If you could replicate the motions required, then yes. The argument here comes back to quantifying ‘massive reps’ and how quickly it takes you to replicate the motions
Impossible! Let’s go down to the court right now; you will not hit 140 or even close to it.
I don’t mean to be a jerk; sorry if so. Just heat of the battle here. But the words are crucial; the analogy has got to work or it just makes things worse.
You may walk off the court with an excellent, mechanically sound tennis serve - at maybe 90mph. But high speed is going to take time.
Don’t you see the parallel/the implications for guitar??
When I was playing lefty, I couldn’t perform the picking motion realistically while fretting a simple pattern. The Yngwie six-note pattern is what I was using. Simplest thing I could think of. Going back to 1991 again. Every time I tried to do them together the hands would freeze.
If I went really slow, it wasn’t the same picking motion any more and did not translate to being able to do it at the faster speed. So I had no choice but to keep trying at the faster speed, where the motion looked like a real picking motion, even though I kept freezing. Eventually I was able to get a couple ugly tries where the picking hand moved sorta realistically and so did the fretting hand. It took one sitting, on and off, of trying, maybe 15 minutes, but not continuously.
That’s what I mean by landing the trick. I was able to “do the trick”, i.e. do the thing I was attemping, sorta realistically.
yadda yadda Yaakov’s blah blah:)
The BMX thing is a mediocre (viz. potentially confusing) analogy. The lefty playing thing is better. But also not great; it would be like a person playing with his strong hand but with an injury. Your ‘weak’ hand has been trained to do a completely different job than the right by this point in life.
Here’s what I think you’re trying to say in response to massive repetition.
You’re saying as follows: a) get the mechanics absolutely right, and b) do them at a speed you can handle - maintaining the correct mechanics - over and over. When (or even while getting) that lick to where you want it, c) do a different lick with a + b. And so on, and so on…
Right?
You’re talking Roddick speeds right? I’m dating myself I know, but at the time almost no pros could serve at his speed either.
I’ve said multiple times in the various case studies that speed is likely to go up once the motion is learned and smooth. I’ve tried to be clear about that.
But we saw Kim on day 1 with a pick go over 200bpm. What I didn’t tell you is that she actually did 225bpm, on day one. I just didn’t use that segment because it was sloppier and she missed the string a lot. But counting the motions, she was actually already picking faster than both me and Tommo. And it’s clear it was real, because you could see her elbow motion looked basically just like @joebegly’s. Some people just get it. Natural ability still is a factor here.
But yes, even Kim will likely speed up when the motion becomes more learned. My partner Reyenne can not only do the elbow motion faster than Kim, and way faster than me, but she can actually meter out even sixteenths at 220, 230, etc. That’s what happens when the motion becomes more learned.
So you are saying that if I replicated the exact motions required, it wouldn’t work? What would I be missing?
Im not saying that I could do this…its highly unlikely would be able to replicate it that quickly. But I really think you are missing the point about all this. Repetition is required, but what would quantify as massive reps?
Somebody’s gonna kill me (or least break my keyboard) - NO. 140 is average for a pro. That’s important to know; I’m not nitpicking. We are not talking about setting world records for guitar picking here, or aiming to be PG/Yngwie; we’re talking fast-but-possibly. I gotta make that point or we’ll be off on some tangent…
Wild guessing, talking right out of my ear, I know… But tell a tennis pro, “I wanna serve at 140, the average for pros, with the same first-serve consistency.” S/he’s gonna tell you to pay for a year or two membership at the club.
That’s massive reps. Ditto guitar shredding.
(Cyber stuff is not my strong point; no body language/facial feedback. Hope I’m not coming on too strong or offending. I do appreciate your input).
But - and this is so important - look at what I just wrote Troy (my a-b-c thing). I’m saying: I think you’re basically all correct. Down with “massive reps uber alles”! But… reps is part of the picture.
[quote=“Yaakov, post:29, topic:39632”]
Wild guessing, talking right out of my ear, I know… But tell a tennis pro, “I wanna serve at 140, the average for pros, with the same first-serve consistency.” S/he’s gonna tell you to pay for a year or two membership at the club.
That’s massive reps. Ditto guitar shredding
[/quote] Is it? What quanties massive reps? An hour’s practice ar a club, once a week for 2 years?
I think this thread is going round is circles. If you really think that massive reps is the key then go for it… how long have you been playing and how many reps have you done?
Is it serving you well thus far?
I just remember the news was always quoting his serve speeds as being an outlier even among pros. But this was at the 2001 US Open I think when I was there, maybe the bar has risen.
