Measuring Progresses

Playing Technique
#1

Hi all, I am 6 weeks now into structured practice of Volcano and Cascade. Having recorded all the progresses (20+ exercises) as a function of practice hours, I have been able to produce this average graph: nicely linear (R^2 = 0.99), it shows a 37% improvement (speed - objective and accuracy - subjective) in 150 (100 active, 50 rest) hours. This tracking is helping a lot keeping myself motivated in the endless quest to understand where my limits are and keep improving… I suggest you guys make something similar and share! Have a great day.

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#2

Great job sticking with this for so long! This graph is really interesting!

Here are some questions:

  1. How did you rate accuracy? Subjective score of say 1-5?
  2. How long was this in calendar days?
  3. Presumably the 20+ exercises stayed the same through all this?
  4. What’s the range of speed (BPM normalized to 16th notes) you went through here?
  5. Any exercises you felt were super useful or a terrible waste of time? Why?
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#3

Great questions Lars:

  1. I rated subjectively meaning no increase in BPM if not completely satisfied with what I heard, felt (no tension built) and saw in slow motion. This means accuracy is a parameter embedded in BPM
  2. Started 35 days ago with 4+ hours / day (3 in week days and 6+ in weekends… my wife hates me now…)
  3. I introduced some exercises at later stage (i.e. Arpeggios and Cascade Pentatonics and Zap Ascending fours)
  4. normalizing all to 16th in 4/4… would be 140ish to 200. I considered the BPM indicated by Troy in the scores as the limit to consistently reach before adding new exercises. I’d say my current “limit” (and a sensible one from musicality perspective is around 850 notes per minute as burst)
  5. I’d say no. But I must admit that I maybe started too early in the process with Cascade 5… I spent countless hours on that and still sloppy at 160 on a target 180.
    I am now starting to remove the “Mastered” exercises and introduce new ones… maybe I’ll keep having a shot to them from time to time to keep muscle memory…
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#4

Honestly, this scares me. That’s seriously a lot of guitar time. I’m no doctor but I would be very wary of this sort of thing, especially once you go beyond an hour. Please be mindful of anything that feels weird or odd in your arm or hands. And please consider putting way less time into this, such as, not more than an hour in a single sitting, and at least, I don’t know, let’s call it 20% rest time of not playing at all (again, that’s a guess) interspersed within that hour.

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#5

Thanks Troy… absolutely agree that this is a lot of time invested and I would recommend anyone that is feeling stress or pain of any kind to stop immediately. Having said that, my muscles and joints are not new at all on guitar, and therefore I built this extra effort on solid foundations. Playing 3-4 hours a day if you are seriously committed to an instrument is not too much at all (compared to classical instruments study).

#6

I think we need to be careful about making statements that are presented as facts, because people here will read this stuff that way. I have no hard information that 3-4 hours a day of playing is “not too much”. I also don’t have hard information that it’s wrong either, just to be fair. I only have anecdotal information that, for me, that would be an extreme amount of joint use, and I’d be feeling it the next day. Especially if the amount of rest was low.

What are you doing during these 3-4 hours, exactly? Is it highly repetitive exercises with a metronome type of thing, or something else? What is the ratio of playing time to resting time?

#7

In this “intense” period I have normally done 10 minutes metronome exercises (several different kind, and then relax for about 5 minutes, stretch, stand up, move all the joints). What I reported as not much is compared to the 6-8 hours / day we where spending in conservatory (made Double Bass for 3 years before starting Mechanical Engineering and choosing Guitar as my main instrument). Maybe our Teachers where not aware of bad consequences but that was the pace.
Anyways, my sincere apologies if this is post is creating more concerns than motivation. :slight_smile:

#8

Not a problem! This is just a hot topic around here. These kinds of posts always raise more questions than answers. There is a large amount of, let’s call it, “cultural wisdom” about practice which hasn’t really been tested and may or may not be good advice. I am very wary of players doing highly repetitve, exercise-style practice for hours at a time, especially with low down-time.

