Can’t resist this thread! My 2 cents -
1)Metronome probably won’t get you a speedy mechanic if you have a bad one.
2)Speedy mechanic doesn’t mean you can play well (synchronized hands and good timing) at those speeds
3) You can have ‘crap zones’ in between the 2 extremes of speed that you can play
4) Sometimes things sound fast, when they are not (relatively speaking)
So in essence:
Ditch metronome until you have a fast motion. Start fast.
once a fast motion is acheived, apply to some licks
-Test licks against metronome to test hand synch and timing.
Used metronmome at a variety of tempos to find ‘crap spots’ and rev up and down (with or without metronome) above and below crap spots and re-test with metronome.
Not saying anything else - its just what helped me break a bit of ground in recent times
Slight detour: On that note, I also recommended Claus to you because I have a gut feeling we are both neurotic about this stuff in the same way and it was his method that took me from zero control to really high speed playing in far less than a year.
You are like the old version of me in the sense that you need some sort of order, some sort of IKEA Assembly guide to doing this stuff, right? Like you just want some stupidly simple system that tells you what to do so you can abstract away all the bullshit? Well, in all of my time researching guitar speed this is the closest you will ever get to that. I am saying that with a gun-to-my-head level of certainty. Troy’s method is great, too, but that’s Claus’ system in a little more of a free-form way. It’s core emphasis is still on smoothness, control, and speed.
So, you would likely benefit from turning you brain off, and I don’t think Mr. Clarinet Overthinker Guy from whatever school is going to help you do that with his method. Also, Can Mr. Clarinet burn through multiple patterns at high speed himself? Claus could in his prime, with a level of control that I can only compare to Anton Oparin or 1986 Paul Gilbert:
Claus is really one of a handful of instructors I’ve seen even come close to that mind-boggling level of wrist control that people saw on Intense Rock. The moment I saw him years ago I knew intuitively that he knew something 99% of YouTube guitarists didn’t.
Which brings me to my next point: Whenever you take advice from anyone about guitar technique, make sure they have videos of themselves/some other form of proof for whatever subject they are talking about. If they do not, I would strongly suggest moving it along. You could be talking to a literal 15 year old know nothing. Rusty Cooley has a funny quote about this which escapes me at the moment.
RE: Phase 3:
Yes, that’s the point. The speeding up happens automatically if you are playing the sequence with the appropriate pickstrokes and fingerings. And this right here is the most amazing part. You will be sitting there and things will be getting more accurate and quick while you watch, Idk, whatever it is. In my case, trash YouTube videos and so on. You can’t force speed, it happens on its own…
I’ve written about this before and it’s become a bit of a meme response for me, so read this old post of mine. It’s co-signed by Troy with the rare “heart” from him so if you have any doubts (lol)…
So anyways James now I’m personally invested in you lol, I want this to work for you so badly so you can see how easy and simple all of this is. You can stop the obsession and just get to work. Finally, right?
And it’s not your fault for struggling. The guitar teaching world is plagued by grifters and people who hold themselves out as “teachers” who are anything but. Consider how absurd it is for you to have this question for 4 years, and the only person who ended up guiding you through it step-by-step for FREE is me, an attorney-by-trade who works in technology. LOL.
Imagine having this problem in a violin conservatory or piano conservatory. You wouldn’t, because they already have this stuff ascertained and understood. Only in the guitar world do we hear the bullshit of “Hey man, like, whatever’s comfortable, maaaaaaan.” … “Use whatever WORKS, maaaaan.”
To end this, in Anton Oparin’s school there is a student with whom I recently spoke and he said something that really stuck with me (paraphrasing):
“Most guitarists would never be able to stomach the fact that Anton’s technical level in its equivalent violin form would be considered bare minimum acceptable in some violin conservatories.”
Brutal. Talk about complete and utter indemnification of how garbage guitar pedagogy is. And if you don’t buy that, well, the forum on which you and I are interacting is proof positive enough of this shortcoming, for it wouldn’t exist but for trying (and succeeding) in remedying this deficiency.
Something that I was thinking about recently (kinda been using the metronome more than ever the last few weeks) is that I believe there’s such thing as “metronome burnout”.
I would get a similar feeling when recording for long periods, a kind of drain from trying to nail the beat consistently.
I’ve been trying to get this Shawn Lane riff up to speed for a couple months, going through 5 BPM intervals, and I just got over the metronome. Honestly felt like past 130 BPM or so it would just not sync. I tried a full speed take today, no metronome, and it was surprisingly not a shit show as I expected.
