Do #1 without a metronome, #2 with a metronome to know what your target should feel like, concurrently (IMO).
IMO it’s applicable because if you can bust out a spurt of fast picking but not sustainably, you won’t be able to go for long until you start to feel the fatigue / pump / whatever set in. If you follow @Troy 's “mechanic test drive” and get the fastest mechanic identified and the speed that you got it at, and stay at that pace frequently for increasingly longer stretches of time, your endurance on it should slowly increase.
I think there is an aspect involving learning to do these motions for longer periods of time, but it’s not “endurance” or physical athletic capability, like running where you build up aerobic capacity over time. Instead it feels more like a coordination / learning challenge.
For example, if you’ve ever experimented with the EVH tremolo motion, you may have experienced this where you get it going and then for random reasons it just freezes or loses coordination and you have to stop. Or sometimes you try to start it but you can’t, then you try again and you get it. Over time, you learn to start / stop the motion immediately, even at fast speeds, and run it smoothly for long periods of time. I think this is more motor learning, not building up strength.
This also happens in strumming techniques. Watch Joscho doing his Gypsy strumming, and you can see how stone cold learned he has it:
He can start and stop this on a dime at any level of speed or loudness he wants. That moment at around 1:55 where starts at full volume without working up to it or gradually dipping the pick into the strings. He knows by memory exactly how far into the strings to dip the pick to get exactly that loudness, across all the strings he is strumming. All with no bridge anchor point, only the arm anchor on the body. That’s something you have to learn.
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To no surprise at all, Troy has the right of it, I think, but again that’s kind of the distinction I was trying to get at - the two approaches are ways of practicing different things.
Approach #2, just blast the lick, accuracy be damned, is a great way of developing a mechanically efficient pickstroke. If the problem you’re having is the pick keeps getting buried and hung up in the strings, then that’s something that slow practice won’t help you with because it’s to easy to do mechanically inefficient things at low tempo that fall apart at high tempo. Basically, to learn how to solve the mechanical problem of getting the pick to all the places it needs to be, you need to create a scenario where those mechanical problems are actually present, and slow, gradually speeding practice doesn’t really do that/
Approach #1, start slow and gradually speed up, is a great way of developing fretting hand coordination and timing. You can blow through a lick at a really high tempo and just sort of slur the note groupings a bit to jam them all into the space and have it sound ok at speed, but the note tempos will be really uneven, and this can both not sound the way you want it to for legato playing, and be incredibly hard to sync your left and right hands for picked playing. So, to get your fretting hand really in the pocket, starting at a slower tempo where you can execute something comfortably, and steadily increasing the tempo to improve the speed at which you can execute something comfortably. Since the challenge here isn’t one of mechanics but one of training your hand to move evenly and rhythmically, this different approach makes more sense.
Make sense? It’s kind of like divide and conquer.
What? It’s still a challenge of mechanics and doesn’t necessitate a different speed approach. The fretting hand is governed by the brain and nervous system in the same way as the right hand and should be trained with the same principles. You can easily pick an incorrect fingering for a sequence, follow the advice you’ve dispensed, and be sitting for the rest of your life trying to notch the metronome up beyond a certain speed and it will never happen. This advice isn’t sound, and you’ve managed to incorrectly explain the two approaches I was discussing with James. The first one as you’ve described it isn’t Claus’ method at all as we were discussing it. It’s not “start slow and gradually speed up”.
Either way, it’s not a big deal since you came back from a few days away and it seems like an honest mistake, even if the left hand advice you’ve given is… Interesting.
James, at this point, just PM me. It’s frustrating but it seemed like we were close to wrapping this up and if I continue the conversation we will be another 30-45 posts in here. I think we’ve extended this thread past its natural lifespan and just to follow forum rules and civilities let’s have it slide off the first “page”.
I wasn’t talking about Claus’ advice, sorry if that wasn’t clear. I also wasn’t really replying to anything you’d said, so much as replying to some earlier comments the OP had made in reply to me, that I just hadn’t been online for the better part of a week and was just seeing now.