Either way, the point is that, yes, some people really do hit pro-level speeds on day one. Kim is faster than Petrucci on day one. Day one! It’s kind of crazy right? Of course she has almost no other playing ability. But the motion itself, the ingredients are there if she wants them.
I like the BMX analogy because I did that as a kid, and it symbolizes the thrill of trying. Having a pool with a diving board and trying to do a flip is another good one. You keep doing it until you can sorta land it. It will be ugly, but you’ll go in head first instead of sideways or belly flop.
I don’t generally proceed lick by lick. Batches of licks are better. You need variety. This is the interleaved / randomized practice idea we talk to Pietro Mazzoni about. All these phrases proceed at random rates and teach the other phrases how they work. The motor sytem learns from all of them.
Remember, currently, you can do a USX picking motion on one note. But you are limited. You can’t do different combinations of strings, with differing numbers of notes on each string, because doing all those little combinations involves actually making slightly different motions. You don’t know those motions yet. Throwing in the fretting hand confuses things further, because it feels weird.
This is where the basket / batch comes in. You need to have lots of things you’re playing and not be too concerned with making them all perfect right away. This is also where playing of songs comes in. Bluegrass standards are like lots of little licks in one. That’s why those players learn all these complicated sequences. They’re always doing “interleaved” practice, even when they’re just playing one tune a few times.
Again, I think you’re ready to go here. If I could encourage you to do one thing it would be to do more playing and less typing. I know you’re concerned about wasting time, but what would it hurt to do a couple weeks of playing whatever you want, and see where it goes?
I feel like we need a guitar-specific version of Godwin’s law - someone is definitely going to reference a particular Frank Zappa album title any minute now.
It is cool, and interesting, and… more than I’m trying to say or understand in this thread.
Such an isolated thing as Kim hitting a super high speed, without reliability or control, is not speaking to the issue. Math, sports, language, a video game, you name it - anything you’ve ever learned to do, you didn’t do it at top speed (or other appropriate metric besides speed) on day one. The fact that you could do one little piece of it crazy good (kudos, Kim) - I don’t see what that’s telling us about how to practice.
I don’t like the BMX analogy. To me it says: perfect mechanics at top speed, NOW. (Not possible - remember, bringing it back to guitar we’re talking about how intermediate pickers become advanced pickers. Don’t tell an intermediate biker to do Evel Kenievel stuff unless you want him dead;) Don’t tell Yaakov to rip off Tommo’s Sixes at 120bpm by day’s end.)
I don’t like the learn-to-play-lefty comparison either. You could almost say, try playing with your foot. Your weak hand has radicallly different neuro-muscular functioning than the strong one (unless your ambidextrious). One does jar lids, the other calligraphy. Monkey’s could learn to strum I’ll bet, but not shred. (Okay, a human, given enough time working lefty… but that’s neither here nor there.)
I know what you’re thinking - why is this guy so hung up on analogies!? Because you’re trying to tell me something about guitar practice that I don’t understand (and that I suspect you do). If the analogy is poor, I get further from pulling that truth out of you, not closer.
Which brings me to say… I think we’ve actually arrived at agreement.
(huh?!)
If it seems I’ve been actively advocating for massive repetition, it’s only in a devil’s advocate kind of way.
Others are of course welcome to comment further. But I’m ready to walk away from this thread feeling like a stake has been driven straight through the heart (enough goth-types here, I think the metaphor works) of the idea that massive repetition - [read carefully] on its own, not as camoflauge for some other activity - somehow creates technical chops. The considered opinion here is that it does not. And I’m ready to cast my lot in with yours on that one.
You gotta know what’s in the Primer. (But you won’t be fast yet.) You gotta improve that with licks. (You studied the Primer; you were accurate, you were technically sound, but obviously not great yet.)
Then you gotta spend, yes, probably a number of months - another lick and another and another - to get to where 16ths at 180bpm or more is just another day at the office. That’s where the repetition comes in. And it’s crucial. Neither Rome nor shredders are built… we don’t need Tommo to finish the quote.
Whew!! Troy, don’t spoil my weekend - are we close enough conceptually for a handshake on this? 
I admit I’m a little lost here. We’ve tried to be consistent in communicating that these early attempts at trying to do something won’t be perfectly clean, and will take time to iron out over a period of months if not years when you’re talking about full vocabularies full of lots of music — “six months to two years” as I’ve been quoted as saying many times. It’s just a guesstimate.
If that’s all you’re asking, yes, of course, making things accurate will take time. And obviously you will play the same things multiple times during that period, as you try to make them more correct.