I think sticking to something like 50/50 split for metronome / non-metronome playing might help me mitigate this, but just something to think about if you’re ONLY playing to a click.
This just sounds like fatigue - metronome or not. I love using a metronome, but you could just do bigger increments, especially at slower speeds - lessen the increments every time you feel it getting more difficult.
Could be as well. Also doesn’t help that my free time is normally spent doing a ton of climbing, so there’s tons of fatigue there (and some injuries) to work around.
Hey @Yaakov! I see you got a lot of good support already on this thread but I can’t resist adding my 2pence (as I’m writing from the UK)
I think your broader question here is how to get faster, metronome or not, right?
Since I’m fairly familiar with your particular case, hope you don’t mind if I pull this clip out of you technique critique thread. This shows that you have an excellent (and fast!) upstroke escape (USX) motion already:
To translate this speed into more “musically applied” speed, the easiest way to go is to exploit the strengths of this movement that you already have.i.e., you need licks that switch strings exclusively after upstrokes. Anything with an even number of notes per string, starting on a downstrokes, would do.
By playing a lot of different licks that fit this technique you will consolidate it, and I bet you’ll go faster and faster with it as you iron out small random variations in your motions.
I remember recommending to you some USX etudes I wrote, but looking back at them they were maybe too long and involved for a starting point (e.g. they covered all 6 strings with different shapes etc).
You could take some smaller units, like the yngwie 6-note lick confined to only 2 strings, and start there. The more short licks you find the better. Variety also helps with reducing boredom
Any of the approaches suggested by the others will probably give you good results, provided the licks you are choosing conform to the technique you are using.
Whatever practice regime you decide to use make sure you try a few reps at the target tempo every now and then, assuming you are shooting for something realistic and not 400bpm or something
I actually work on your Sixes thing daily, @tommo! But I’ve been metronoming it, and @guitarenthusiast has got me seriously thinking about shelving my little Korg clicker and going about things differently.
(Maybe you’re right about the etude being long; something to shoot for further down the road, after having success with some smaller licks. Or taking what you wrote and breaking it up. Gonna’ think about that.)
I appreciate that thoughtful response. Definitely a lot to think about there…
“start painfully slow and speed up”… assumes all motions at all speeds are exactly the same. Sure, faster motions are often just sped up and Troy has talked about this, but pick depth and slight changes in the hand and arm are very visible once speed increases, so it’s a fool’s errand to think there are zero changes in technique at say, 60 BPM 16th notes, versus 200 BPM 16th notes"
Before reading this, I was actually thinking about how 16ths at 160 are not 16ths at 164, let alone 220. There are more micro-factors to a mechanical movement than we can know; if there were a way to quantify and measure them all, the sum of them would be different at almost every point up the BPM dial. So in a sense, when you rely on a metronome, every time you bump it you’re starting from scratch. No good.
"add another variable to the equation which is human judgment in deciding whether or not to increase the metronome speed. The funny part is the body already does this, and this is a fact in neuroscience: The cerebellum assumes that any sequential input within a timeframe (no research to indicate what this might be) is to be played as fast humanly possible by the person playing it. Every time you perform a repetition the brain is essentially thinking “How I can make this faster?”
So are you saying that using the metronome actually interferes with a neuro-muscular process that, left to its own, would get you to ‘fast’…?
That’s precisely it. You have to be super logical here and think to yourself that if 164 and 160 are not the same speed, then by virtue of that alone they can’t involve identical motions. Otherwise… They’d be the same speed.
I’m not sure to what extent anyone would be completely starting from scratch, as I’m sure there’s carryover in the bigger picture sense. But I get what you’re saying, and if you do large enough jumps on the metronome that definitely feels like the case. With highly technical passages even an extra BPM or too feels intense.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Human beings aren’t computers much less clicking boxes.
If the brain does this automatically, why on earth would you add your own conscious control to the situation and overcomplicate things with your own judgment. Taking away the focus on the quality of the movement is a really terrible idea if the goal of your practice is to produce a quality movement lol. The only exception to this as I’ve mentioned is when you have a super, super specific BPM marking to perform at in which case I’d recommend just playing to that tempo from day one. But that’s really just for metal/rock players and shred guys in a live setting with in-ear monitors. You’re not going to be seeing a jazz guy in a club or an unaccompanied flamenco guy on the street playing to a grid.
