we have to listen to our bodies and be smart. We are capable of more than we give ourselves credit for
seems the main ones who suffer hand injuries are the HARD pickers and those who use heavy strings with lots of hand strength employed in their styles (SRV and Phil Sayce have had issues afaik)
Sorry, Troy! Looks like you answered my question in the first paragraph after my initial post in your blog.
The short answer is that the players we have interviewed almost universally describe a period of intense mechanical learning early in their life. They sometimes make comments about a large amount of time per day they remember working on their technique. But even if they don’t always put a specific number on it, it’s clear that that the dedication and focus is significant.
Thanks Troy and glad I was able to spark a discussion and blog post. I think this is an interesting and important subject regarding “practice”. I’m still working my way through the blog post.
The only thing where I’d get a little leery here is these are all fairly “macro” movements - large movements involving large muscle groups working in close concert with each other and where strength and building muscle mass is usually a direct objective. And repetitive strain is extremely effective at building muscle mass.
Guitar, meanwhile, is a much more “micro” movement - small, fast, accurate movements that depend very little to not at all on strength, but largely on dexterity and flexibility and accuracy and speed and endurance. Really, control more than strength.
I don’t believe guitar ability - outside of things like controlled bending, especially on heavier strings - really requires much muscular strength to do well, though I’ll happily be challenged on this one if someone feels differently. That seems to rob a “doing reps” approach of its main benefit. The main detriment, then, would be repetitive stress injuries, damage to ligaments and joints from doing the same movements over and over and over again. That can largely be addressed through form… But it IS a risk.
I’m not sure what the answer is here, and I’ll often use lessons I’ve learned as a cyclist to inform my thoughts on practice… but at the same time that’s more of a matter of convenience and personal experience than anything where - for the reasons above - there’s much in the way of logical evidence why it SHOULD be so.
I’m kind of hesitant to embrace “brute force” practice regimes for those reasons. Sure, ballplayers will spend hours in the batting cage, NBA players will stand there and shoot free throws over and over and over again, and I’ll go out and do hill repeats on my bike to climb faster… But we don’t have vascular surgeons doing 12-hour sets six days a week in med school, we have them studying and doing much shorter practical drills. We do some drilling to teach handwriting in schools, but you’d never expect a student to do more than an hour or two of cursive work at a time. In art school there’s extremely little repetitive drilling, and the focus is almost entirely on doing. Idunno. It seems like fast and delicate movements don’t benefit from mass quantities of repetition for long periods of times in the same way bench pressing for you or hill climbing for me does.
Sorry for getting carried away here! I think the hard part about your question, and the reason it’s worth a blog post, is that we really can’t know how much actual practice these players did, because what they call “practice” could be so different. There’s a huge difference between what Terry Syrek did and what I did, for example. They are not the same activities, and they don’t produce the same results.
To put it as succinctly as I can, if you want to know whether it’s necessary to do highly repetitive exercise-type practice for at least several hours a day to learn the picking techniques we have studied, I can tell you for sure the answer is no. I never did that, and I can do many of these techniques at, let’s call it, a “professional” level of competence.
That’s probably not going to stop future all-time-greats from being near a guitar for many hours a day when they’re young. As we learned from our interview with Ellen Winner, genius types are internally motivated to the point of obsession. But just because they’re around a guitar for that long still doesn’t even mean they’re actually “practicing” in the sense of hard-core drilling that lots of people mean. It probably encompasses a range of activities that contribute to other aspetcs of their skills beyond simply technique, including harmony, ear-training, and general musical knowledge.
Agreed. I don’t see how anyone can put in those kind of hours on only scales, exercises, etc. You have to give your hands a break and those aspects you listed can still be considered “practice” to many. I believe both Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have stated that their “practice” included these elements.
Great subject! And thanks for all your time, effort, and wisdom, Troy!
