Practice: correcting mechanics vs. plain repetition

Playing Technique
#1

@Tommo asked me in a different thread about what I’m trying to figure out regarding practice methods. Thankfully, I’m not trying to figure out how to use a metronome to get faster anymore! But I thought about @Tommo’s question, and realized what the answer is, as well as why it’s important to me (&, I think, some of you)…

I’ve read more than once where a pro player talks about what his early-playing-days woodshed looked like - in a word, lots of reps. It’s more or less what’s described here:

[https://clauslevinblog.com/2015/09/07/extreme-guitar-speed-in-3-simple-steps/]

Now, everyone on this forum knows that for the fastest playing, learning correct mechanics - i.e. single-escape picking - is not simply the product of repetition. Consciously (CTC people) or subconsciously (many of CTC’s interview subjects), you’ve ultimately got to ditch poor technique and come around to single escape to reach top speeds.

However… ‘massive repetition’ is mentioned by too many top players to be completely ignored. And that’s where confusion starts for me, because it’s a lot easier to talk about the ‘lightbulb moment’ (eureka! I’ve figured out USX motion!) than the so-called long tail of really acquiring and perfecting it.

The answer to @Tommo’s question, therefore, is: I need more clarity on the long tail. Especially because that’s where I’m going to be spending a lot of time from now on.

Are those top players just misunderstanding their own development when they talk so much about repetition? Or is massive repetition, in addition to proper mechanics, a crucial part of the process? What role (if any) do you think that repetition has in learning to pick fast?

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#2

Interesting points and questions raised.My short and firing off the hip response:

I don’t think ‘massive’ reps contribute to being able to play fast. However I think that it has its place with ingraining a super high level of consistency (reducing likelyhood of mistakes) and refinement in terms of hand synch and timing, but here is the catch - its only worth repeating something that is good or something that encourages something good to develop. It is here where we can either make it worthwhile or a waste of time.

I think that a lot of the pros were subconciously experimenting with their picking motions during the early part of these massive reps part of their guitar playing and were lucky to find one that worked early on, so the slow and work your way up thing worked for them.
I also think that big reps help you learn and internalise the licks too in terms of notes, finger selection etc. I think that is what a lot of people are actually doing at those slow tempos - thats why it only gets you so far until the brick wall hits.

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#3

Hey sorry for stalking you here as well… but if you mention my name you risk summoning me :smiley:

I understand your concerns but I want to point out that some of your assumptions above may not be correct… annoying Tommo post alert :slight_smile:

Not necessarily! What you need is a truly alternating motion (in terms of the muscle groups used). Whether this is single-escape or double escape is in principle a secondary issue.

Now, what is true is that the fastest recorded motion (none other than @milehighshred) happens to be single escape, and most “shredders” end up doing a single escape motion most of the time.

Well the evidence here is anecdotal at best. I can also quote players like Shawn Lane and Marty Friedman saying that they practiced very little!

Different genre/style, but I also saw an interview with Wes Mongomery who said “I never practice, I just play songs”.

Moreover, massive repetition could be the byproduct of the poor quality of… ehrm… Pre-Troy guitar instruction (I may be biased :sunglasses:).

We were simply navigating blind, confused by metric tons of contradictory advice: hold the pick this way, use little pick, make small motions, practice at 40bpm for 6hrs and whatnot! When you don’t know what you are looking for, you may need 10 hours to figure out something that would take 10mins with proper guidance. Or you may never get there.

I think so. But I’m not saying top player don’t spend hours on the instrument. I assume they spend these hours in productive ways!

Are you asking about raw picking speed, or the ability to coordinate right and left hands?

Hopefully the latest addition to the primer clarified once and for all that repetition has a very (very very) small role in developing raw speed: - just watch the beginner tremolo case study… in a total of 5 minutes my partner Kim managed to pick 15 notes per second - faster than I ever did in 20+ years of playing* :slight_smile:

*PS: this was actually quite inspiring and led me to test some new motions. With one of them I got close to Kim’s speed. Again it was not because of repetition that I increased picking speed, it’s because I found a new motion.

… and because I got my butt kicked :smiley:

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#4

Sometimes you’ve just got to do something rather than worrying if that something is the best possible thing you could do.

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#5

Here’s five minutes of a famous person from a famous scene on a famous instructional video using a metronome. I’ve watched this multiple times over the years and still can’t figure out what he’s trying to teach us. Is he showing how he makes his hands go faster? Is he showing how he works on hand synchronization? Is he showing how he cleans up mistakes? Because I don’t see any mistakes in any of these takes. All I see is five minutes of a guy playing everything perfectly until he basically can’t go any faster.

Does he ever get any faster than this? Is it really doing anything? Why does he still do it?? More questions than answers!

TLDR you think you may know what people are trying to tell you when they say they did “massive reps”. Maybe I’m dense, but it’s really not obvious to me what they mean most of the time.

