I don’t know if it’s been mentioned in the thread, which I haven’t read in its entirety, but Daniel Coyle wrote a great book about skill acquisition and uncommon/accelerated learning, The Talent Code. It is an investiagation of “talent hotbeds” throughout the world - places that have churned out world-class talents at rates inconsistent with statistical probability, like the Dynamo tennis club near Moscow, a baseball training center on a small Caribbean island, or Meadowlands (Meadow Mount?) in Vermont (IIRC) for classical musicians, and the learning methods of coaches or teachers in those talent hotbeds, then goes to some scientists who have investigated the role of “white matter”, or myelin, in the brain in recent years. I don’t remember a single instance of any student putting in 8 hours a day purely on technique. I seem to remember that the most that the brain physiology could handle of that regime on any given day is 2-3 hours and we’re talking about people training to world-class levels.
Thanks, sounds interesting! I listed a bunch of other books here I’ve come across related to learning, practice, pedagogy, and assorted other musical topics:
I’ve heard of The Talent Code but not read / discussed here yet…may have to pick it up at some point 
Not sure how deep it gets on practical applications but definitely seems like some engaging case studies! Linking here for reference:
Thanks a lot, just bought it.
One of my nerdy hobbies is aim training for FPS games on mouse and keyboard. There is an entire community built around training this skill, with standardized rankings and training scenarios to evaluate your level. The top 0.1% of aimers all trained a minimum of 1 hour per day, with some going up to 3 hours per day or more. The best aimer in the world currently grinded particular training scenarios 6 hours per day in order to win a championship. Generally it takes around 1500 hours to get to the 0.1%, with some taking as little as 500 hours (but many of those had thousands of hours in FPS games before training) and some taking up to 2500 hours. At my current rate of progress I will probably be one of those that takes 2500 hours.
If this is applicable to guitar, I’d say it would take between 500 to 2500 hours to become a guitar god, depending on how quickly your brain learns motor skills. But it is just one anecdote so take it for what it’s worth.
Honestly, the question of how much practice time is optimal is a moot point for most players who ask about this. Because the askers usually aren’t observing their techniques to see what is actually happening.
Simply filming your technique and looking at it can put a stop to a lot of the wasted time. Most people are not likely to sit there for hours repeating the Paul Gilbert lick if the joint motions look identical on every attempt. Instead, the camera can hopefully make the choices more obvious:
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If you see technique that is not the one you’re trying to learn, I think you’d be likely to either try something different, or if that fails, to seek out some advice as to what you’re missing.
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On the flip side, if the technique looks and sounds correct on every attempt, that’s a clear signal it’s time to move on.
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The third option is “do more repetitions”. When faced with very clear video of your hands that looks the same as the last time, I’d have to think you’d be less likely to choose this option — which is a good thing.
So many players with great technical skills, stress playing at a slower pace at least initially, it’s impossible to overlook… playing something incorrectly-slowly accomplishes nothing… but if you have technique you’re trying to master, let’s say economy picking, how can you develop that level of control unless you invest hours into repetitious practice?
If every time you play a sample phrase and you film it, you can do it slow, but the motion is no longer the same when you speed up, then zero learning is happening.
How will you fix that? You have no choice but to try at the faster speed and film it. If the motion is still not correct at the faster speed, then the slower speed attempts did not help the faster ones. You just have to keep trying.
In general, escape is the thing you want to look at, because the escape “is” the motion, not the pitches. This is true for alternate, economy — any picking motion. Economy is just a combination of alternate and sweeping, and they each are a type of joint motion you are trying to mimic. So the evaluation is the same.
I don’t know what else to tell you about this other than to film yourself. The point of my previous post is that the camera is the equalizer. It will cut through all the BS about practice, because it will tell you immediately whether the motion is actually the one you are trying to learn. And that’s the whole point of practice, learning to mimic a specific type of joint motion.