Practice Intensity to develop virtuoso technique

Playing Technique
#11

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.

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#12

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!

#13

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 :slight_smile: 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!

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#14

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?

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#15

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.

#16

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?

Muscles engaged/stressed for different motion mechanics?
#17

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. :wink:

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#18

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.

#19

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.

Troy, any chance of a Neil Schon interview?

Peace all!

Daniel, Denver

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#20

240 BPM with 8th notes is what I mentioned.

Looks like I replied too soon. I see you already caught that. WHOOPS!

#21

Thank you for laying this out in so much detail John! Will make this my daily practice method from now on. Much appreciate your input and you taking the time to write this :slightly_smiling_face:

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#22

Not that its necessarily feasible to implement, but sometimes when I read these posts I think that we should try to have some common way of the speed we’re referring to. For example 8s @ 190 or 4s @ 220, or something similar. Just to avoid ambiguity.

Great info @milehighshred, thanks for taking the time to share!

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#23

You’re welcome! I hope it helps :slight_smile:

#24

That sounds like a great way to approach speed, but I have a few questions. When you practice building speed the way that you described, and one rep doesn’t really come out clean, do you lower the bpm, play it once in a lower tempo, and continue to speed up again, or do you try to play it cleanly in the tempo where the last time wasn’t very clean, and the try to speed up from that tempo? Also if you hit a wall and feel that you can’t get any faster do you just practice it at one certain speed which is lower than your max, to make the mechanics better?
I was also always wondering if when you build speed the way that you described, isn’t it difficult later to play something blazingly fast right away when you’re playing live? Because you don’t really have time to have your hands”get to know” the part at slower speeds right before attempting to play it fast.

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#25

I stay at the same speed and keep trying to get it right.

Sometimes, yes. I like to call this volume training, because you do a crazy amount of volume just to improve your mechanics and really drill something into your muscle memory. That’s just one way of approaching your practice when a wall is hit.

That’s why I advise students (and myself) to practice things involving speed FASTER than what’s called for in any given song. It basically helps prepare you, or OVER prepare you for when you play something live. Because, chances are just like you said, you won’t be able to suddenly bust out something that’s pushing your limits in terms of your top speed(s). Especially when it comes to something that’s crazy technical and brand new to you. So, if you DID need to play something crazy fast and technical on stage, this is a great example of when you need to pay it 1000 times to make damn sure you have it solid at the appropriate speed.

So, there’s practicing to get more speed, and then practicing to lock it in for show time.

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#26

Thanks for the very detailed answer! I’m definitely going to try your approach. Take care!

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#27

It’s not real evidence but more like a testimony : I friend of mine recording some local band once said to me that every Death Metal guitarist he ever recorded started failing at straight 16th-notes around 220-230 bpm. If the riff was not palm-muted, it was more like a “play freaking fast stuff” with a result somehow working with two guitars L/R in a mix.

As for my own experience : I did learn a full Death Metal set for a session once. Really straight forward stuff with Lots of 16th-notes riffs, palm-muted and not muted. I could take it up to speed, which was 210 Bpm for all the songs (lol). I could do it quite fine, playing the all setlist 3-4 times a week.
But I never felt okay at 220 bpm or higher. I could never do these long 32 bars riffs non-stop 16ths. Maybe I was in that mud-zone my recording friend talked about.

To be honest, I don’t no much bands performing long 16th-notes riffings at those “higher than 210” speeds. Tremolo picked parts are always based on “bursts” compared to those horse-like stamina 16th riffs at the 210 area.

But all those techniques, they always imply elbow locking. There is a grey area where it’s difficult to see if the player is using wrist-only or wrist+elbow ect, ect.

My take on this is that the “shock waves” in your forearm start to work against you at those ~220-ish speeds. Maybe more muscle mass could counter that, I don’t know for sure.
From my own observations, player holding their instrument pretty high up their chest achieve better results with their default picking-arm position involving a pretty flexed elbow, and therefore a more contracted bicep, which maybe could help against that “shock wave” thing.

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#28

I definitely notice something like this when I experiment with my own version of Michael Angelo Batio’s picking. I can do a forearm rotation UWPS thing that’s not a true clone of Batio’s technique, but when I do a more authentically Batio-like technique with significant brachioradialis drive, it can reach speeds slightly faster than my forearm rotation, but doesn’t have the same feeling of tension that I feel with a Vinnie Moore or Rusty Cooley style brachioradialis driven “conventional” elbow flexion/extension movement. But it’s still not quite as fast as my low-control attempt at Cooley style “hyperpicking”.

I think the more acute bend in the elbow is a factor in why the Batio version feels better to me. Maybe there’s almost a “bounce” of the forearm off the biceps, a little like the Moeller drumstick bounce type of phenomenon that I think I mentioned in another thread with respect to forearm-rotation picking.

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#29

Back in the day, Guitar Player featured an article on developing speed with some simple patterns. They provided an “everybody should be capable of this” speed of I think quarter notes at 112. From there on was self-deprecation in the absence of the science. Thank goodness for Cracking the Code.

These days I find the greatest advances in speed come with complete assimilation of a particular technique or motion and not because of some particular physical exercise. Furthermore, more strumming practice and legato practice (which you bring up) seems to benefit my picking. Because of the success with tangential results in any given practice, I try to pay attention more to what I haven’t set out to do, if that makes any sense.

I can muscle twitch at super crazy speeds, but it’s not actually something I particularly want to cultivate. Effortlessly sustained higher picking speeds is of more interest to me, and so working on optimal wrist flex/extension along with forearm rotation gets more attention.

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#30

Hello, it is not as complex as it seems, it is a matter of practicing using the correct concepts and parameters, don’t forget the synchronization of the brain with the 2 hands, as Michael Angelo Batio says: the right hand is the Master and the left hand is the pupil…, but and the brain?, the brain contains the concepts or ideas that you will execute with your 2 hands, it is not a matter of quantity but the quality, Joe Satriani in an article advises you not to spend more than 5 minutes practicing an exercise, Marty friedman advises you to practice only what you are going to play, I would recommend that you master the whole tuning fork of the guitar, with diagrams and intervals then create your own mental map of the tuning fork and keep it in your head, you will see how simple concepts will help you a lot, finally I would advise you to investigate and apply on the law of pareto which tells us that approximately 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.
Regards.