Practice strategies after developing fundamental motion

Playing Technique
#1

So I wanted to seek peoples’ opinions on effective practice methods for learning fast licks after you have the fundamental picking motions developed and you know you can reach the speeds you are trying for. This is purely related to developing accuracy and consistency at high speeds but not increasing your maximum speed or learning a new motion.

The first (and most obvious?) practice method I use would be playing a lick all the way through at a very slow speed and focus on being very accurate. This obviously helps when you are in the beginning stages of learning a lick, and it also seems to help particularly if there is a bad habit I notice when playing a lick up to speed, such as missing an upstroke or something similar. Another thing I do if a lick is particularly long is break it up into sections and practice them slowly one section at a time. This seems to help if I don’t yet feel confident playing through an extended lick without making mistakes, even at slow speeds.

Another strategy I have heard that people use is something that I believe is called “rhythmic modulation”, where you play through part of a lick at higher speeds and transition into a slow speed around the problematic areas. This is something that I don’t have a ton of experience doing so I can’t comment on how effective it would be. Another strategy that is somewhat related to this is the process of breaking a lick into small fragments and playing through the entire lick but pausing in between those fragments. I also cannot comment on the effectiveness of this because I have not used it often. Let me know what you guys think about these.

The last thing I do sometimes is simply “gun it” and try to play through a lick at full speed all the way through. This rarely seems to work for me if it’s a lick I’m having trouble with, and it seems to me like this is something that should be avoided if you’re focusing on accuracy and consistency, and not trying to increase your speed or develop a new motion.

I definitely could use lots of input on what you guys think the most effective/least effective strategies are, and if anyone has more strategies to add definitely feel free. I have a feeling the answer lies in the use of many of these strategies for practicing fast licks, but I’m definitely in no position to have an authoritative say on that. Let me know what you guys think!

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#2

I thought this was a really interesting approach:

Basically chunking from another perspective. He also does something where he starts at the target speed and gradually reduces the bmp until it cleans up. The polar opposite of the ‘start slow and creep up’ that we’re all sick of hearing. Because (spoiler alert) when you start slow, you’re probably not using the same motion you would when you’re fast. Starting fast encourages the proper (efficient) motion, gradually reducing the speed encourages this motion to still be what you’re using, but identifying where you start getting cleaner.

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#3

Would you say this is best to do for brand new licks that you have no experience playing, or for licks that you know well and can play slow, but have problems playing accurately up to speed? Or even both?

#4

Good question. I’d imagine this would be for stuff you already ‘know’ how to play. Like, you’ve got the fingering down and all your string changes are in place. I feel like trying to just ‘go for it’ at your fastest speed when you don’t even know how to play the lick would just be a mess.

#5

The problem with this method for me is when I practice using it I tend to get a lot more “bad reps”, even when practicing small chunks, than I would if I was running through something slowly. From my understanding, the way you perform something is sort of like an average of all the reps you’ve accumulated while practicing it, so it makes me nervous working on a lick and continuing to get a lot of bad reps. When you use this practice method do you find that you still see improvement even when working on a lick and accumulating “bad reps” playing small sections up to speed as opposed to playing something slowly and getting more “good reps”?

#6

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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#7

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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#8

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.

#9

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:

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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?

#10

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 :slight_smile:

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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#11

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.

#12

When this happens to me I just jump to something different and return to the lick later on that day or next day.

#13

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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#14

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.

#15

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:

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And the alternate picked part:

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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.

#16

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?

#17

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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#18

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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#19

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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#20

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.