And yes, early attempts very well may be just as fast as your later attemps. For an experienced player who doesn’t have a stringhopping problem, and already has some hand synchronization on certain phrases, yes I would expect the ability to do sixes at 120 on their first batch of attempts. I would also expect notes to be missed, open strings to be hit, strings to be swiped, and so on.
But that individual would be a few steps ahead of you, since you don’t have hands operating together yet. All well and good.
Again, I know it’s frustrating because we don’t have this stuff written out yet, and you have a higher bar in terms of what you want to know before they do something. I am one of those people, who asks 1000 questions before doing something because I legit don’t get what others find obvious a very high percentage of the time. It’s one reason why I’m in this line of work. So I try to put myself in those shoes whenever I can. Are we being as clear as possible? Are we overlooking things that are obvious to us but not others?
Hopefully you have enough to go on here. If not, keep hammering away with practical questions and we’ll keep answering them.
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I thought the guitar version of Godwin’s law was: “David Gilmour says more with just one note.”
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Infuriating, isn’t it?
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Claus is a “philosopher” and a big talker, and to be honest I don’t trust him; lots of reps means nothing, lots of intelligent reps is a different story, what if with every rep you try to figure out the best way to play that rep, or try to increase the speed, lots of reps for the sake of reps is a waste of time; I stopped believing in lots of reps as such and slow practicing long time ago, and I’ve seen on my own eyes that if you want to play better you have to polish your technique at a given speed by playing a given lick at a higher speed so that your muscles can be able to relax at the previous speed; this is my experience, this is also what Shawn Lane said, and this is also what Troy said in “Starting with speed” video
To me, the primary benefit to the slow and intentional initial practice of a phrase you intend to play much faster seems to be mostly for the fretting hand - if you try to play a phrase too fast when you’re still in the process of learning the fretting patterns then your hand synchronization can suffer from having to think too much about the fret numbers as opposed to just executing the song or lick. The left hand has fewer hoops to jump through than the right hand though so this isn’t so much a trial and error process like high speed picking practice is; once the fretting patterns have been committed to memory there’s an incredibly diminishing (or possible even 0) return for practicing very slowly when speed is the intent.
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A really interesting thread, what I’d like to understand is what is the practice strategy to get licks to the point where they can be played consistently at fast tempos?
I can trem pick 16ths at 210bpm, I can legato the Yngwie single string lick at the same speed. Put both together and hand sync is lost at about 150.
If the raw speed in both hands is there how should practice be approached to get the hands locked together at faster tempos to the point where there is confidence to play those tempos on stage or in the studio?
Is it a case of bangin’ out fast but messy out of sync reps and hope it eventually clicks or reps at a slower speed where the hands do sync up to try and ingrain the sync before going faster?
Really interesting thread. I read most of it until I got exhausted lol. I will say this, I’ve been a devoted follower of CtC for years now. The vast majority of the last several years have been spent trying to work on picking exercises using various CtC techniques.
To echo what Troy said and what Yaakov mentioned about Ben Eller, playing songs is how you develop the full gamut of skills. In just a few weeks of working on half a dozen songs (such as Holy Wars), I improved my dexterity in a much more solid way than the repetitive and boring exercises I have been playing on and off for years since discovering CtC.
I don’t think this is Troy’s or anyone else’s fault, but after my lightbulb moment with CtC, my natural inclination was to grab my guitar and immediately work on picking exercises ala Rock Discipline. I think I would have been better off just jumping right into learning songs, licks and riffs and applying my newly acquired knowledge.
I would say the vast majority of the greats mastered their instrument by learning repertoire of their heroes. There is an interview somewhere along the space time continuum with Petrucci where he states that he developed his technique in his early years from playing songs. Which is ironic, given the nature of Rock Discipline. Like Troy, I feel like perhaps he came up with all this stuff AFTER his technique was already solid. But I doubt very seriously he was doing this kind of super repetitive, technical stuff as a teenager. I think he was learning Iron Maiden and Metallica and Rush.
I have always been a very analytical, inquisitive person. So I’ve always analyzed and questioned my technique. Mostly in a negative way - “this can’t possibly be right”. So I understand where Yaakov is coming from with these types of questions. And from what it seems from this thread, you are fairly new to guitar? I would say less time spent on drilling exercises for hours and more time learning songs and applying the breakthrough knowledge of CtC. USX = how you master most Petrucci riffs. Not that I have lol.
There are far more techniques in songs than just escape motions. Interleaved/random practice seems to he proven to be the most efficient way of developing a technique. And you can’t do much better than learning songs from your heroes, which will employ tons of different techniques. When I see 14 year olds at guitar center with better technique than I do, it’s because they are playing Animals as Leaders songs. Not 4 finger exercises with a metronome.
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