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#6

Did this for 2,5 years, couldn’t play anything faster 120-130 bpms, 16th notes. (I only pushed myself the first time in the 160 zone for a few seconds for the sake of recording my videos for posting on the forum here). I don’t get that. I wish I could see how he really practiced in his early years, I think he had an amazing technique in the 90s.

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#7

This forum’s like a 12-step meeting. I can always count on empathy and support. Great responses. Okay…

You’re putting you finger on one source of confusion for me. The consistency and hand synch are part of what make you fast. If so, you can’t dispense with the massive reps.

You mean ‘correct mechanics,’ right? If so, for sure. That always bears repeating. Because as you go on to say, practicing with mechanical inefficiencies is a gymongous waste of time.

It sounds here like you’re saying about top pros that they a) first figured out a correct/workable motion and then b) drilled it ad nauseum. Do I read you?

Agreed. DBX is also fast; I was just trying to be concise by specifying single-escape.

(re: guys who claim to have done massive repetition) True enough. But I’m glad you brought up Montgomery. We talked about this in another thread, regarding Ben Eller saying the same. Emphasizing that I’m not calling anyone a liar, but my take-away over there was that it’s not literally true. What I believe these guys are really saying is that they didn’t drill etudes/exercises, but pieces of songs - but I suspect that they worked those licks pretty heavy. Possibly thru massive rep.

Possibly. But let me ask - if Kim were interested in going further with guitar… Let’s say she cleaned up her motion a little (it was already yielding great results in a raw stage), then she says to you, ‘I love this- I wanna shred!’ What are the next few steps you’d tell her to take? Precise instructions, if you please…

#8

Ah, but here’s the difference: I have read a fair number of player interviews. Never - not one time - do I recall anyone using the word “metronome.” I’m agreeing with you that guitar celebs a) get great, b) decide to do a video, c) say to themselves - ‘how DID I learn to do this…?’, d) go out and buy their first metronome for the sake of the video;)

But I have a much harder time dismissing the claims of massive repetition. I can’t produce quotes, but the way it’s described, the number of guys who say it… Doesn’t that strike you that unlike metronome, the massive rep thing is not just (…hmm, for Grady, I gotta come up with a good pop-culture reference here, preferably pre-2000…) the Keyser Soze story of the guitar world?

#9

It’s not about the metronome. It’s about understanding the intent of what someone is saying. I understand people say they did “reps”. I understand they actually probably did do it. But what were they trying to achieve when they did that? It’s very hard to tell. And once you even think you know what they think they were working on, then there’s the question: did it really do anything? How do you know?

That’s the point of the Petrucci scene. It’s not at all clear what he’s trying to work on, and it’s not at all clear if it’s doing anything. If it was mistakes, did he get cleaner? Hard to tell since he’s perfectly clean in this demonstration. If it was speed, did he get faster? I don’t think so, at least not with that technique and not since.

Etc.

#10

I wouldn’t say they make you fast, bit they make you sound good doing it!
Fast picking hand + fast fretting + lack of synch = isnt slow, just shitty sounding.

Part of me would correct my wording here because I don’t think that it worked, but at the same time didn’t hinder them, because they one way or another were using an efficient motion. Troys case in point regarding Petrucci excerpt above. I am willing to bet he could already pick at 200bpm when he started using that exercise, but had crappy hand synch. I think that exercise would help with that…

#11

Regarding “massive repetition”: survivorship bias could be a factor as well. People who did “massive repetition” and made big gains and through whatever other alignment of planets went on to become rock stars then made videos products and did magazine interviews where they said “here’s what worked for me…”.

But people who also did “massive repetition” but failed to see similar gains didn’t get a platform to share their “here’s what didn’t work for me…” stories.

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#12

Yeah, agree. Plus, lets not forget that they never said “hear’s what I came up with” - I bet they were told to do it from those before them…

#13

That’s of course the question, right - ‘what is massive repetition good for’?

I don’t know. What I do know is that a) between the basics - where the average person is after 3-6 months playing, let’s say - and solid lead style playing is, by all accounts, a matter of another 1-2 years at least; b) almost everyone seems to be doing the massive reps thing during that time, so c) there’s the very real possibility of some kind of causality here.

I’m trying to ferret out if anyone knows what that is - i.e. ‘what is massive reps good for?’ Btw, I’m trying to think neutrally about it; maybe the answer is that it’s worthless. What we really need is for CTC to get a grant from some arts council, put the Magnet on a bunch of Squier Strats, and do a longitudinal study on what really happens in the practice room for those who become real players. Seriously. Is that something you’d consider pursuing, @Troy…? (you’re YT channel’s already not shabby, but do this with the same quality of CTC, and I promise - 5 million subscribers within 6 mo.s;)

#14

I think the probem here is 100% semantic. You keep saying things like “massive reps”, and synonyms like “drilling ad nauseum”. It begs the question of what you mean when you say that. If you clarify what you mean, you yourself can probably already answer the question.