Hey gman0101,
We had a big discussion on this in a fairly similar thread to this which you can find here:
The thread is titled: Is There An Optimum Number Of Practice Hours A Day
I started the thread, so just so you know, I’m not using the word “practice” in the sense of only practicing exercises. In fact, Yngwie Malmsteen said he never “practiced” in that he never did exercises. He played 8 to 12 hours a day and that’s what I’m referring to as “practice” in the thread I linked. I use practice in the sense of time spent playing guitar while they were pursuing becoming great at the guitar. Despite over 100 replies to the thread, nobody was able to cite an example of a legendary virtuoso level guitarist who didn’t practice at least 4 hours a day and that’s a very conservative estimate, since most on the list in the OP claimed to have spent more like 8 to 12 hours a day playing guitar in the process of becoming great.
Sorry to give a crappy simplistic view, but in my mind the answer is:
The emphasis is on the ‘quality’. I have been playing guitar for 20 years and my picking has improved greatly in the last few years during which I have had 2 children, bought a house and new job etc - all of which means I have severly limited guitar time. CtC has been instrumental in that it has allowed me to practice with higher quality and awareness, so that an hour practice now is worth 3 of what I was doing before.
So I suppose it is one’s ability to accurate gauge the efficacy of their practice which would be a key insight. Its very easy to get into the mindset of “I have put my hours in today and hopefully that will put me in good stead to see some inprovement tomorrow”, only to realise you have been doing it for 6 years without great success.
I am a firm believer that a lot of hours are needed to reach the skills of some of the above guitarists and you cannot do it quickly on less than a few hours a day, but the higher quality focussed practice on stuff that is proving to work is what is important.
In one of the Andy Wood interviews, he wouldn’t hang around doing the same thing if it wasn’t working, he gave it a good enough go to find out and then tried to augment what he did until he hit upon the result he wanted. @Troy has also echoed the importance of this ‘trial and error’ method (if I recall correctly).
And finally to quote Yngwie, “If its good… its good”
To me, this comment on the “young Andy Wood” clip in the blog post is a mic drop moment:
Going to need to some clarification here Troy.
From this thread, you said:
“I had some mild forearm strain maybe fifteen years ago when I was trying to figure out how two-way pickslanting worked and came home from work every day and did that every night for hours. What is “that” you ask? Good question, I didn’t really know. I probably just repeated scales forever. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, or what I was doing to get there. I stopped playing for a week or so, and the strain went away. That’s about it from guitar playing. More recently, video editing has been a real killer - thousands of mouse clicks and drags on a trackpad will destroy forearms. I got an ergonomic mouse and that’s much better now.”
Not trying to call you out, but I distinctly remember this post because it stuck out in light of you being consistent in advising against that sort of practice. I mean, you said you never did that, but then above you said literally the exact opposite.
Source: Injuries from working to change technique?
For what it’s worth I’m from the school of thought that Claus comes from. 8 hours a day is absurd but let’s not pretend you’re getting anywhere with 15-30 minutes unless you’re already an advanced guitar player with the ability to make every single second count.
Purely playing devil’s advocate here:
Why not?
I’m not saying I disagree with you - rather, I think as guitarists we take this for granted, and we probably could benefit from at least revisiting that prior.
In the spirit of getting the ball rolling, I’ll say I’ve done more to help my picking in the last year than I have in the decade before that, and while there have definitely been the occasional night or weekend where I’ve played 2-4 hours, I’d be surprised if I’ve averaged as much as an hour a night during that period, and most of the progress I HAVE made has been stuff that once I started working on something it came pretty quickly - say, looping 5-7-8-5-7-8 patterns on a single string and bursting the speed to build coordination and stamina, or lately I’ve made some progress smoothing out my timing on string changes by doing 5-7-8 on one string, 5-7-8 on the next highest, then staying on that string repeating 5-7-8, then dropping back to the original string and repeating 5-7-8, and looping that, as an escaped downstroke pattern to get more even on changing strings with an escape downstroke from one string to a thicker string.
I mean, if there IS a need to play more than 30 minutes a day to build elite technique, there should be a good reason for that we can find, right?
