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.
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
Great thread, it’s something I’ve always wondered about, not how much time but what “practice” means. There are so many other variables about practice not already mentioned too. If they are just repeating a scale exercise over an over - is it at 100% of their speed ? 90%, 80% ? Do they rest in between rounds - do the exercise once then rest for 5 seconds ? Did they do the exercise for 5 minutes non stop then go onto something else and come back to the first exercise an hour later ?
Research on academic study has shown that alternating between subjects aids retention better than one long block of study on one subject followed by another long block on a different subject. Maybe they applied this without knowing it ? There are so many unknowns.
8 hours a day sounds like a recipe for tendonitis or fasciitis. At the very least, burn-out.
I think there’s a saturation level most people will hit, both physically and mentally, well before 8 hours a day. I also think practicing anything without the proper mental acuity behind it can lead to bad form or habits.
I have to bring my experience here because I would have said this up to two weeks(maybe one) ago.
Most picking in the pop vein and in fact most playing on guitar or bass and to some extent piano fall into this category because “singer song writer expressions” are inherently expressed with the listener in mind and pop music is famous for it’s lack of virtuosity(“oh Mickey your so”, etc etc…).
But when you get serious about note for note picking and especially want to play jazz or fusion especially some of the heads which are written out note for note at furious tempos a la “Heavy metal bebop”, “hammer ons” and “pull offs” just won’t cut it, and clearly J. ambershold records are made with the idea of stunting any real growth of chops at all.
So tremolo picking and up 90 bpm aside in order to really pick alternately the string has to be pushed through and pulled on in either direction with much more force than I ever realized and in fact once accomplished becomes easier the faster you go as momentum becomes a big plus.
I formerly did not know this until after “practicing” for hours and hours and hours I finally saw what works and what doesn’t work, but this takes a great deal of focus on the task at hand very singular focus. Not only that if the effort isn’t put in the calluses don’t develop because the ground for such development leading to this type of articulation simply does not exist.
We must admit that if you are not a “natural” this picking business is pretty difficult because you have to hit the strings just so or nothing happens and without repeating it(a whole lot), the mojo is just a dream waiting to come true.
I love how our choices in this thread are 1) 30 minutes. 2) 8 hours
2-3 hours is probably a huge sweet spot. Human nature being what it is, maybe only 45-60 minutes of that (AT BEST) will be really highly focused “deep work”. But it is what it is. Dunno how many people are out there who can warm up then hyper focus into super productivity right away and reduce that 2-3 hours into 45 minutes.
There’s a book called “Mastery” by George Leonard (an aikido guy) where he emphasizes the “plateau”. Basically he believes the important breakthroughs and most of our learning comes while on the plateaus of the learning curve. Learn to love the plateau and breakthroughs will come.
Very interesting contrast from the “always improving” message. I highly recommend this book to all looking into this subject.
8 hours a day of practice on the guitar is far from impossible. Zakk Wylde practiced 8 to 12 hours a day starting when he was 14 years old. He made his pro debut on Ozzy Osbourne’s “No Rest For The Wicked” album when he was 21. Not bad, huh?
I bet some people are saying to themselves: “He could have gotten just as good by playing less. He made it because he’s inordinately talented at music and not because of those “marathon practice sessions.” We can’t say he wouldn’t have gotten just as good if he’d practiced less hours, right”?
Wrong. He did practice considerably less and not just for a few months, That’s what he did for 6 years.
Zak started playing at 8 years old. It was at 14 years old that he started practicing 8 to 12 hours a day. That’s a bit of a strain when you’re in high school. Those types of hours of practice demanded he get by on not much sleep. He’d be so tired in school that sometimes he’d fall asleep at his desk. I’m about as sure as I can be that had he failed to make any better progress playing 8 to 12 hours a day than he had when he was playing a lot less hours, He wouldn’t have stuck to such a rigorous practice schedule.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. Nobody would say it’s impossible to learn a musical instrument with an hour or two of practice a day. How much progress different people will make from using the same exact type of practice routines every day for a couple hours each day will vary widely depending upon one’s level of talent.
