I would add that my current understanding is that the metronome’s primary function is to teach us to play in time - presumably with a technique that we already have.
I learned the hard way that the metronome is not even sufficient for the task. Sometimes I recorded myself and could swear I was on the click / drum track. Then I looked/ listened to the recording and I was massively ahead of the beat, so had to recalibrate.
As for your chord fretting question, I don’t see why you would need the metronome for that:
you got your 2 chord shapes that you want to combine, and you’ll first think of the smoothest way to move your fingers from one shape to the other. For example, you may find that some fingers don’t have to move at all, and that’s a plus. Or you’ll find that all the fingers need to move, so it’s a bit less convenient. Then once the shapes and are memorised you can just try to connect the chords smoothly, without regard for a particular tempo.
As per my post above, metronome practice is very important as far as keeping time (as pointed out by @tommo), regardless of speed. Not saying that you have to use one to get good timing, but it is very apparent when someone lacks the ability to do it - just listen to their playing!
Regarding chords and the metronome - I think it is useful because of that very reason - you have to play the chords at the right time. You can’t go as fast as you can and you can’t go too slow. Using a metronome to increase chords helps because it pushes you into action and tells you pretty quickly when you messed it up. It drags you up to tempo - some people need that, otherwise they dawdle at the same speed and are never forced into making adjustments or experimentation. I suppose the problem is that the whole bump up by a couple of bpms is too small an increment.
Yep, that’s what I say all the time on here. Metronome is for timing or super specific live/recording scenarios, and leave it at that.
Practice is much less stressful when you don’t have a drill sergeant barking in your ear “Keep up! Keep up!”. And probably more effective, too.
I realize this question will keep coming up on this forum so long as it’s active so I don’t have a problem answering this as I’m sure @tommo doesn’t either.
It’s just that I really, really, really, think the research is settled on how the human brain operates w/r/t speed. And I don’t think this answer is ever changing, either.
When I was a kid I had an uncle who loved to watch 'wrasslers in cage matches on t.v. I have that feeling here sometimes - but I’m the smallest guy in the cage, about to get torn in half…
So right, @tommo, I can’t imagine a master like Pass having spent his guitar youth staring at a pendulum swinging either. But… (here we go; squeezing through that rusty cage door now…)
Let’s be specific. Fingering choices, guide and pivot fingers - the stuff @tommo mentions - is not what I’m trying to get at. Timing, which @PickingApprentice rightly points out can be helped thru a click (though I agree with Tommo - I find myself racing the click, not playing with it), is not what I’m talking about either.
I want to work on getting a chord progression fast. The speed is in the changes. So, do I A) just play it at a comfortable tempo, over & over (i.e. chunking style) without consciously increasing speed (because - this is important - the speed is supposed to come on its own) or do I B) use a metronome to deliberately push my speed up (e.g. Hadcock’s +12bpm/-8bpm cyclical approach)?
Simpler, now: how do train the left hand to change chords fast? Chunk or click? A or B?
All the wisdom shared up above in this thread would seem to suggest A (and @guitarenthusiast, for sure). I know that’s what you all think. And regarding trapped-escaped (USX, DSX) single-note picking, I get it now that you’re right.
But I don’t get it with chording! It’s like we’re doing a group test - I’m holding the pencil, everyone around the table is yelling “write A!” and I’m like, “no, no, it’s B!!”
(Truthfully, not just to be contrary - can’t y’all see? why isn’t it B?! )
I love a bit of drill sergeant practice - to the point where I got really grumpy when my 2 year old broke my metronome- not because I didn’t have another metronome, but because I loved the sound of my usual one! Haha!
The metronome is great, but the advice should be 'start at 200bpm and work your way down, ! Not up!
Funnily enough, I struggled to play my fastest without the metronome. When I picked up the guitar, warmed up and played a tremolo as fast as I could and checked against the metronome, I would be dissapointed to find I was doing 16ths at 170bpm - it felt waaay faster than that, but would then whack the metronome on with an extra 20-25 bpm on top of that and would pretty much get it.
