Personally I’m not against bad reps anymore. I’m doing plenty of them every day. I really like Sulliman’s method and as you can see he’s tackling something which is new for him with this strategy. This kind of attitude helped me to improve a lot and break barriers I couldn’t imagine breaking, ever.
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Without seeing what you’re doing, it is hard to say. I do know one thing, playing very slowly and accurately lots and lots of times won’t make you suddenly good at it when you switch to the high speeds.
For me personally, when I do this method I don’t feel I’m getting (tons of) bad reps. I feel energized and relaxed. I feel a huge improvement in hand sync, almost immediately. If I had to voice a complaint with this method, it’s that when I get to a point where the phrase starts getting longer (i.e. I’ve forwards chained enough notes), I feel like my brain can’t keep up with my hands. That actually really excites me and makes me think it’s working, because when I come back to it a couple days later, the chunks are longer and I can handle more notes at once. I guess what I mean is that it seems much more neurological that physical. I can move my hands fast enough.
This is a very different way than the traditional ‘start slow’ mentality. I’m a hobbyist. But I had to be honest with myself and think of what “different” thing can I do? What I’ve been doing all these years clearly has not made me as good as Paul Gilbert. And I was by no means a bad player pre CtC. I just couldn’t stay in the shred zone for very long and felt tense quickly. Now that the motion mechanics are more on point I needed something else to help push myself. I’ve seen very good results from this. The bad reps are just feedback. Let your body get used to it at these fast speeds and adapt.
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Same feeling here. I feel like my brain is falling over, not that my hands are slow. And this keeps getting better after a few days/weeks with a particular challenging passage.
Thanks for the detailed response! For the last hour or so I’ve been working on applying this method to a basic descending 5s EJ-style pentatonic lick. It looks something like this:
The main problem I usually have is my pick will awkwardly stop between the sweep from the 4th fret on the g string to the 5th fret on the b string, which basically causes the lick to just crash and burn. This has been one of my main problems in economy picked EJ stuff, but I assumed I could only fix it by getting more reps in at a slow tempo and making sure to not make that mistake. I know it’s a mental issue and not a fundamental technique problem since I can get a good amount of reps in where this doesn’t happen, but it usually creeps up about 30-40% of the time. Do you think this problem will eventually go away given enough forward chaining practice, or is it something that just needs more slow practice?
Is it possible to film yourself playing it slow and correctly, and also fast and sloppy? I only ask because I’ve learned that what we think we’re doing isn’t always what we’re really doing 
Just to be a good sport here’s my thrown together attempt. I changed it slightly so I don’t have to start on an upstroke, and put it an octave higher because I’m feeling lazy lol
Without seeing you play it, the only thing I can think is that the motion of the sweep isn’t correct…like, maybe DSX is happening or something? Doing a downward sweep with a DSX movement will feel awkward–just like an upwards sweep with USX tends to feel a little strange.
The sweep from the 4th fret of the G string to the 5th fret of the B string should be the easiest part of the whole lick. I don’t know how else to describe it, but to me, those 2 string sweeps in the EJ style remind of Mario Kart lol! There are these little strips you run over that give you a sudden speed burst haha! And honestly that is sort of what happens in EJ’s realm. He is not playing straight 16ths like this. His timing is super loose, which is one of the reasons it sounds so cool when he does it.
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Here’s a video I was able to get, excuse the crappy camera and angle:
This is a pretty good representation of what my practice looks like when I try and work on this stuff while playing it at speed. This clip goes pretty well for the first 30 seconds or so, then after that my right hand begins to just randomly stop over and over again, usually after hitting the g string. It’s not a fatigue thing, since I usually don’t ever feel any pain or soreness when working on this stuff. This is one of the “easier” licks I’ve been working on too, so you can imagine how bad other stuff is lol.
When this happens to me I just jump to something different and return to the lick later on that day or next day.
How much time per session would you say is good to spend on a singular lick like that? I usually try not to spend more than 15-20 minutes one a lick in one practice session.
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Not more than that. I spend even less, but I’m not a teacher so it’s just my personal take on that. I keep switching between stuff constantly, after 5-10 mins max I’m sure I’d get tired of repeating the same stuff.
Thanks for the video!
From seeing that, I don’t know what the slow playing will really help with. I’d work on the problem parts. I actually just had a lesson with Peter C. Have you seen his stuff? If not, check him out. He’s put a lot of EJ covers on here. He’s an amazing player and he’s also doing some Skype lessons right now. His advice on the 5’s is to break it into smaller portions. You have the sweep part:
And the alternate picked part:
Again, crappy quickly thrown together, here a quick example of me playing this:
If you feel stuck on the sweep part, isolating that may help. And doing it fast is what you need since that’s where the problem is. This is of course all assuming the motion you are using is optimal for this type of playing. I’m not an expert on analyzing motions. You may want to have @tommo take a look in case anything is off. My untrained eyes detect a little bit of flipping or jumping here and there, and I could be wrong.
Thanks again for the great reply! I will definitely make an effort to work on stuff at higher speeds and see if I notice any major improvements. A bit of an off topic question, would you say this same principle applies to stuff at higher speeds that involves more hammer-ons and pulloffs and less fast picking? Or even fully sweep picked stuff? Or would it be best to take the approach of practicing slow and gradually increasing speed for that kind of stuff?