Something else occurs to me… Truth be told, I’m not happy with stuff I play at medium tempo either. Not considering I’ve been playing for over 3000 hours at this point. So if you have to ‘go fast to go fast’ - I wonder if you also have to go fast to go medium.
The little fluffs and bloopers I do when playing something fairly easy - i.e. the immature dexterity that makes me an intermediate - would, I’m guessing, disappear on its own if I could really rip.
That’s not to say you work on being fast 100% of your practice time. But the greatest gains towards what classical musicians call ‘stability’ at the moderate tempos might actually be made by learning to play accurately fast.
Thanks again for the footage we used in the case studies. Did you watch it yet? A lot of those studies are potentially relevant to things you’re working on now. Yes, you have to go fast to go medium. The fast motion is the good one. Then you can slow it down to improve accuracy, smoothness, and so on.
You didn’t use a metronome to find your smooth motion in the case study, you just went fast by feel and the better motion is what emerged. Metronomes aren’t bad per se, they’re just often used by players focusing on getting all the notes “right” at a slow speed with the wrong motion. Turning off the analytical brain and finding a smooth motion by feel is how to identify correctness.
As far as areas for improvement, your case study footage still shows some garage spikes i.e. pick grabbing on the upstrokes. You can see and hear this in slow motion when the string plucks more forcefully on the upstrokes. I would experiment with edge picking by straightening your thumb to see if you can get this to go away. This will improve smoothness and probably reveal some more speed.
In general, when you want to go faster, change something to fix the efficiency.
FYI as a thank you we have also granted you permanent Primer access. You should be able to hit the home page and watch whatever part of it you like. Thanks again!
This thread makes me wonder if @Troy generated some kind of questionnaire for the people he’s interviewed / recorded with metronome-specific questions, as well as general practice regiments and whatnot. Even a forum-wide survey would be pretty revealing.
It gets more complicated from there in terms of what is actually going on in the body to control other things such as dynamics and lower levels of speed, but I will spare you another paragraph (or twenty) about hand and arm muscles and blah blah blah. Lol.
Just keep in mind that speed in and of itself isn’t the final indicator of efficiency. Something can be fast and still be horribly wrong from a biomechanics standpoint in terms of fretting/picking choices for specific phrases. Those aren’t as subjective as people tend to think. Which means you can be even faster if you modify that last percentile. But as long as you’re fast is the main point… And this is where it really starts to get into the weeds… If you’re super curious you can message me but I think for now you have enough info to really get going.
Don’t get nervous - I’m not having a metronome relapse, but… The ideas of proper mechanics (i.e. trap-escape picking for fast lead lines) together with chunking (getting USX or DSX to hum at a doable speed and let it speed up on its own) are downright powerful. I’ve got a few actual power tools lying around, and I’m a big believer in knowing not only what they’re good for, but also what they’re not.
So here comes the metronome again…
Hear me out. As an intermediate player, I’ve still got fundamental stuff to work out with the left hand as well as with the right. Chording, for example, is like the most basic thing you need to play guitar. So it’s tempting to get excited and think that as with USX, somehow I’m gonna’ figure a way to mechanic/chunk my way to great chord fretting. But…
That’s bogus, right? Trap-escape picking is a “technique” - I’ll define that word as effective mechanics that are not necessarily intuitive. Lots of people never figure out trap-escape and are stuck string-hopping for life, so that’s what I mean by a technique not being intuitive. Chording, on the other hand, is not a “technique” in that way. Pretty much any two people would finger an open C the same way, and the motions involved in moving into and out of the chord are also basically intuitive.
What’s more, as far as I can tell, “go fast to go fast” can’t work with chording. So I’m saying that doing the metronome, bump-a-few-clicks-at-a-time thing, IS the way forward with a skill like chording. Maybe the only way.
Am I making sense?.. (I obviously think so, but I’ve been SO wrong before;)
Uhm I’m not sure. I think one of the greatest “chorders” that ever lived is Joe Pass. I somehow have a hard time imagining him with a metronome slowly increasing bpm… not exactly a quality answer I know
So your assertion hinges upon what, that a C chord is standardized and that fretting movements are more intuitive so they are more amenable to being built up with a metronome? If I put you on a desert island for a year to practice guitar chording and to get your chops as fast as possible, you mean to tell me you need a metronome to do this? But if you’re playing Yngwie sixes, that’s different? What?
I don’t really follow what you’re saying. It’s mechanics in the human body. There’s no “X is more difficult than Y” here. It’s just different. But it’s trained the same way regardless.