You’re already an advanced player based on the clips I’ve seen of you, so my example likely doesn’t apply to you. I’m happy you made the progress, that is great. It supports what I’m saying in the aggregate - shorter bountiful practice sessions are likely most useful for advanced players. Intuitive beginners might benefit too, sure. I’d be willing to be the science might suggest that, but at the end of the day, being a beginner or intermediate by virtue of the label means that you are likely not an experienced practicer. You don’t have the requisite hours or “feel” for when you’re doing something right, even if it sounds “wrong” - that in and of itself is a huge thing people get hung up on.
I don’t have any hard evidence to support what I’m saying, I just have my experience. I took one technique - tremolo picking - and said I’m giving this two years to get as fast as possible. Within a few months I was able to play anything from any song or band I liked. I did it as much as possible, 1 hour - 8 hours a day at the absolute extreme end for 3 or 5 days one week. The reason I became this obsessive is because I listened to Claus Levin and borderline brainwashed myself into thinking I could do this thing, but I just had to put in the hours. He said you couldn’t get anywhere with 30 minutes a day, and I think for the average person it’s absolutely true. 30 minutes a day is only a long time once you’re advanced and practicing becomes less of a mystery. It’s literally like punching in and out, everything becomes so predictable. I have no doubt in my mind now that I can build any technique as far as I need to for most conventional musical purposes.
I know my approach here doesn’t line up with the Cracking the Code dogma which is less is more, don’t practice too much, etc, but my point is that I’ve literally never met one person in my entire existence who became proficient at anything by doing it for 15-30 minutes a day from the get go. I can’t imagine what the failure rate becomes for most people when they commit to so little from the outset.
And now, surely you saw the post I linked above. Troy the brain behind this forum has gone on record as saying he never did intensive practice but then I linked a post and it says the exact opposite. It’s just confounding. Why is there this adversity to accepting that people who do more simply get better? What science would we need for that? Why would we need it? Isn’t it just logical?
tl;dr: I don’t think 15-30 minutes a day is enough for the type of playing typically analyzed around here unless you’re already a very experience practicer. My general advice is to practice as much as you possibly can so long as you aren’t causing yourself mental or physical distress, with the caveat that you should scale expectations with the amount of time you put in. If you feel like you could be doing more, it’s probably because you could be. It’s the simplest advice - we’re all here because we love guitar.
First, thank you, you’re too kind - I assure you, though, that my picking was definitely NOT advanced. 
…but, in the spirit of devil’s advocacy, is the fact that most successful guitarists have spent a period of their lives doing extensive marathon practice sessions proof that it works, or is it a symptom of the fact that in order to become an advanced, accomplished guitarist, you have to be pretty dedicated and focused, and it’s “common knowledge” that marathon sessions “work,” so anyone that serious just goes and does it because they think they have to? Correllation doesn’t imply causation, though as XKCD puts it it’s definitely winking suggestively from the corner and all, but just because B follows A doesn’t prove A causes B, especially when you have the mother of all selection biases here.
I honestly don’t know the answer to these questions, but I think the reason it’s worth asking is because if the answer is no, marathon practice sessions DON’T help, and it’s a matter of diminishing returns falling off pretty quickly, then we could probably design far more efficient practice regimes. I know speaking personally I was NOT a very good alternate picker a year and a half ago, to the point where if you listen to solos I’d recorded before CTC, there were extremely few picked runs in my playing and the vast majority of my fast playing was legato. And, over the ensuing say 15 months, I had shoulder surgery, couldn’t pick at all for a couple months, then as soon as I could started training for a half marathon and spending as much time as I could on my road bike to get back into shape and undo all the ground I lost, then went on a maybe two month spurt of VERY active online dating, and now have way less playing time than I used to thanks to a (completely amazing) girlfriend… and, in that period, mostly working in small chunks at a time, built up enough proficiency with a pick to at least get confused for an advanced player on the internet.
