Putting lines together - three notes per string

Technique Critique
#1

Hello everybody,
I think I will make a new thread for my 3nps-problems, hope thats okay…
After working about 4 month on my right hand speed I can play sextuplets at 140 bpm in a chromatic way like this:

e -------------------------------8-9-10---------
b --------------------8-9-10--------------------
g ----------7-8-9--------------------------------
d --7-8-9----------------------------------------

The goal should be to play this sextuplet at 120 bpm effortless:

e -------------------------------------8-10-11---------
b -------------------------8-10-11---------------------
g -------------7-8-10----------------------------------
d --7-8-10---------------------------------------------

My problem is to connect the two different shapes together.
Sometimes it works well but most of the time i make some mistakes.
In a live situation I should be able to play this effortles and without thinking about.
Please consider, that these lines are only an extract of a melody. I made this simplification only, because I thout itis much easier to break it down in a simple form, where I can learn the technic.

Troy and his team suggest not to start playing slow but rather playing in a medium tempo and increase it to the maximum…

Maybe it needs the same time to bring the muscles to do this in the speed I want ?
… and yes, I am a little disappointed, but not because the “cracking the code”, because of my sluggishness …

My question: How should I practise to put these simple forms together ?

Note: Some guitarists I´ve seen on Youtube say, that here right hand is limited and they will prefer more the legato way of playing. (I heard Steve Vail saying this and Tom Quayle for example which plays often with Martin Miller)

Maybe my physical constitution don´t allow me to play fast in this way ?
I know, stupid thing to say this, but maybe thats the reason …

Do you have an suggestion how my daily working plan should looke like ?

Maybe it helps to send a video ?

Thanks in advance,
Chris

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Putting lines together - 3NpS - Video
Putting lines together - 3NpS - Video
#2

If you can play the first passage I know you can play the second one just as fast and play one right after the other with just a tiny bit of practice.

It won’t take much time at all. You’ve got the picking motion down and that’s the hardest part. I bet it’s just a matter of your fretting hand not used to switching between the different fingerings. The first passage is all 1-2-3 fingering but the second is 1-2-4, 1-2-4, 1-3-4, 1-3-4.

The second pattern needs to be “burned” into your muscle memory. Practice the second part slow enough that you don’t make any mistakes. Do it over and over until it’s burned in. Probably only take 15-30 minutes to do that. Then start playing it faster and when you’ve got it up to speed combine it with the first passage. Betcha a dollar that you’ll have in nailed in under 2 hours, more likely 1 hour. :+1:

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#3

Thanks Ian!
After your suggestion, I did the following thing today:
Playing this shape:
124-124-134-134
30 minutes, without a break at 70 bpm.
Then
30 minutes, without a break at 80 bpm

Now I need a break…

The next step would be to bisect the time (15 minutes)and play at 90 bpm

I go on, till I will reach 120 bpm…
Is that in your mind?

#4

Actually I think he’s suggesting you ingrain the mechanics at whatever pace allows you to play very accurately, attentively, and carefully, with ease, and then when it’s really ingrained, push the envelope. That’s kind of the opposite of metronome gradations, yes?

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#5

As a personal way of practicing, may I suggest to try the difficult passage in isolation,

b -------------------------8-10-11---------------------
g -------------7-8-10----------------------------------

In my mind if I need to play with less effort I should be able to start from any part of a scale I am doing.
If you are playing with alternate picking, you with start with an upstroke to simulate the fact that you are coming from the d string.
I bet this could help you :slight_smile:

Just my 5cents!

#6

What @RockStarJazzCat said. You don’t need to practice it with a metronome, in fact turn that sucker off for right now. The metronome is for cleaning up your timing once you’ve got the fingering and picking mechanics down. From the practice you did today the fingering’s probably already burned in. So next time you pick up your guitar, warm up a bit and then play it a few times each time a little faster. I think you’ll see you’ll have it the same or just a little bit slower than the first part.

One thing you might find is that even though you can play each part fast, when you put them together mistakes start popping up. In my experience what’s happening is that the fingers “get confused”. They have to get used to switching between these two slightly different burned in patterns. So just slow it down a bit and get then accustomed to switching patterns.

