I have never been interested in fast playing until recently. I watched all the Cracking the code stuff about pickslanting etc., but what I´m really curious about is the intensity with which items need to be practiced to develop that high of a level.
I´ve heard much contrary information on this and I´m quite confused. I spoke to fast players that stated that they have taken one item (the Yngwie Six Note Pattern for example) and really drilled this for 6, 7, 8 months for 4-5 hours per day. Just that single item at a speed where they were super relaxed, not straining and not pushing for speed and trying for speed only now and then to test their max. Then they attacked some other technique and gave the pattern a break and drilled the new technique for an equally insane time, periodically coming back to the pattern and working on it.
Other fast players told me that they always have been working on many different aspects at the same time: alternate picking, arpeggios, legato, etc. and practiced each one for an hour or so per day. They also practiced many hours a day, but not focusing insanely on one topic for hours and hours over months, but had a rather diverse practice schedule.
I´d be really interested in your takes on this.
Thanks guys!
I would check out some clips from the interviews with Dr. Noa Kageyama and Dr. Pietro Mazzoni. They discuss practice strategies and the science of learning motor functions which is quite fascinating and the currently-accepted scientific facts behind learning might surprise you.
Yes, I´ve watched the two guys and have yet to experiment with the method Kagyama describes - switching elements very frequently and taking short rests after doing reps.
Thinking from a bodybuilding approach, blasting a muscle group totally to force it to adapt would also make sense to me, but I have no practical experience to draw from in this field.
It might be a good idea to avoid the temptation to use bodybuilding analogies and apply them to motor learning. While some principles may, by sheer chance, transfer from one to the other, others principles may not.
In particular, the point of the interleaved practice Kageyama advocates is that it forces your brain to work harder by forcing it to “re-learn” each exercise multiple times during the practice session, rather than falling into a good-feeling but less long-term-beneficial “groove” where less learning is taking place.
Everybody is going to develop differently. Personally, I would hate working on just one thing for 4-5 hours straight day after day. That sounds dreadfully boring, and I’m sure I’d hit a point of diminished returns pretty quickly and my brain would turn to mush.
I do believe that working on multiple things, perhaps just 2 or 3 exercises for a week, can be very beneficial. It’s also important to take time to just play stuff that is fun and enjoyable. You can’t just beat your brain senseless all the time without getting burnt out. At least, I can’t.
I use to be one of those kids/teens that could play guitar for 4-8 hours a day. Really depended on if it was a school day or not. But, I did not just do metronome practice the entire time. Yes, I did metronome work, maybe up to an hour each day on average? That was so long ago I can’t remember exactly how much time I spent just working on speed drills, but an hour on average seems right.
The rest of that time was me messing around with improv, writing my own music, playing Iron Maiden, etc. In other words, just having fun with the instrument!
I jump right in to that bodybuilding analogy temptation! In fact, I find principles of weight training and sports to be damn near identical with being a bitchin’ shred player. Thankfully, we don’t need several days of recovery after pushing our speeds up.
That being said, I’m a huge advocate of pushing yourself to your physical limits if playing super fast is something you want to do. Having short rest periods to break up your practice runs when things get difficult has always been very beneficial for me and my students. Not only does it give your hands and arms a chance to recover, it gives your brain a break.
See, when I see the terms “weight training” and “sports” beside each other, I think about all the ways that even those two things are not the same. I absolutely agree with the idea that it can be useful to think of guitar practice as a type of “sport-specific training”. I can’t think of any principles of sport-specific training off the top of my head that wouldn’t apply to “guitar training”. But while “weight training” can be thought of as a coordination task in its own right, particularly when we look at technically demanding olympic lifts like the clean and jerk, weight training also calls to mind concepts like training to momentary muscular failure, which if taken literally in guitar training (or any sport-specific training) are more harmful than beneficial. While in weight training, performing lifts in a fatigued state makes it more difficult to maintain form, and thus increases the risk of injury, in sport-specific training, performing a movement in a stage of fatigue that compromises technique results in repetitions that train a “defective” version of the movement. This is one reason coaches will sometimes cut a sport-specific training session short: not merely because no benefit is being gained, but because the athlete is actually starting to train their body to perform the movement “wrong”.
That’s something I’ve done a LOT in order to push my speeds as fast as I possibly can. That’s one thing I find that shred guitar training and bodybuilding have in common.
Yes, when your form is bad then the set is done. That’s taking things “past” failure. At least, that’s how I view things now. Your set is done once you can’t perform another rep with accuracy.
Good point, thank you for sharing your view! At the moment I´m an armchair quarterback in this regard and have no practical experience on how to do this. What Kageyama points out definitely makes sense. I have to experiment, collect data on myself and then evaluate.
Thanks again!
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience - much appreciated!