Moot point, since it was an entirely separate conversation, but I think Troy chose better words than I did here, when he described the challenge of alternate picking as motor learning rather than building strength, where I was describing it as a mecanical problem to solve. Basically, just the observation that moving a pick back and forth through a string isn’t itself muscularly taxing, it’s the act of getting it over the plane of the strings to move to the next string, and something as simple as using an angled pickstroke vs one parallel to the plane of the strings “solves” that challenge, and requires no “muscular conditioning” to get better at.
Fretting hand choices with legato matter - Tom Gilroy has posted at length on the subject - but not in such a way that 16th notes - or even 16th triplets - at 130 vs 145bpm are really going to cause any problems, and it really starts to make a difference in terms of finger independendence and the impact on mechanical efficiency at extremely high tempos. Sort of beside the point though, as what I’m trying to get at is I think pretty unquestionable - that a metronome (or click track, or drum loop, or whatever) is mostly useful for building timing and evenness at a given speed, rather than as a tool to “build” picking speed.
So, sorry if that wasn’t unclear, this was all tangental to the conversation you two were having, and more driven by his original post about metronomes and athletic practice. Or, I guess your subsequent conversation was probably tangental to his original line of questioning.
Okay, I definitely got a lot of mileage out of this post, so I’m satisfied! I think that for any future readers there’s a LOT to learn here, thanks to a lot of great feedback from all. Many thanks.
The biggest takeaways for me (if other participants have their own, please, chime in) are the following:
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Gradual metronome-bumping as a speed-building approach is highly controversial (to put it mildly!) [A last point on metronome in the next post…]
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Arguably the most popular approach to building speed is a) nail proper, efficient mechanics (e.g. ditch stringhopping and be sure you’ve got a sound USX or DSX going) and then b) play the lick at a comfortable speed with those mechanics, accurately, many many times, usually with no click. Let the speed come on its own. Chunk-and-slow-burn, if you will.
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An alternative to chunk-and-slow-burn is to just go straight for the target tempo and pound away, though it’s a bit beyond your present capabilities. “A bit” is key, seems to me. For example, @anon25405869 could get away with this approach on the Petrucci lick he posted, since he’s already capable of about 90% of the recorded tempo. For someone like me who would top-out much lower, ‘forcing fast’ in this way would just be an awful mess. Better for me to stick with #2.
…As for that last point on metronome. Hadcock’s 5-and-1 approach answers one of @guitarenthusiast’s criticisms of metronome practice. The muscular tension issue - since you can’t play faster or slower, but exactly Xbpm, this creates muscular tension akin to driving with the brakes on - may be resolved by the +12bpm/-8bpm thing, since each -8 feels easy after the +12 that precedes it.
@milehighshred once posted here about his teaching approach: 60bpm; bump not more than 5bpm at a time, playing the lick maybe once (certainly not a lot); continue until you crash; start over at 60bpm. (Ostensibly, that whole cycle could repeat several times.) This, and Hadcock again, answer @guitarenthusiast’s other knock on the metronome, that it gets you cemented at a slow speed. With the typical, linear metronome approach (e.g. +1, +1, +1…), yes. But with both Hadcock and MileHigh there’s so much hop-scotching w/the bpm’s that this might be a non-issue.
Though I’m planning to stick with the other methods in the previous post, I should add that I did try Hadcock on a bass lick I wanted to learn recently. To start with, I could manage it at say 85% of tempo. Hadcock did in fact get me to 100%.
Yeah, I agree that the metronome is a great tool whenever you’re working on things that can accidentally slip out of rhythm without you really noticing it. Not so that you’re playing completely on the wrong beats, but just out of the pocket. Long legatos, complex syncopations, anything where your focus is taken by something other than the sense of pulse.
I never had the patience to ascend a single bpm at a time anyway, lol, but certainly I could see benefits from heavily varied practice routines, both in terms of tempos, but also I guess “what” you’re practicing - if nothing else, it probably helps you improve across a range of fronts.
If the Hadcock approach is working for you, that’s awesome, and keep doing it. I’d say also spend some time thinking about it and really trying to analyze why it’s helping you, and where the weaknesses that were holding you back at 85% were, that have now gone away. If you come to any conclusions, I’d love to hear them. 
That’s just it. I think that once mechanics are no longer the issue (which I believe was so with the bass lick), it often comes down to dexterity. You can’t ‘do dexterity right’; it’s a function of repetition. Even when we ditch the metronome, both with chunk-and-burn and 145-bpm-right-now - it’s about repetition.