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#7

Is this how you normally do metronome practice? If so I’m going to recommend a combination of @Troy’s and @milehighshred’s advice to help you quickly get a pattern/chunk/lick up to speed. Start with Troy’s method. There’s no metronome practice at this stage. The goal is to get the fretting and fingering motions burned into your muscle memory. I’ll do this while watching TV or a movie and by the end the lick is on autopilot.

  1. Start with a medium tempo.
  2. If you can play the part clean, great! If not, slow it down to where you’re not making mistakes.
  3. Repeat it a few times, stop for a few minutes then repeat again.
  4. Burst the speed. It’s okay if they are mistakes. You’re getting used to playing the part fast.

The key is that you want to know the pattern/chunk/lick so well you don’t even have to think about it. You could have a conversation with someone or read a book while playing the part. Depending on what you’re trying to learn the burn in and getting it up to speed can take anywhere from a few minutes to a day or two. But the more things you get burned in the easier and faster it is to burn in the next one. And once it’s burned into muscle memory you’re going to naturally start speeding up the part.

Once you can shred that sucker its time to clean it up with the metronome.

  1. Start slow, like 60-80 bpm. Depends on experience.
  2. Play the part 4 times.
  3. If no mistakes, bump up the metronome 5 bpm. When you get up to the 160s this might be as little as 2-3 bpm.
  4. If you reach a tempo where mistakes start popping up back down to the prior tempo.
  5. If you get stuck a certain tempo it’s burst time. Move the metronome up by 10-20 bpm and play the part a few times.
  6. Go back to the stuck tempo. It’ll feel easier to play and you just might be able to move it up a few bpm.

Good luck! :slight_smile:

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#8

Sort of! The key question here is to ask if the person can actually do the picking movement yet, or if they can’t. If they can’t, there is no burning of anything. Conventional slow correct practice doesn’t work because you don’t know what correct feels like. Instead, you need to figure out the motion first and that is all done fast and initially sloppy, and only gradually slower as you begin to recognize what correct feels like. Only someone who has the skill pretty well down can play slowly and correctly with anything resembling realistic form.

If your technique is solid, then “practice” for you means learning a new piece or phrase with a skill you mostly already possess. That’s more of a memorization game and that can be done more slowly.

We’ll have more to say on this down the line but that’s a general cheat sheet.

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#9

Honestly, I would not practice this way.

In every study we’ve read on very long practice sessions, which researchers call “mass” or “blocked” practice sessions, they perform poorly compared to practice with frequent breaks.

Also, practice sessions focusing only on one skill perform poorly compared to practice sessions which focus on different skills or different applications of a skill, especially when those different skills are mixed up randomly.

Finally, practice sessions that focus on extreme consistency also do worse than practice that allows for natural variability of whatever movement or skill you are trying to learn. Natural variation speeds up the learning process by giving you more ways to accidentally do it right.

So… if we add this all up: doing long uninterrupted sessions, of only one skill, with very little variation is pretty much the exact opposite of what we know about how learning works.

If you’re trying to learn a new physical skill, the best way to do it is short attempts with frequent breaks while searching for the click of getting it right, all done at a fast speed or at least a realistic speed which is similar to the speed where you want to actually use the skill.

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#10

Thank you very much all of who sending me suggestions.
So when I tend toll prefer Troys way, how could my daily practise plan looks like ?
I am a little bit confused and my english is not so good…

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#11

A possible idea:

Write down a bunch of things you want to work on on scraps of paper.

Put them in a hat.

Pull one out and work on it for 15 minutes.

Take a break, then grab another and do another 15 minutes.

And so on and so on.

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#12

Don’t overcomplicate this. Pick the skill you want to work on, learn a few variations of it - different sequences or patterns - and rotate around them in shorter practice sessions throughout the day. If you’re working during the day, you might have to practice at night with frequent breaks.

See Troy’s video:

However, a huge component is accepting that you will have to practice a lot to get results comparable to any of the virtuosos. It’s al learnable mechanics, but 15-30 minutes a day is not going to cut it.

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#13

I’ve heard that a well. I would say that practicing the same thing in the same manner over and over again won’t fix it… and in those cases… it would be better just to let it go, and just play it with legato.

If you could, post a video your attempts, as close as possible to a ‘magnet’ position.