The metronome did not give me the speed - the efficient picking motion did. However, the metronome allowed me to comprehend what ‘fast’ really was and dragged me there.
I wonder if whether a psychological element causes some people to fair better with the metronome than others? Is it just that some need a ‘systematic’ method? (Whether it truly helps them or not)
My devils advocate answer would be ‘Does it matter?’ Does B help you? If so, carry on and be happy!
My opinion is (again echoing a previous post of mine) is that you should do both. I think that option A is vital to make sure that have actually learned the change involved and as @tommo explained - search for the smoothest way of doing things. Then option B at least becomes worthwhile and is a kind forced experimentation (when using the +12 and -8 formula). Its very much a refinement phase too
This reminds me of another thread with @tommo in which someone requested Universal Mind intro, and I played it noticeably faster than it’s supposed to be. After looking up the right tempo and plugging it in, the “downshift” in speed felt more manageable and clean.
I think @PickingApprentice and @guitarenthusiast are basically using the metronome as the guide, not the tool, and I agree with that. You can practice without the metronome exclusively, but if in your head you’re thinking “this is fast though” and you’re 20% slower or something, you’re gonna get all messed up when you actually try to play it at speed (by using a metronome).
Very fair question. And since I’m always trying to be pragmatic about this stuff and not off in theoretical orbit, I think the answer’s yes.
If I go with A (chunking), and let’s use Claus Levin here because he’s got great stuff on chunking (though I don’t think he ever calls it that), I’m gonna be drilling on that progression for a loooong time. The point is not to even think about speed, after all, since it’s supposed to come on its own.
But as I’m answering you - and this is something I especially love about this forum, the dialectic here forces real thought…
I should just do one prog with A, another with B, be patient and see what happens. (I know that doesn’t seem like much of a eureka! moment, but when I’m down deep in the details, I can actually miss a simple solution like that.)
Okay, you’ve convinced me: we don’t know whether A or B or both! I’ll have to experiment (though I remain interested in other people’s $.02 on this subject…)
Without a metronome? I’d determine the amount of bars for the phrase and make sure I repeated the exercise only that amount of times. Maybe rest for a few seconds, or a minute, then try again.
If I had a metronome going, I’d tap tempo that part of the song and match it with the metronome, then I’d do the same thing as above, just with the metronome.
If I had a serious, and I mean like absolutely crippling mechanical problem that stemmed from a certain part of the passage, I’d play it in a loop endlessly until I figured out what (fingering, picking) was causing the problem.
Before today, I would have said hey, Claus Levin wants you at a doable tempo - he didn’t say anything about forcing a tempo sloppy!..
But as I get into Tommo’s Sixes exercise, I’m finding that anything under 100 bpm is pure wrist for me - and since my fastest motion has got some forearm rotation in it like Troy pointed out, either I practice it doable with pure wrist (and then at some point the motion I’m drilling won’t work anymore) or I gotta force it at 100 and put up with sloppy for now. So I think I’m getting you.
…But to be sure I really get you… If @anon25405869 had said, ‘since I can only play this clean at 130, I’m gonna sit on that tempo and just drill it for a good long while (like Claus Levin) until it grows wings and flies on its own at 145…’ You’re good with that too, right?
A little late to the party, I’ve been offline the last few days, but…
I think it’s VERY important to keep this in context, though - I can’t speak to the specifics of what Peter Hadcock was practicing with a metronome here, or why he was using a metronome… but the mechanical challenges of alternate picking on a guitar are nothing at all like playing fast alternate picked runs on a guitar. And, while I’m extremely leery of using athletic/workout metaphors for guitar technique, if there’s one thing I HAVE learned as a cyclist that I do think has bearing on the guitar, it’s that understanding WHY you’re doing a particular drill or workout, and what it’s supposed to accomplish, is incredibly important for making improvements, if nothing else to ensure the drill or workout you’re doing is actually going to lead to the benefits you’re looking for, and that it’s tailored to the problem you’re trying to solve. Come to think of it, I think that’s really a guitar lesson that I’ve been applying to cycling, more than a cycling lesson I’m applying to guitar.
