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.