As far as how to do 3NPS runs… you have to have a ‘go to’ mechanic for hurdling over your difficult string changes.

If you are a DWPS, and you are ascending… that would probably be your ‘outside’ transfers. So if you can, try to spend a few minutes a day trying to overcome that weakness. Usually that requires some sort of rotation, or some sort of change in your mechanic to hurdle over the string.

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#14

Very strange, I’ve been working the last couple of weeks on this exact same lick myself. Just wanted to say thank you to everyone here, this has been really valuable practicing advice and is already pretty close to how I’ve been unconsciously/naturally been approaching my practice. I have one small question:

By “practice sessions that focus on extreme consistency”, do you mean practice sessions where you spend 30+ minutes playing a part slowly and trying to make sure every single note is perfect/consistent? It sounds like the advice here is that, rather than do that, it’s ok to play sloppy and make mistakes while you figure out the movement, then bring things down to a reasonable speed to refine the movement, and keep kind of hopping between “at the edge” practice and “cleaning up” practice to get the speed moving up?

#15

Exactly. If you’re trying to learn a picking motion you can’t yet do, how can you possibly know that it’s “correct” when you’re doing it slowly? Focusing on the notes isn’t going to tell you whether your motion is right because there are lots of ways to play the right notes with the wrong motions. Meaning, motions that aren’t efficient and won’t feel smooth as you speed up.

If you already posssess the technique, and you’re just learning a new piece, that’s mostly just memorization. Feel free to do that slowly if you’re getting results that way.

Yes, learn movements fast, slow them to down to figure them out. But not all the way down. If you don’t have the movement, then you won’t be able to do it super slowly and correctly until the end of the process. Even experts that we interview change their form when playing slowly, so we shouldn’t expect to be able to do better.

In general, you’re not starting out slow and getting faster, and you’re not even starting out fast and getting slower. You’re starting out with a narrow range of mostly fast speeds and getting wider, increasing the window of speeds you can play at to encompass gradually slower speeds, and sampling all speeds during that process.

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#16

So my problem is not the picking motion at speed. I know this, because I have build my picking motion on this lines:

E --------------------------------------8-9-10-----------------------------------
B -------------------------8-9-10------------------------------------------------
G --------------7-8-9-----------------------------------------------------------
D —7-8-9----------------------------------------------------------------------

I´m able to pick this chromatical lines (sextuplets) on 160 bpm and the picking motion don´t care,
if they pick chromatical line or the lines below. Thats my opinion and maybe I´m completely wrong ?

My problem is synchronize the whole phrase below, which means that the main difficulty for me is the
location change which has to be done on the B-string. The fingers get confused when I change the fingering and the location.
When I play ever shape separately no problems, only in connection they make problems.
So my question was: should I play this “whole” phrase, to get the whole fingerin in my brain (and not a part of the phrase) slowly, fast, or should I play in 30 minutes slowly without a break … ?

E --------------------------------------8-10-11-----------------------------------
B -------------------------8-10-11------------------------------------------------
G --------------7-8-10-----------------------------------------------------------
D —7-8-10----------------------------------------------------------------------

#17

The fact that the location change to your 3rd string causes difficulty is super-common.

First… I’d see if you can do 3NPS without fretting at all… basically just pick each string 3 times and ascend… and see if you still have the problem on the B string… and listen if it sounds consistent.

If you do… you know your problem: you need to learn/improve on 2WPS, or some variation of 2WPS. Make sure to watch/rewatch all of Troy’s videos on the subject.

If however… you can pick it fine… then it is a ‘brain-wiring’ issue. And I would suggest attacking this by splitting it up. First, do the run using just fretting (hammer-ons). Then do the picking by itself at the same pace (3 times on each string). Then do them together… again… at the same pace.

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#18

Thank you very much. I think its a brain-wiring’ issue and so I tried the last way to clear and reset the brain :brain:
After trying it for a while I think it works fine

#19

Awesome. Yeah… I’ve encountered this so many times. Sometimes, the longer we’ve been playing guitar, the harder it is to reset things like muscle-memory.

#20

Yes that’s right…
After two days of trying to re-wire, the left and the right hand feels very strange, seems as they don’t work together, but I think it’s the re-wiring-process…