So, I really don’t know what the answer is, but I think it would make sense to at least try to rule out the possibility that the reason a lot of elite players have done 8-10 hour practice sessions at some point is because they’re super dedicated and it’s commonly believed that they have to do this to get good, but that past the first hour or two it was all just a waste of time due to diminishing returns in marathon practice sessions. I mean, not for nothing, it sounds like Troy’s brief stint of binge practicing ended with him getting hurt and no better at TWPS than when he started, reading between the lines, you know?
Yeah for sure. I see what you’re saying. The point about correlation and causation is fair. Maybe there is a tipping point beyond which it’s wasted effort. In that vein I’ve hears 1.5-2 hours being the upper limit, and to my detriment I spent a seriously, seriously STUPID amount of hours in 2017-2018 playing this instrument. I recall practicing so much one day that I was seeing black spots in my vision and I knew I had to take the next day off. To that end, I think Troy is on the money and I’ve been using his advice of shorter sessions broken up with frequent breaks. But I think I obsessiveness can often trump that and sometimes you need to ride the wave of passion. In retrospect for me it was masochistic and I’d be surprised if many other players who practiced like that didn’t feel the same way.
It’s such an odd, metaphysical area to get into. When is enough simply enough? Maybe a few 40 minute sessions per day is the maximum, but then you see professional players like Rick Graham, Marshall, etc and it turns out they did the opposite.
I think really all you can do is just have a general idea and to that end expectations should be scaled, but I also think if you’re doing a solid 1.5-2 hours a day there’s no way you can’t become insanely proficient. The shorter in duration you go I’m sure the more the dropoff rate increases, I’d put money on that.
Eh, again, my picking was pretty abysmal when I signed up here - I was left with the distinct impression that I must be holding my pick wrong or doing SOMETHING wrong (even before being exposed to CtC) because I’d put so much work into it with so little to show for it. Legato, sure, I could burn… but picking was a mess. And I definitely put some serious hours in on chromatic drills and scales and the like.
Of course, that doesn’t prove anything… If anything, maybe it just proves WHAT you practice matters, since things like that 1-2-3-4 picking drill don’t really work your string changing in the same way as 3nps patterns. Certainly one of the things I’ve taken from CtC is that mechanical technique seems to develop in response to the things you TRY to play…
But, I’m not sure how you could really test this, and obviously I can’t on one hand argue that stuff like this:
…is anecdotal and doesn’t prove anything, yet at the same time then go and argue the fact I’ve made more progress in the past year in predominately short practice sessions than I have in the decade before is “proof” of anything either. It’s just one more data point. At the same time, we have more data points like Andy Wood at 8, before he’d have time to have done that sort of intensive marathon practicing, playing mandolin parts that I’d have struggled to pick something comparable on an acoustic guitar a year ago. So, I don’t know… It just seems like it’s tough to jump to the conclusion that you NEED to do that kind of marathon practice.
Like, I’d be curious if you could have learned to trem pick like you can today doing 30 minute sessions on a near daily basis, rather than 2-6 hour sessions.
Shit, I’m not really a great trem picker - maybe this is a good opportunity to find out! 
Lets not forget… players like Vai for example with his 10 hour practice a day, did not spend 10 hours on picking alone. It involved chords, scales, rhythm, improvisation and composition This is what made him elite overall. In order for him to reach his goals in all these areas he had to spend 10 hours especially as he wanted to create the sounds and style in his head. Now, not everyone out there in guitar land wants to take the guitar to that level, maybe they just want to play their favourite songs, play in a band or whatever. You do not need 10hrs a day to do that. A lot of our guitar heroes were pioneers and didn’t have the resources and tech that we have today - it is perfectly reasonable to expect to learn how to do at least the technique aspects in a shorter period, generally speaking.
The classical guitarist John Williams famously never practiced more than 30 minutes a day. Of course his father was a guitar teacher and supervised the first four years of his practice. His father stopped when he was confident John was practicing efficiently and effectively. John was eight years old at the time.
Good call. My entire practice history from about 1986 until around 2002 was of the unstructured creative variety, with almost no long stretches of continuous playing when I picked up a guitar. The “dwps breakthrough” moment happened this way, and once it clicked, the technique required very little upkeep. From when I graduated college in '94 to '02 in fact I didn’t play much at all. Weeks or months would go by while I was working my job or tinkering with recording equipment.
