Practice strategies after developing fundamental motion

Playing Technique
#21

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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?

#22

Yes!!! All of it :slight_smile:

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.

#23

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.

#24

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.

#25

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.