Optimal amount of time to practice a lick

Technique Critique
#1

Hi everyone,

I was wondering what the general consensus is on the optimal amount of time to repeat a lick during a practice session. I am at the point in my playing where I’m pretty happy with my raw speed, but my issues right now stem from the inability to play fast stuff consistently clean without making mistakes. I often tend to obsessively repeat a given lick for 30+ minutes at a time during a practice session and this generally causes me to play the lick progressively worse as I repeat it and sometimes causes short term soreness in my fingers/wrists (especially if I repeatedly try to play it fast, as opposed to slow), which leads me to believe that this is not optimal. I’m interested to hear you guys’ ideas on how to achieve consistency and cleanliness when it comes to fast playing and how much time I should spend on a given lick during practice sessions throughout the day.

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#2

I personally started playing more consistently to a click when it comes to learning very complicated things that I feel I won’t be able to get in a day or two. That way, I can benchmark my progress consistently, and can tell when I need to stop and take a break (making mistakes, feeling off, etc). That can be as short as 10 minutes, or up to an hour… Just depends.

#3

It may well be that the technique used to play whatever lick that is not clean is not appropriate for the lick in question, ie no amount of time, short or long, will make it better. We need to know more!

In general: many short sessions are better. If you’re still trying to find the right mechanic, variation is good (posture, pick, grip etc). Try to play at different speeds. Obsessively practicing to a metronome is probably not a good idea. You’ll find lots of threads on this.

If you have a particular lick that you would like help with, post a video!

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#4

Here’s a couple examples of some of the licks that I’ve been having trouble with for the past several months:


My main concern right now is improving consistency and not really increasing my top speed. I would like to be able to get to the point where I can reliably pull stuff like this out while performing without worrying about whether or not it’s gonna fall apart. I’ve been working on these licks every day for probably 6 months or so now and while I’ve definitely seen progress in that time, I’m still very far away from being able to play them as consistently as I would like.

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#5

I’m certainly not an expert, but I’ll add my own $0.02. It really depends on the complexity of the lick, but my experience has been that anything more than 15-20 minutes of repetition doesn’t buy me anything, even if I want to keep hammering away. You get to a point where you’re mentally fatigued from focusing and you’re just not going to pump anything else into your brain, you have to take a break and give your brain a chance to process the new information. I’ve found that I’ve actually improved if I put the lick down and come back to the it the next day. Patience has been a hard lesson for me to learn. I find if I’m diligent and practice the lick 2-3 times in a day for 15 minutes each and keep doing this every day I can usually begin to nail something within a few days (or never if it was wasn’t ever meant to be :slight_smile: ). I’m an older player so ymmv.

#6

To start, it already sounds great!

Can you identify what portion feels like it’s going to fall apart? If it’s only a section that has hard fingerings or picking, then you’d be better off just isolating it and focus on it for the majority of the practice. Once it starts to feel more fluid, you can run through the whole thing and it should hopefully feel better!

I actually did the same thing with this riff, lol

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHs0VraHGUq/?igshid=rsxf75wow496

#7

Thank you for the kind words!

For me right now it’s hard to confidently play anything fast or technically demanding in a performance context without messing up. The videos I recorded each took a few attempts to get a single take that I was happy with, so I would consider those the benchmark that I want to be able to reach all the time. Right now I just don’t feel like I can pull out any of those licks without messing up whenever somebody asks me to play something, or even when I’m jamming by myself. I used to think that this was attributed to a lack of a sufficient warmup, but when I hear people talk about how Michael Angelo Batio has practically no warmup routine, that makes me feel like it must be something else. Another issue could definitely be my lack of experience playing technical music in front of other people, but I don’t always feel nervous when attempting to play something difficult in front of people, yet I will often still end up “stuttering” (repeatedly stopping in the middle of a lick) or just playing very sloppy. I understand that it’s impossible to play without making mistakes 100% of the time, but I still feel like I could be much more consistent, especially when it comes to playing fast.

Also great job on that lick, it’s hard enough playing it on my strat, I can’t imagine playing it on a hollow body lol.

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#8

Do you also follow this routine with licks you already know that you’re trying to maintain? Also, when you spend time practicing a single lick how much time would you say is spent playing it slow as opposed to playing it fast?

#9

First off, to echo @Pepepicks66, your takes sound great!

