I know that might sound really out there to some of you, but I feel like for creative purposes, that’d be the process I think would be most accurate in finding your speed goal.
Then to take an athletic spin on that, you’d probably want to be able to, on your best day, do 20% faster or so, so that the goal is something you can just rip up on any day without warming up.
I think it’s possible that in the process of the exercise some people might find that when they really do some soul searching maybe the music they want to perform is NOT actually that fast, or doesn’t involve a lot of fast picking passages or what not.
Ok OK, OK, SO
that’s the creative ‘music making’ perspective as I see it.
Another perspective is simply enjoying the challenge of certain benchmarks and achieving a certain athleticism with the guitar. It’s fun to do, it can be exciting to watch, and personally I see no problem with it as long as we recognize the intent is different than trying to make the most beautiful music possible.
for ME
I’m a teacher by trade and also teach some fairly advanced students, more in the jazz/improv realm and not so much metal/shred/hard rock etc. I love learning more about guitar technique and it makes me stronger as a teacher to have a better idea of how things work and to be able to actually play them. So I’m interested in a whole host of things related to fast technical playing even though very little of it would be put to use in my own actual music making (or even in the type of improvisation I like to do.) I find it really interesting to try to pull off crazy shred licks just from an athletic/mechanical/problem solving perspective and then I find the more I work on that stuff the more I can understand about guitar technique in general and that helps me as a teacher.
For anything I would actually like playing, for a more concrete answer, I’d love to be able to do mostly-picked, syncopated accented 8th note lines that can cover wide and unusual intervals, and I’d like to be able to do it at 350bpmish. I can do a lot of stuff at that ‘note-per-second’ speed, but unfortunately not a lot of stuff that fits all of those parameters (syncopated, intentional accents, mostly-picked, wide and unusual intervals) and not for extended/long lines. Even two way pick slanting isn’t awesome for that kind of stuff, I’ve resolved at this point that it either has to be hybrid picking or crosspicking.
Even if it’s mostly economy picking, there will always be some cross picking or slant-change events in this type of vocabulary, it’s hard to avoid those motions without slurring a lot of using some hybrid.
Fingerstyle/classical style might work well too, but that’s not really my training. I can do some cool stuff with hybrid but I bite my nails so the tone isn’t as strong as I’d want it.