For a few months in 2002, when I first watched Speed Kills and spotted the secret-sauce “2wps” hand motions, I got fired up again spent time trying to do the motions. This was actually the first time I ever tried to “do” a picking motion deliberately. I still didn’t really know what actual motions I was making, but I knew it had to resemble the down-up-rotate thing. Or so I thought. Anyway, I was probably too fired up because I did indeed do this for a couple hours on certain days. Not every day, but more often than I had previously.
After about two or three months of Speed Kills mania, I developed forearm soreness. On the advice of a doctor, I stopped playing for a week or two, I don’t remember exactly how long. It went away, and I made a mental note to back off the guitar playing. I went back to something resembling the intermittent playing I had been doing prior. Just with much more knowledge and baseline skill than I had when I was a teenager.
The scale playing stuff didn’t really click until about 2007, for reasons which are lost to the mists of history. I do remember that I was trying to switch to a Di Meola-style “loose fist” grip for a few months, and it wasn’t working. When I switched back to “grazing fingers”, that’s when it clicked. Similar to the dwps breakthrough moment, the scalar stuff just started working really effortlessly. I remember this because I filmed that “Amp Shopping” video right afterward, so the form you’re seeing in that clip is pretty close to that breakthrough moment, which is cool.
To be clear, I’m not anti-practice, and I make no claim to know the mininum amount of time someone could practice and still actually learn things. I have no idea what Claus says about practice or why you think we’re saying different things, but I don’t like seeing the world as factions that are with or against each other. This may be semantics, but I’d prefer to think that all of us are instead “with” the search for the way things really work.
In terms of my path personally, it has been characterized by periodic breakthrough moments, about once every 10 years or so, during what feels like a time of heightened experimentation. In between those breakthroughs there seem to be long periods of Albert Lee-style stasis where my technique doesn’t change much, but also doesn’t need much in terms of practice time either to stay sharp.
I think of this as a kind of punctuated equilibrium. Maybe it can be turbocharged with a certain type of directed experimentation which is less casual than what I’ve done. And of course, we hope we can reduce the experimentation that’s required by providing the clearest possible specific instruction on exactly how the motions involved work. Nobody should have to spend 30 years figuring out basic picking technique like I did.
Thanks Troy, this helped me understand where you are coming from. And yeah, it’s definitely not about “factions” or anything; far from it, as I think what you and Claus say isn’t really at that dissimilar at its core. Just nuances which can be chalked up to you being two different educators.
Hi,
I think your point here is hard to overestimate. In the end, what we should be doing is practicing music first, and technique second.
Naturally, honing one’s technique is essential for acquiring the skill set for playing the guitar; we ought to put the time into developing the optimal hand picking mechanics (wrist motion, deviation, pick grip, etc.). However, focusing entirely on the mechanical aspect may prove not to be optimal at all, or even contrary to the intent.
Speaking from my own experience, after 11 months of strictly mechanical and repetitive motor practice I moved on to practicing the foundational music concepts, such as scales, chord shapes & progressions, as well as arpeggios. It wasn’t until I started practicing the latter when the mechanics of my picking motion evolved to the point where I could comfortably play 1-nps arpeggios, or alternate-pick, as well as combine them both; couple of months earlier, I would not have been able to do that at all!
Whatever happens to our mind when we practice while tackling a musical problem, rather than strictly technical, is what may help us move over a stumbling block with our technique. Human brain is wonderful that way!
In this context, practicing music and its foundations, or song/lead excerpts serving a musical purpose may be more helpful in accomplishing the goal of optimal picking technique, or simply get us there faster, and with less strain. Thus, the time put may not be the decisive factor at all. At least, I’d like to think that 
classic thread in which anecdotal info supporting one’s preexisting belief is wholeheartedly endorsed, while anecdotal info opposing one’s preexisting belief is wholeheartedly rejected