The thing about it is, talent alone isn’t enough. Zakk Wylde rose to the top of his field because he had the talent, the ambition and the drive to do whatever it took to be the absolute best guitar player he could become. That’s what it took to achieve what he achieved. Without that drive to be the best, to put in the requisite hours to attain that level, he wouldn’t have gotten to where he got and as fast as he got there.
It’s like anything else. Talk to a doctor, a lawyer, or a CEO who is at the top of his field and you’ll learn that he didn’t get there by treating his career as a 9 to 5 job; he got there by putting in 60, 70, or 80 hour weeks. They wanted to be at the top of their professions and were willing to put forth a level of effort others weren’t willing to put forth. They were willing to put in amounts of work some would say are impossible or unreasonable. It all comes down to how much do you want it.
When I read this topic, I immediately remembered an interview with McLaughlin and Malmsteen from 1990:
MALMSTEEN: Listen, I play guitar 20 years, and during these 20 years I’ve never practiced.
RESNICOFF: I don’t believe that.
MALMSTEEN: I have never practiced. I’ve never done an exercise, I’ve never done a certain pattern over and over and over, ever!
McLAUGHLIN: Remember what I was saying to you when I was listening to his tape, Matt? “This guy never practiced in his life.” [laughter]
(Excerpt from an interview with Yngwie Malmsteen and John McLaughlin by Matt Resnicoff for Musician Magazine September 1990)
cursive? are they trying to be elite at cursive writing though? Our public schools are the total opposite of anything that will lead to any sort of elite skill. Rather,they exactly display how to become mediocre. Compare Mozart’s childhood to a kid from today.
A better comparison would be someone who is world class at calligraphy. Ya think they got that way on 30-60 mins/day?
Guitar is MUCH less demanding than olympic weightlifting or powerlifting. Hence it can be practiced much more without injury. of course some people can injure themselves just walking to the mailbox.
We are talking about neural efficiency here…whatever the actual physiological mechanisms are. if you do a lick one time you burn that pattern in that tiny amount. What if you get happy and play it 20 more times? Thats nice, its now a little more deeply ingrained. What if you do it 50,000 times over the course of a month? Now instead of a little bitty weak channel for those impulses to travel over, they have something starting to work more like a dedicated pipeline
if strength athletes could train those movements 3x per day, 7 days per week…they would lol. The neural efficiency would be off the charts. But those movements are way more costly to the overall body systems and of course the joints etc. of course we DO have the example of guys in jail who do bodyweight exercises DAILY and become crazy strong. They dont always gain mass because they are living on noodles and soy protein lol. They gain crazy strength due to the neural efficiency gained thru zillions of reps.
I suspect part of the reason why kids learn so fast is because they dont have all THAT many other “highways” burnt into the brain and central nervous system. Michaelangelo was apprenticing with hammer and chisel before he could read. See Mozart and Anton Oparin.
Anyway, we all have our opinions. I doubt anyone got great on 30-60 mins per day. id say most of the greats (obviously) had fairly long periods of super intense study. yeah they got bored and took breaks etc but the actual breakthrough level stuff was earned thru hundreds of thousands of reps. Thats whether or not they had an actual routine or not or did actual exercises. Whether or not Yngwie ever did metronome exercise is unimportant. Starting at a young age, dude racked up thousands of hours of practice time
Rick Graham had the majority of his skills after 2 years, as shown in the video we have all seen.
Claus Levin also claims he had the majority of his picking skills after 2 years. He said he first tried the Paul Gilbert lick for months but it was simply too hard. Then he went to single string Dimeola stuff and also repeating 6 note fragments and he said thats when he got really good
To me its about what you are trying to get out of it. You want to break through to a higher level??? You want that on 60 minutes of practice? ok, good luck lol. Or do you want something to be rock solid deeply grooved so it works on time every time? (see the free throw guy)
I just dont personally see the real breakthrough stuff coming without many thousands of reps
on the basic right hand patterns, the bread and butter stuff, like every version of the PG lick, every version of a Pent scale etc…I want those patterns DEEPLY ingrained. I dont want to worry if they’ll work or not