[After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and starting to explore “deliberate practice,” I fell under the spell of thinking every challenge on this instrument was mechanical and could be solved with the kind of “bio engineering” we’re engaged with here on CTC. For sure, trap-escape picking and other conventions that Troy has brought to light are absolutely crucial. But I had discounted the critical nature of good old sweat - i.e. repetition - as part of the formula.]
But I feel compelled to repeat that Hadcock is, imho, for reaching a tempo that’s already within arm’s reach, and with mechanics that are already sound. That’s often not the case in many practice room situations (at least for me).
I know I am at high risk of derailing the topic further but…
I’d say yes-ish 
Some degree of repetition of the “correct” movements is probably good. But a lot of repetition can reduce focus / quality of the practice and even consolidate errors if you are not careful.
So I’m glad you pointed that out… I don’t know what you and Troy think of Claus Levin (@guitarenthusiast linked to him earlier in this thread), but his discussion of chunking (though I don’t think he ever calls it that) is quite similar to the way it’s discussed here at CTC. He also talks about massive repetition while chunking, and just from anecdotal stuff you read in Guitar Player interviews for example, it sounds like something people actually do (i.e. chunk w/good mechanics + massive reps).
I guess if the player is mindful of what you’re warning about (and GP is profiling guys who almost certainly were), then it can work. From my recollection, I have yet to read a post from a guy like me who was stringhopping and then became a proficient USXer (not tremolo on one string, mind you; I’m talking being able to handle your Sixes etude now) without it taking months if not years. So clearly, there were a lot of reps happening between hopping and shredding.
But as always, I’m the noob around here, so correct me if you think I’m wrong:)
Good question - I guess it (=amount of time + practice methodology) depends on the problem that needs solving.
In your particular case, we know you got the picking speed sorted. Do you know what exactly is missing? Is it L/R hand sync? Or is it something else?
Yes, I do. See @anon25405869’s video;)
Seriously, put another way, I think it’s simply this: if I showed you how to toss a tennis ball for a serve, taught you what to do with your feet, how the racket should move through its full range of motion, etc… you’re a physicist, right? So you’d probably have very accurate mental (or perhaps literal) notes on what to do.
Now: do it. Well, uh…!
Even with the correct mechanics properly understood, there’s gonna be that long tail everyone talks about where it takes significant time to get it together physically. Even if, theoretically speaking, you didn’t have to revise any of your mechanics because indeed you had understood them perfectly.
Fair answer? Really, I’m asking - not trying to be flippant… (BTW, don’t want to grab too much spotlight from @anon25405869 - that’s awesome playing and an exciting discovery, I’m sure. My wife’s always talking about us getting credit for our kids’ awesomeness - since this happened in my post, I hope I get a little credit for your awesomeness, too;)
If you’d like to ensure that something takes months longer than it should, one thing I’d recommend is talking it to death on a forum!
As you can see from the way this thread has progressed, we get the fastest results when we’re examining the results of real-world playing on video. Everything else is just thoughts and ruminations. Fine for discussion and entertainment, but super low output as far as actual progress.
Whatever it is you’re working on, whatever strategy you have in mind, what I recommend is simply doing it and then coming back in a couple weeks with a clip we can take a look at. If things are working, we’ll know. If they’re not, we’ll also know and may have some thoughts on where to go next.
You have a great foundation here. Your fastest track now is getting some hands-on time with some kind of musical phrases, be they songs or exercises, or ideally a mix, and coming back with some footage we can look at to gauge how it’s going.
This is your mission, should you choose to accept. This post will self destruct in 4… 3… 2…
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@tommo, as a moderator I think you need to ban @anon25405869 from the forum, given that he is obviously posting bootleg footage of Petrucci (pre-beard era) and passing it off as his own playing…
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Since Steven Hill was the original Mission Impossible agent, and I had the pleasure of speaking with him a few times (neighbors in Monsey, NY), I accept. I’m off…
Pretty spot on I think!
Edit: the tone as well, considering you have the guitar, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re using a Mesa Mark series or an emulation of one lol.
If you’re bored / curious and have the DI, I can reamp it through a IIc+