Let’s make a checklist:

If you mean playing the same phrase slowly with incorrect movements, and hoping you’ll get faster, we know already that doesn’t work. See your own case study, of course.

If you mean taking Petrucci-level perfect technque, slowing it down, and using to memorize the notes in a long, complex piece like a Bach partita — that does work. You have to memorize things somehow.

If you mean taking incorrect technique, and applying it to a selection of phrases while making lots of little tweaks and attempts to change the technique to find a better one — that does work too. To an outside observer, it might look like a guy repeating a phrase 500 times. But you and I know that’s not really what’s going on.

If you mean taking technique which is perfect (fast, accurate, and efficient) on some phrases, but slightly unfamiliar on other phrases, and doing a similar thing, where you repeat those phrases while making tweaks. Again, does work. Again, same outside appearance — the appearance of “repetition”, which is misleading to someone who doesn’t know what you’re actually doing

Etc.

In short, be clear about what you’re asking, you’ll get clear answers. They’ve never been clearer, honestly!

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#15

Completely! Combined with the vagueness in determining which problems they think they even solved, or what they mean when they reference playing things multiple times, I think you have the reason this topic keeps coming up like it does.

#16

I don’t know about everyone else, but this is very helpful and exactly what I was hoping for. Okay, two things…

  1. So what I quoted here, that’s what you’d tell Kim to do? She can basically ride that wave all the way to kicking Tommo’s can again, but on JP solos? (I’m not being facetious, btw)

  2. Did anyone click my Guitarmastery link in the OP? Warning - I’m not here to dog anyone else’s work (I know Troy’s not, either.) So like a flurry of 16th notes, let’s keep it clean. That guy’s all about massive repetition. Anyone see any value in what he’s saying?

#17

Again, I don’t like the phrase “massive repetition”. You have to be clearer than that. Everything we’ve ever discussed about learning technique on this forum involves playing things multiple times. So we are “about repetition” here too. We’re just much clearer about what you should be doing while repeating. Or trying to be!

It may kill you to read this, and @Tommo can confirm, but I don’t believe Kim actually has any intent to learn guitar!

But if she did, she has get the left hand involved. I still think the only way is like landing a BMX trick. You have to get it at least once. It if takes you 100 tries you have to do it. Yes, it’s “repetition”. But it’s not. You’re trying to stick the landing. If it doesn’t work, then you keep trying, come back later, try again, and so on. This is very far from the unproductive grinding at slow tempos where all the notes are correct and you go up the metronome 5bpm at a time.

I have experimented with this recently by working on lefty guitar. I experienced the exact same thing as you where I could do the motion hands apart, and completely lost coordination with hands together. It just felt so… weird. The only way I was able to get past it is by making repeated attempts to do it once. I felt smoke coming out of my ears. I eventually was able to get it kinda working a few times. I didn’t go super slow, I just kept trying to do the technique at whatever medium fast totally awkward speed I have as a lefty.

I don’t think the method really changes. Acquiring new skills are all about doing them realistically. Do it once sorta realistically, sorta fast, and probably sloppy. Try to replicate it, then go a little bit slower and be more accurate. Ping pong around.

I know I’ve said this stuff a million times and it’s our fault because we don’t have instructional material on this subject yet. But we will eventually. For now, just maintain your daredevil spirit and don’t worry so much about what you do before you do it.

No I didn’t click the link. I know he’s the requisite “old school” practice advice person. I watched a video of his a year or two ago which was a not-so-veiled attempt to rag on us, while clearly not understanding at all what pickslanting (aka escape motion) really was. My impression was that he is the kind of person who fights what he doesn’t understand rather than tries to understand it. Didn’t feel like going back.

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#18

I think this is a great metaphor.

Oddly enough, even though I see the word BMX, the mental picture that immediately springs to mind for me is someone learning to land an ollie on a skateboard. And I never even skated!

#19

Pity… But yes, of course. I assumed that by ‘perfect technique’ you meant the left, the right, a grip that works for the motion, a fast motion, the whole ball of wax.

So glad you said this - it’s this kind of thing where I always lose you.

Tennis analogy: I show you the components of a good serve. It sounds to me like after the 5-10 minutes it takes me to show you that, you’re then gonna go full-out for a pro-level, 140 mph serve before we leave the court, ‘100 times until you stick it.’

Really?? Is that what you’d actually do? You wouldn’t just do it passably, then a little faster, then a little harder, over the course of a considerable amount of time…?

#20

I’m reading further and more carefully, about your attempt to learn lefty…

Hold on a minute - you gotta nail your verbiage like that BMX trick here - what you just described is not like the BMX thing. You can’t go airborne, spin, and land slower than the pro guy does.

So which is it???