Playing fast: advice from a flute player

I learned something from watching this. It also confirms what has been said on this forum.

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Love it. His perspective sounds very Crackingthecode-esque indeed.

It is amazing how all these information seemed to have been available for decades but guitar community, to a certain extent, decided to “willfully” ignore all that and stick to a lot of myths because reasons.

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This guy blows, and I like it. The advice about going fast once you’ve gotten passage under fingers fingers when learning speed reminds me of similar advice from local Italian maestro @tommo on learning/practicing from 2020:

“Go fast and clean it up later, tater”
-Shawn Lane, probably

@steve506 this info is getting out there finally for us :raised_hands::call_me_hand:

Oh wow thanks for digging that out! Luckily I read it again and don’t regret writing it in hindsight :rofl:

I think our understanding is a little more nuanced now. There’s no guarantee that the “try to go fast” step will always work - in a nutshell you also need to go fast with a technique that is actually capable of going fast on the passage in question.

Classic example: DSX motion trying to play USX lick. No matter how hard you try it won’t work. So you either need to figure out how to do a USX motion, or you need to find a way to change the lick for DSX.

And so on and so on :slight_smile:

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Yes! The whole demystifying work around guitar technique by Troy and others has been groundbreaking.

On that note, I think the ability to scope what your technique can give you is a major boost. Like, say you want to play some Yngwie but you play DSX so you should be aware of the differences in musical vocabulary and adapt (eg. sixes starting on an upstroke). Thankfully, that sense of awareness helps make things flow more naturally over time.

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I kid, of course, but:

Also, he does add the caveat that his segments are easy and without error, so this is not the same as slopping out and pushing for speed. Maybe slightly more akin to the frequently-maligned bursting idea.

Anyway, I like it.

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I watched the video and it seems like we’re only seeing part of the story. He explained how he breaks the piece up into little portions (I forgot the name, “segments”?) that he’ll be able to play at speed with no errors, but then HE DID NOT EXPLAIN HOW HE COMBINES THOSE. I presume that this comes in another video? Where is the link to that?

So we were left with five or six segments that can be played at speed by themselves, and we have no idea how they’re combined in such a way as to enable the necessary music.

Right. I assume that once the segments are equal in performance, he creates a new segment that is the tail end of one into the start of another, and then once that is good, the whole thing is more or less mastered. But that is how I’d handle it, and he himself doesn’t make it clear. Right now it’s “Collect underpants —> ??? —> Profit”.

I’ve had great results by starting with a small segment and adding one note at a time at the same speed I played the original segment. Kind of like the concatenation you are describing.

Cool, but what does the artist do?

According to a comment, the answer is in here. Looks like there’s a 14 day free trial if you are truly curious…

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Gotta respect that marketing strategy because the man shared enough value to appreciate the content but left just enough insight out of the video to start living in my head, rent-free.

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I will just continue with bumping the metronome while aiming to use exactly the same escapes at every speed, at least for now.

A little tangential, but close enough: I have wanted to test out different practice methods using different participants all trying to play the same line (which they cannot currently play at the desired tempo). It would be tricky to pull off, of course, but I’d love some actual evidence that method A appears to work better than method B.

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In other instruments the correct technique is taught and then people use the metronome to bake it in. In guitar this is not the case and people use different techniques at different speeds resulting in confusion.

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The different techniques situation is quite puzzling. For instance, I have my “fast” technique for most things but when I want to make a melody a little more bouncy and after watching Chris Buck and Charlie Allen as closely as I could, my current swingy technique seems to be (please don’t kill me) a peculiar form string hopping. Something like this:

My “bounce” technique is most likely not even close to that but I have found the groove gets more smooth when I just loosen my hand with no anchor at the wrist and just let it be.

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