To save you and potentially others some time, if you are doing a picking motion correctly, there should be no need to work that up to speed from very low tempos. Once you get below about 150bpm sixteenths on something like that, it’s almost impossible to tell by feel if you’re even making the motion correctly because the feel is so different.

Instead, basic speed should be present almost immediately, and you can work down to accuracy — with continual checking at higher speeds to see how it is coming. My best guess is, if we could control test it, this general approach would produce the fastest results with the least practice time.

What picking motion are you using? Do you have the motion working fluidly for simple things like repeating single-string phrases? How fast can you do that and does it feel easy and smooth? Feel free to put up a clip if you like. Happy to take a look at that. No problem if not. But please consider putting in fewer hours either way.

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#9

Thanks! I am focusing on downward pickslanting as studying Volcano and Cascade… never realised my natural slanting before, if any, but DWPS feels comfortable to me. I am trying to move the tendency to use elbow to forearm and wirst as this gives me more control and feels more relaxed. Here a clip of a short single line 6 notes pattern @ 145 BPM. Thanks for suggestions!

#10

This is awesome! Thanks for posting.

You clearly don’t have a stringhopping problem. The first big hurdle where people get stuck is figuring out how to do a single-escape type picking motion fast. Rejoice, you have sailed past the first checkpoint.

Second, I don’t think you are really playing to the click here — which is something we see a lot with very short “burst” type clips that people post. I don’t think burst playing is really long enough to properly synchronize, so the metronome just becomes distracting background noise. And honestly, I don’t think the click is really doing anything for you anyway. I would just turn it off. You’re fast!

The next step is smoothness and consistency. I would drop the drill / exercise type work and move to longer musical phrases, which you either write or find, where you can just get going and stay going. The simplest would be single string stuff. But if you can do any high-speed string changes, via alternate picking, that’s great. If you can manage any downstroke sweeping, you can throw some of that too. It’s easier to do three-note-per-string type phrases with occasional two-string sweeping than it is to do two-note-per-string type phrases with occasional two-string sweeping, like the EJ stuff.

Do you do rock / metal playing? If so, I think a varied basket of stuff like this would be the logical next step:

The idea here, again, is to string together long phrases, which you try to play smoothly with no click, at whatever speed is most fluid. It can be as fast as you can go, less fast than that, whatever you like. I bounce around a lot when I do this, trying to find smoothness at all speeds. The emphasis is on making the mechanics feel fluid, not trying to “hit a tempo”, because again, I think that just adds distraction from the main goal which is learning a motion.

Nice work on the speed stuff - the hardest part is behind you.

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#11

Thanks so much Troy for taking the time to provide this comprehensive feedback. Keep going! Giovanni

#12

Interesting, this is the opposite of my experience! Somehow the combination of alternate and sweeps feels smoother for me in the EJ descending 5s (which I can do after some warmup) compared to three note per string scales (which never really worked for me)

#13

I love it! Minitab charts to gauge playing - never thought of it and is a great idea :slight_smile:

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#14

actually is just excel but I’ve been using Minitab in the past so I get what you mean! :slight_smile:

#15

Sorry for the confusion! I was not referring to the Yngwie scale approach where you use only sweeping, should have been clearer. I mean more like the EJ-style approach where you have a line that’s majority alternate, but includes occasional two-string downstroke sweeps. The fives pattern works this way, but you can do the same thing with a three-note-per-string fingering. Like the descending side of this lick for example:

This way you get “more alternate” and even “less sweep” than the fives pattern. You’re not moving from string to string as quickly as you are in two-note fingerings, and which is kind of its own animal in terms of how the picking and the tracking fit together. My impression is that there are more players here who can do the three-note fingerings quickly than two-note ones, even when you take the left hand out of the equation. We could use some clearer instructions for doing that for the different picking motions we cover.