One of the things that Troy has teased out with the guitar and the “running before you can walk” approach to practice is what you’re hoping to accomplish is to develop a mechanical approach to picking notes that’s mechanically efficient, and this works because none of the challenges that are present picking fast runs on a guitar at tempo even exist when playing slower runs. Basicaly, you can’t hope to “solve” these mechanical puzzles, if you’re not experiencing them, so you HAVE to try playing fast to figure them out and going slow and slowly building speed doesn’t help. This isn’t a way to build pick speed - even beginners can be taught to alternate pick awfully fast pretty quickly, and after reading this thread the last time I was on for kicks I fired up a drum loop and just started cranking up the tempo trem-picking 16ths, and I was handling 240bpm with what I would hestitate to call comfort, at least an acceptable amount of control. That’s FAR faster than I ever practice - the physical ability to move the pick back and forth isn’t a limiting factor, it’s the mechanics of doing so in a way that I can make efficient string changes. That’s something that isn’t a matter of gradually building up speed, it’s something that you’re either doing it in a way that works, or you’re not.
I’m not a clarinetist so I can’t speak to what Hadcock was trying to solve, but I’d lay good money on the fact that the challenge isn’t trying to get your pick from inside the plane of the string, to above the strings so you can move from one string to the other.
So, if you think this “burst” approach is working for you, and if you believe it’s NOT for the reasons Troy has already outlined at length elsewhere, then that’s something I think it might be very fruitful to spend some real time thinking about WHY it’s working, and what’s happening exactly that’s helping you improve.
My experience, for whatever it’s worth, is a metronome is great for building timing and coordination and control, rather than trying to use it to push speed. I’ve been doing legato work to a metronome lately, playing WELL below my max speed, but really working on building fretting hand evenness and control, and I’ve seen some noticeable improvement in just a week or so from that.
EDIT - like, on the importance of understanding what a drill is supposed to be doing, further down you write this:
…it would really depend why you couldn’t play it faster than 130bpm clean. Is your picking hand falling apart? Since I assume you can alternate pick and move the pick fast enough that you can comfortably trem pick at 145bpm, then I’d say yeah, just jumping up to 145bpm - or even faster - and blowing through it while your picking hand tries to figure out mechanically how to navigate te passage probably will work. If the issue however is your fretting hand is struggling to keep up, or there are coordination issues between your fretting hand and picking hand (which, let’s be honest, given that alternate picking is an extremwely naturally rhythmic, sort of self-policing motion, is basically another way of saying your fretting hand is struggling to keep up with your picking hand, and is pushing and pulling the timing), then honestly setting your metronome at 130bpm and drilling it at that tempo, and then moving the tempo up in small increments, probably WILL be a pretty effective way of getting yourself up to 145bpm, over time.
Main reason I’ve been doing a lot of legato runs to the metronome lately is that I’m becoming more and more aware that as a guy who’s played legato to get through fast runs for most of his life, and has had his alternate picking finally start to come together, my fretting hand isn’t as used to having to be meter perfect as my picking hand, which causes coordination issues, so metronome work HAS been incredibly productive.
I’m good with starting at the specific tempo from Day 1… If there is a specific tempo to which your playing will be accountable.
Maybe it will help you to understand things if I explain it this way:
When you have no metronome, the body will speed things up continuously without you doing anything provided the inputs are correct, until you hit the upper limit of what is humanly possible. This is also contingent on how long you decide to play the phrase. A person playing the same phrase the same way for 5 minutes straight versus 1 minute straight will have a lower speed level in the first instance. The muscles only have so much energy.