I think a theme I’ve learned on this site is that we can’t know if a motion is efficient unless we can do it fast. It would definitely hold true for legato playing. And if you’re interested (slight time investment, huge payoff) I’d highly recommend Tom Gilroy’s work on efficient fretting hand patterns. He’s summed them up here
and here
Really fascinating stuff. We can always go back and clean up a sloppy (yet efficient) motion. But, we can only take a ‘clean’ (but inefficient) motion so fast. Also, our nervous system needs to be exposed to the higher speeds in order to adapt.
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Yeah I’ve read through those threads a bit, admittedly not enough to fully comprehend most of the details (the main thing I took away is that using the pinky in conjunction with the ring finger is bad for fast left hand stuff), but I will definitely look more into it. Thank you for the recommendations!
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Hey man! Here’s an exercise that really helped me get it down and stop feeling like I was tripping over myself with the picking.
I recorded it direct from my amp so the accents aren’t SUPER noticeable but along with kind of exaggerating the escaped upstroke and the sweeping downstroke I feel like practicing this a few times and then going back to playing without accents helps get even articulation on all the pickstrokes and helps prime that USX motion and have everything flowing a little smoother.
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Thanks for the tip! One of my biggest problems with the EJ runs is getting the sweeps to work, especially when I’m not super warmed up so I’ll definitely try this too.
I’m not the most disciplined when it comes to practice but I’ve made some observations about my own playing and I’d like to know if anyone can relate.
- My progress happens in abrupt leaps rather than a gradual improvement. Something “clicks” and suddenly I’m able to play a lick I previously struggled with. Sometimes I’ll be practicing late at night, go to bed frustrated, pick up my guitar the next day and just be able to play the lick without issue.
- If I make a mistake when trying to play fast, it won’t simply be one wrong note in an otherwise well-executed sequence. Instead, one mistake completely derails my synchronisation and the rest of the “chunk” becomes a mess.
For these reasons I treat practice as a problem solving exercise rather than rote repetition. There is an obstacle that prevents me from playing a certain pattern. Until I identify and make a targetted effort to overcome that obstacle, that pattern will be impossible. I will slow down a bit (maybe 70% of the target speed) to identify the obstacle but I don’t see a point in going ultra slow and gradually increasing tempo. When you’re bumping your metronome from 60 to 62 bpm and playing the pattern with no mistakes, you’re not challenging yourself and you’re not solving problems.
Does any of this make sense? Should I adopt a different approach?
Yes!!! All of it
Do you feel like you’re progressing? What you describe sounds like my understanding of how this is all supposed to work. I don’t think we should change our approach unless we hit a plateau.
So I wanted to show a clip of how I’ve been practicing for the last 24 hours and see if you guys think I’m doing this right.
This is somewhat representative of how I’ve been practicing a single lick, I played through it slowly at the beginning so you all can see what it should look like but usually I try and jump straight in at speed since I don’t want to condition myself to have to play something slowly before I can play it quick in a single session. The main problem I have with this lick is the first ascending part so that’s what I mainly work on in this clip. Normally in a longer video I would probably also work on the second half of the ascending part up to speed but for the sake of not having a long video I just did the first half or so.
As you can see after I start to add more than 6 notes in this lick it falls apart quite often. Would it be best to reduce the amount of notes in this case or should I keep hammering away with a lower success rate of trying to play with a bigger chunk of notes?
I mainly just want to make sure that this method of practice will help me get licks up to speed and consistently clean, since it seems as if I’ve already wasted a lot of time playing stuff slowly so I want to optimize my practice as much as possible with this stuff.
I think it’s the way to go, yes. You had some real smooth reps around 10 seconds and that’s exactly what you need to condition your hands to do. It just won’t happen playing the same thing slower because the motion probably won’t be the exact same thing you need at the fast speeds.
Also, 2nps stuff is hard when you cross more than 3 strings in a succession and your lick is using all 6 strings. So, the difficulty may be the string tracking. It’s clearly not impossible or anything, but Eric Johnson tends to cascade often which allows some of these tracking concerns to get bypassed. Or at least, they happen much more gradually so it doesn’t feel as drastic.
A way you could check if this is really your issue is to play something like this instead, at the same speed, and see if you can handle longer chunks:
|--------------------------------------|
|---------------------------------3-5--|
|---------------------2-5-----2-5------| etc...
|--------2-5------2-5------2-5---------|
|----3-5------3-5----------------------|
|-3-5----------------------------------|
Mainly though, I’d keep doing what you are, but also play the 2nd half of the ascent by itself too. You could “backwards” chain it buy adding 1 or more of the previous notes each time. Sort working at the riff from both sides.
Yeah the main problem I’ve had with this lick for the couple months I’ve been working on it has been my brain seeming like it’s unable to process anything past 2 or 3 strings at high speeds. I’ve definitely had a few good reps at full speed over the time I’ve worked on it but most of the time my brain just stops after the first 3 strings, like it’s not able to process the rest of the ascent. I know it’s possible though, I actually stole this from a Mateus Asato clip (first 4 seconds of this video):
In this video he switches to using pulloffs after the ascending part but I don’t really have problems picking every note once I get past the initial ascent so that’s how I’ve been practicing it. Do you think it will get progressively easier to add notes as I keep working on the initial chunk? My hope is that if I keep working on the first 3-4 strings at high speeds it’ll start to get more ingrained in muscle memory and I’ll eventually be able to get through all 6 strings without stuttering. I’ll definitely try and do some backwards chaining as well though.