I think Troy’s work is very valuable and insightful and may help some people who are struggling.
I think in addition to him explaining how certain movements, positions and angles work and the importance of escaping the strings when switching strings (if not sweeping), there is this idea that to play fast, one must practice fast. If we examine players and the way their hands move when playing fast, this appears to be quite different than how they move when playing slow and this fast way must be practiced and “building up to it” may not be the best approach. It can also be a shortcut to see what kind of picking motions work best for you etc. Shawn Lane I believe espoused this belief. He started with speed and sorted it out.
But there is another view shared by many top players that appears to be at odds with this.
I’ve always noticed that and I was reading an interview with modern virtuoso Matteo Mancuso - who some think may be the next big innovative guy (EVH > Yngwie > Matteo) - the other day where he discussed this topic and he has some opinions on this with an interesting perspective and it got me thinking.
As far as other big guitarists go:
Yngwie is known to have started on one string playing it for months taking the slow approach to an extreme level. Later he would hear himself on practice recordings which played back slightly faster than recorded and then try to emulate it incrementally building speed. He states this is how he built his speed and considers it a crazy story. He is slow hand.
Guthrie stresses slow practice. Anton does.
Vinnie Moore does as well. You have to practice slow and build up to speed.
MAB insists on it. It’s all over his videos. There is no lambourgini without it.
Vai as well.
Yngwie suggests the hands don’t even come into it… he says he plays with his ears. Play with your ears. Play with your ears. (He often repeats it).
EVH says if it sounds good it is good.
Yngwie says, you don’t stand up in a rocky boat.
Many of these players do have pretty refined techniques at high speed and do appear to make relatively small movements. Many people often remark that Yngwies right hand hardly moves at all. He instead performs magic tricks. He is said to have a very relaxed right hand.
Getting back to Matteo, who plays many styles very well and who eshews the plectrum entirely, he insists that one must practice slow to be able to play high speed lines with good accuracy and control and cleanliness, while staying very relaxed, improvising in the moment and on the dime with control of each note even at high speed. Almost an anti-chunking view. And even more importantly… he thinks playing well slow is a critical skill and often overlooked by people looking to play fast. Almost the opposite view here… playing fast does not translate to playing slow well. But playing slow well and buiilding that up does translate to playing fast well. With playing slow well sometimes being more difficult.
Here’s what he says:
Matteo Mancuso stressed the importance of playing slow when attempting to learn fast, virtuosic licks, noting how he still dedicates the first hour of his excercise routine to building up that momentum.
In recent times, the Italian guitarist has been climbing the ladder and earning the reputation as the next guitar virtuoso to watch out for, and players like Steve Vai, Al Di Meola, Joe Bonamassa seem to definitely agree. Although a part of what makes Matteo so impressive is the ability to play lighting-fast runs with immense precision, the key to pulling that off, as he explains to João Vilela in a recent interview, is to start out slow and get all the details right.
Asked how he manages to play so fluently, Matteo said (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):
“I think it’s because I pretty much paid a lot of attention to staying relaxed while I play. I wanted to play, let’s say, complicated things. I remember that one of the first players who kind of introduced me to virtuoso playing was Eric Johnson. I wanted to play some of his lines, and they were pretty fast.”
“But my goal was not to play faster than him. I just wanted to play clean, like Eric Johnson plays. So my goal was to play the thing as best as I can, while staying relaxed. That was a really important thing for me.”
However, in order to build up to that levels of speed, one must begin by playing slow while striving to get all the details right, Matteo explains, noting how he still dedicates the first hour of his practice to slower-paced movements:
“Another thing was also playing slow, especially when I was starting. The first hour of playing is always slow movements, especially my practice routine right now: I always pay attention to practicing slow, and then get to the speed. But it needs to happen with time. Because when you practice slow, you hear a lot of details that you can’t really hear when you play fast.”
“So to get these details at 100%, you need to play really slow at the start. And that’s what I was doing. Of course, the more I was playing, the more I got consistent with that.”
However, Matteo also warns that being able to play fast doesn’t imply mastery over slower licks:
“In reality, if you can play fast, that doesn’t mean you can play slow. Sometimes, when you play slow, it requires a little bit more control, especially when you’re playing legato stuff. When you’re playing slow, sometimes it is harder to do that, rather than just shredding without tempo.”
“Sometimes it’s harder to do like to do a phrase with a slower tempo, but on time rather than do it fast. So that’s why I I’m always trying to study different tempos. People always think that faster means harder, but actually, it isn’t. Sometimes there are the things that are actually harder at a slower tempos.”
Anyway, I just thought that was interesting and echoes what many other top players have said. But maybe with a little more explanation.
What I got from that was:
When he started out, he started slow with slow practice and built up his speed over time. That’s how he got fast. And even after having developed his technique wtih this approach, he still allocates a lot of practice time to playing slow along with the higher speeds and tempos he developed as a result of slow practice as a way to incrementally build up speed. With an emphasis on the importance of being able to hear and pay attention to a note and getting all the details right at a fine level (echoes of Yngwie’s “play with your ears”) and then taking that up to speed over time.