I assume there are two planes of learning: the development of the motor skill and then the “forcing” the body to adapt to higher and higher demands, would that be correct?
What I´m wondering about is this - I know a shred guy who says that he always practices slow, relaxed and does loads of repetitions in that state, often while watching TV to get have his conscious mind tune out. He never practices fast, but does a short period of fast testing after each practice session.
Troy said that he never really drilled on thing like a maniac, but gave his hands lots of variety and also noodled a lot.
This is what makes it so confusing - so many different approaches to go about it…
As to what Kageyama says - have to take it an experiment with it.
Just take an example from bodybuilding - science tells us to take a break of a day or few days to let the muscle repair and recuperate - supercompensation.
I experimented with this and trained chest every day for six weeks - ten sets of ten reps.
The first week was a disaster. Every day, I got weaker and weaker and the reps went down each day. In week two to three - it all exploded. My chest blew up and I could put on more and more weight. I started out with being able to bench 80 kgs for 10 reps and after then whole thing was over I benched 100kgs for 20 reps. I still got the stretch marks under my arms. This was insane!
I was eighteen years old at the time.
I was just wondering if such anomalies might also exist when building speed.
As @Frylock points out, we’re talking about two very different things here. There’s motor learning aspect, and athletic training. Motor learning is what you do when you learn to ride a bike, surf, or draw. Nobody bursts / drills those activities using weightlifting style techniques. They’re all about teaching yourself to do a complicated movement in a natural way, make it accurate, and then make it permanent. In that order.
Burst-style training is for athletic development in physical speed or endurance, like what @milehighshred did to train for the speed contests.
As it turns out, @milehighshred is actually a bit of an expert in both. As he explains above, he did a wide variety of things when he was learning, on the one hand metronomic and speed oriented, and also lots of other stuff, from playing covers to writing riffs and songs. His current technique is the result of this mix of approaches.
For example, when you look at things like John’s finger-oriented crosspicking technique, that’s not something he planned out methodically. And it did not come from high-speed bursting with a metronome, because this is a technique John uses at medium speeds, not fast ones. It came from randomized practice and experimentation. When you hear players talk about sitting on the couch and tuning out to the TV, this is what they’re talking about. Eddie Van Halen tells that story as do lots of players, as you mention. They’re talking about the bike riding / ball throwing motor learning. They are trying to encourage this by letting the hands find natural movements on their own. If you don’t actually know what hand movements you’re trying to encourage, and you’re operating in complete ignorance at random, the hit rate is going to be a little low for this. Which is probably why a lot of players are confused about what this type of practice is supposed to accomplish.
So! Here’s the bottom line:
Whenever we talk about practice, what we need to do is be super clear about whether we are referring to motor learning or athletic training. Just ask yourself:
Q: Is there some complicated hand movement you’re trying to learn how to “do right”, like riding a bike?
A: That’s motor learning.
Or:
Q: Are you trying to increase your raw physical capability?
A: That’s athletic training.
Yes, of course they overlap. You can’t get super fast if you’re doing the movement wrong. But until we learn to separate these two fundamental activities when we talk about “practice”, we’re going to be talking in circles around each other.
Troy - thank you so much for taking the time to lay this out. Much appreciated!
You really have a gift breaking things down and describing them in a clear and concise manner. Awesome! All clear!
Thankfully, with building speed on guitar, we don’t need the same kind of rest in between practice sessions. You don’t tear down a lot of muscle the same way with big compound lifts. Although you are certainly using muscle to play fast, and need to build some muscle up to a certain degree, guitar playing is mostly nervous system related. And, because you’re not destroying your nervous system the same you do with a one rep max, you recover MUCH faster with shred guitar practice, and can do a lot more of it vs weight training.
That was a really great explanation. Now, as far as developing a practice plan…
As I’ve learned with lifting weights to build muscle and strength, KEEP IT SIMPLE!!! Seriously, you can easily over complicate things. My progress in the gym sucked for many years because I tried to emulate what the professionals did. Well, I don’t have their genetics, years of experience, or the performance enhancing drugs.
Same thing with improving guitar speed, it’s important to keep things simple. And, in regards to building motor skills and mechanics vs speed, that’s where the beauty of metronome practice helps you get both at the same time.
So, let’s say you want to play a scale up and down really fast. Nothing fancy, just up and down. Here’s a simple way you can approach this:
First, just learn the scale. Don’t worry about playing it fast, just memorize the notes. Make sure you’re picking it the way you intended (e.g. alternate picking or economy picking).
Next, let’s play it safe and only play 2 notes per beat (8th notes) with your metronome. Playing with the metronome will help give you structure and improved timing/rhythm. Start your metronome at 60 BPM. Play your scale. After playing the scale correctly (no mistakes!) then bump up the metronome by NO MORE than 5 BPM. Play the scale again. As soon as you do it with no mistakes, bump up the metronome. Keep doing this until you can’t get any faster. If you keep making mistakes and can’t play with accuracy anymore, that means you can’t play any faster.