Warning, words ahead. I’m not known for my brevity :wink:

I typically try to approach things consistently, so, yeah, I mostly follow the same routine whether I’m learning something new or maintaining. Again, it depends on the complexity of the lick, the last time I played it, etc. Basically, if I’m learning something new I’ll slow it down to a reasonable speed so I can get the fingering down. Reasonable means slow enough to learn it but not too slow so that it’s not challenging. If a lick isn’t too difficult then slow might be 115 or so. If it’s intricate then slow might be 80. If you’ve been playing John Petrucci licks for the past 20 years then slow might be 140. It really just depends. Me, personally, I start at 80 and bump it up to whatever I need to. If I’m maintaining I usually will attempt to play the lick at speed or above, if it’s a lick I haven’t touched in a while I’ll start at speed and adjust from there. Once you have it, you have it, you just need to dust it off.

As far as time spent playing slow before I kick it into gear, I take as long as I need to get the lick into my head or as Paul Gilbert says, “to make it bulletproof”. I don’t usually speed up a lick until I have it down. For me, that time spent up front is invaluable. I know that’s not really an answer, but I don’t have a hard and fast number. On average? If it’s a semi-challenging lick then I’ll take a few days of multiple practice stints (15-20 min ea.) to get it down and then ramp the speed up to around performance level. At that point I then chunk it; I take parts and I focus on increasing the speed of them separately instead of attempting to shred the entire thing at once. Example, I recently worked a lot on the first part of JPs Gemini. It’s not a super-difficult lick, though the string-skips are murder to me, but it is JP so it’s played fast (143). I started playing it at 80 to simply learn it and did that for 3 or 4 days until I felt comfortable enough to start ramping it up to speed… which it still isn’t :slight_smile: The point is that I try not to jump the gun and I take whatever time I need to learn a lick backwards and forwards before I attempt to push it. Again, speaking only for me. It takes me time to learn something new. It might not take other people nearly as long.

This is not to say that once I speed things up I don’t make mistakes. I do, most certainly. I think we all do (if I can say that). Isolate those parts, slow them down a little, make them more bulletproof, then ramp it up again. Eventually it’s going to come together. But I don’t think hammering away at it for an unrestricted length of time is a worthy endeavor because I think after a certain amount of time you’ll hit a wall and you won’t make any real progress.

I hope this helps!

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#10

I think the anecdotal “so and so doesn’t warm up” is a flawed argument, especially when you don’t play the exact same thing AND the exact same way that they do. I can see from your playing that it looks like you use larger muscle groups to pick than MAB does, which I recall is smaller movements (I thought it was mostly fingers for a while). Not to mention the activities and lifestyle you have outside of guitar, which will impact your ability to warm up.

I climb a good amount, and the same argument is thrown around, “so and so pro doesn’t warm up.” It’s especially impactful there because improperly warming up will lead to drastic injuries, which I’ve fallen victim to. The fact that my circulation to extremities isn’t that good didn’t help.

Point is, do what works for you!

Also, a strategy that worked for me with regards to live playing is practicing a riff maybe 10% faster or so, so live it feels more manageable.

#11

Thank you for the in depth response! I will certainly take everything you said into account and try adopt some of these habits.

#12

I hadn’t considered what you said about MAB using smaller movements, although I do see how that would allow him to play without as much of a warmup. Do you have any suggestions for a good warmup routine? I’ve always just warmed up by playing through random licks at slower speeds so I imagine I would probably be better off having a streamlined routine to get me through that process quicker. Thank you for the other information as well!

#13

I think your warm-up should be tailored to what you’re planning to play in that session, your particular method of picking / fretting, and obviously on the guitar you’re gonna use (if I know I want to play on my archtop for example, I won’t play too much electric beforehand since it’ll throw off my “feel” a bit).

I’ve always been about strict alternate picking, so I run through a few hard riffs at a speed that’s really in control, overdoing what I feel helps my picking (some decent amount of finger movement). I think people mentioned here that I’m mostly a wrist picker, but I feel like my thumb / index movement helps me be cleaner in trickier passages, especially when I’m at like 50% max speed. With fretting, I’m trying to get more comfortable with rolling over fingers for fretting as opposed to big stretches or position shifts, so I focus on a few riffs with those in there.

And this is all separate from rhythm playing, which is a different beast entirely (for me).

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#14

Sounds pretty good to me!

I will point out one thing: you seem to be a primarily DSX player. Is the material you are playing compatible with DSX?

#15

Actually, I had been been attempting to play some of the licks in those videos with UWPS and I recently realized that switching DWPS would likely work better for them, so that’s something I’ve been working for the last couple of weeks. Thanks for pointing that out!