When you have a metronome, you are enslaved to the pulse. In order to stay at that tempo and stay in line with the click, you have to tense your muscles up just the right amount to stay with it. These are the antagonist muscles - the muscles acting in opposition to the ones that drive your main visible hand/arm movements - that I talked about in that other thread a few weeks back. Do you see now why the metronome can harm playing if used excessively?
To highlight this for you, take something you can play as relaxed as possible - like I’m talking you feel like jello relaxed - and record yourself without a pulse, and tap tempo your performance.
Whatever BPM you have now from that tap tempo, cut 15-25% off that number and turn on a metronome to try and stay with the pulse. Notice what your body is doing internally. You are tensing up certain muscles to stay with the click. That movement pattern now needs to be learned for that tempo. Since your fastest speed by default is your most relaxed, you now have to learn to add tension to slow down in the same way a person has to apply the brakes to stop a car rolling down a hill as it picks up momentum.
It’s not really different than learning dynamic control which is 12034920349210x harder than just learning to play a phrase as quickly as you can, which literally just requires you to sit there like a dumb ape and repeat the phrase as long as you want with proper mechanics. When you add staccato phrases, loud phrases, quiet phrases, etc. while slowing down and then speeding up and then vice versa… That is the hallmark of a true virtuoso with extreme control. Someone who has learned what the most relaxed way to play a phrase is, and subsequently has a baseline from which they can learn to manipulate the phrase into what most people think of as music by playing with loudness, quietness, and so on. The equivalent of a person who is so skilled at brushing their teeth that they have made it nearly unconscious and can send a text from their phone with the other hand.
It’s precisely because virtuosos have put the quality of the movement first that they can now manipulate it by tensing up to go slower, or play loudly, or quietly. Do you see what I’m saying now? Troy and co. recommends you start with speed because that will give you the blank slate of quality mechanics. From there, you add everything else. Any other method is putting the cart before the horse.
I would stop thinking of guitar speed as this big insurmountable challenge and more of a really complicated pen trick or something similar. You’ll get farther mentally and physically that way.
This (at least in my guitar world ) has hit me hard in the last few weeks - I can’t believe how lacking my fretting hand is sometimes - I never thought that my picking hand would be more capable than fretting hand, but it has happened!
I think I’m coming around to you and @guitarenthusiast’s thinking at this point, now that I’m starting to understand it. So I’m putting my eggs in that chunking/fast-to-go-fast basket. And right - a monophonic instrument like clarinet is apples to the guitar’s oranges.
Still, there’s stuff that’s too fast for a player’s present level. So at least in a sense, he’s got the same problem we do. Hadcock seems to have gotten somewhere with his 5-and-1 approach (start slow, 1x at +12bpm, 5x at -8bpm, 1x at +12bpm, 5x at -8bpm…). And one would also assume that you’ve got to clean up mechanical inefficiencies on clarinet before making headway with speed.
But again, I’m willing to leave Hadcock behind for now. I can tell you guys know what you’re doing. It’s just not crystal clear yet, and I’m striving for that clarity so that, as you put it, I can hope that the drills are accomplishing what I want them to.
It’s good I clarified then, because I may have thought I understood better than I actually did.
I’m hearing two things. Let’s take @anon25405869’s JP lick (recorded 145bpm) as an example.
#1 - play it far below 145, making sure your mechanics are good (e.g. good trap-escape picking [USX in this case?]) and that you’ve got the pattern accurate. Now be that dumb ape and play it over and over in front of the TV. This will go on for possibly a long time… until… hey, look at that, I’m doing it faster now! And the speed keeps coming like this until, finally, someday, you’re at 145. [This is what I understood Claus Levin to be saying.]
#2 - do 145 right now. Lots of unwanted string noise, mistakes, etc. - that’s fine. Hold yourself to 145 and drill it until it comes.
So I’m confused. You had me sold on Levin - i.e. #1 - but now you’re saying no, #2 is the way to go. Maybe it’s me (wouldn’t be the tenth time;). What am I missing here?