Once you get your scale up to 240 BPM you can now practice with a higher subdivision. If you are practicing a 3 note per string scale, then triplets may be a good choice. Perhaps 16th notes would make more sense, depending on the scale shape you used. I use 240 BPM as a bench mark for myself and my students. If you can’t play something at 240 BPM with 8th notes then you need more work with the slower speeds before moving on to 16th notes. This is how metronome practice works on both mechanics AND speed. You play tons of repetitions while you slowly increase the metronome. This is how I developed my technique and speed.
How many times a day should you do this? One is fine. I’d say three is the most. For example, if you choose to do three sets, you start at 60 BPM, max out on your speed, take a couple minutes for rest, then start back at 60 BPM and climb back up. Repeat again for the 3rd set.
COULD you do more sets? Yes, but you have a higher risk of feeling burnt out and having diminished returns.
How many days should you keep doing the scale? Depends. If you have a speed goal, you can keep attacking the scale until you hit your goal. But, if it takes you more than a week or two, it may be time to move on to something else to shake things up. You may just be too slow and inexperienced to reach a speed goal within a week. For example, if you can’t play 16th notes at 100 BPM today, then trying to reach a speed goal of 200 BPM with 16th notes in a week is being unrealistic. It’s probably not going to happen, and that’s totally fine.
I do find it helpful to track your speed for any given exercise you’re doing so you can see that you’re making progress. Just like weight training Also, if you are NOT making progress, or are going backwards, this gives you the opportunity to make adjustments needed to help you go forward.
This method I laid out is definitely simplified, it’s how I approach my own stuff, and what I have my students do.
Boy, that was a LONG reply. Hope it all made sense!
240 is crazy fast. What evidence do we have that speed can even be changed beyond a certain point? How do we know when someone has reached max speed for a certain technique? Before we start outlining practice regimes I think we have to ask some of these hard questions.
Has anyone here increased their raw picking speed by a measurable amount any time recently? How much and how did you do it?
240 with eighth notes is sixteenths at 120 -> 8 notes per second. Not too unattainable. In fact, I don’t think I know of any picking licks that I can play at all that I couldn’t play at that speed.
Not sure if this counts, but I recently came back to guitar after a long-ish (year or so) break. My raw single-string picking speed is always the thing that suffers when I do this.
What I’ve done is play sixteenth note tremolo picking to a metronome, varying the speeds widely – making sure I can hit intermediate speeds (sixteenths at 150-170) as well as faster speeds for me (190+) consistently. Basically, the problem is figuring out how it ‘feels’ to play at that speed – sure, I can do forearm rotation just fine, but speeding it up feels like more than just firing the same sequence of muscles faster. I’ve gotten from 150 up to 180 or so like this in the last three weeks. I intersperse this with improvising and general screwing around, trying not to burn myself out on one exercise since I’m good at hyperfocusing and killing my hands by playing the same thing for three hours by accident.
Sorry my mistake, misread John’s post and thought he was talking about 240 sixteenths.
Re: increasing max speed, I’m thinking of someone who is in good practice shape and who has reached what feels like a speed limit, perhaps a limit they’ve been at for a while, as is the case for many players. Before you took time off, were your limits the same?
If you can hit 190bpm sixteenths give or take a few bpm, and it’s been that way for years with regular practice and occasional time off, you’re the target player I’m thinking about. Do we have any real evidence that someone like you can push that number to 220 with a certain type of practice? In other words to where 220 becomes the new easily attainable max speed on any given day with warmup. Or is this just something we think should be attainable but in actual practice doesn’t happen?
Not directly related, but at one time in athletics, sprinters were using surgical tubing catapults and graded tracks to engage in what was called “overspeed” training. I don’t know if the current kinesiology literature has anything positive to say about it, but there’s some fodder for Google scholar searches.
I only recently started working on single-string, non-hyperspeed raw picking speed, actually. Before, I could barely hit 160 on a good day without changing mechanics.
I haven’t had a moment to read all the replies here, but I’ll add that the “rules” gleaned from Troy’s project have done more for my playing at this point than any rote practice. I get the most mileage applying yngwie/e.j. practices to the tricky parts of jazz arrangements I wish to learn. They always involve some puzzle to work out in the application, and that also makes it more fun to practice. So I guess my point would be, take what the analyzed players are doing and apply the lessons learned to new territory?
Practicing a tricky part and owning it at whatever tempo is enough for me right now, as it means playing tunes I’ve not played before. I defer to others on achieving, say, maximum velocity.
Also, if you are NOT making progress, or are going backwards, this gives you the opportunity to make adjustments needed to help you go forward.