I want to be as close to “limitless” as possible on the guitar. I’m not too bad with phrasing and creating melodic solos “on the fly” but clean speed is currently my Achilles heel. Also, I love Eric Johnson and Andy Timmons’ playing and how they find ways to tastefully include bursts of blinding speed in their stuff. I want to be able to do that.
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Yep, well understood. In that case, just learn some fingerpicking stuff! 
Something simple like Landslide or Dust in the Wind or Stairway to Heaven is a fine foot in the door. I’ve invested enough time into classical that I’ll never shelve it, but there’s a great world out there that opens up by just traditional fingerpicking. I absolutely don’t knock at all and I don’t mean to make it sound inferior to classical finger picking technique. It’s just “different”
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I’d love to learn landslide actually! I must make that a goal over the next few months
Stairway is easy. Even works fine with pick & fingers.
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I’ll make a video for you sometime. It’s super easy even if someone has never done fingerpicking. Make it a “days” goal, not a “months” goal. You’re psyching yourself out before you’ve even started lol! That said there are some shortcuts in arpeggio type pieces like that and a lot of folks aren’t aware, which makes them work too hard on the chord changes.
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That would be awesome thanks! I’ve had trouble trying to learn to fingerpick in the past. Always something I’ve wanted to be able to do!
Super interesting discussion about classical guitar, its repertoire and comparison with the piano — thanks all!
In particular, I am always impressed at how many people can just sit at a piano and play some very nice- and “complete-” sounding stuff, while it’s very rare to find a guitar player that can play full arrangements that sound good — it’s usually an elite-level skill. And even then, I agree that the error rate feels higher than with other instruments (but then again, I’m highly trained at hearing the nuances of guitar playing, and not so much those of other instruments).
I personally don’t want to play “faster” per se, but I would like to become cleaner in everything I play, I would like things to feel easier and I would like to be more in control of the rhythm and tonal characteristics of all the sounds that I make. For example, I feel like vibrato, bending and the control of pinch harmonics are areas of my playing where I’m not very satisfied and that I should improve significantly.
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Given the course of the discussion, I’ll just drop this here. One of my favorite guitar videos, classical or otherwise.
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There is always room for more music! Segovia made his contributions, and likely raised solo guitar as high as it can go (?), but I concur with you that ensembles are likely a great way to go—it would be great to see new music and approaches.
Amazing!
But an ensemble of the most heavy-metal acoustic instrument (yes, the cello) is also interesting to watch, and the flexibility of the bow is really pretty astonishing, particularly given that it has no moving parts!
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yes this is what I thought - I remember reading this great post online about a retired doctor (surgeon?) who set the goal of playing a famous piece - might have been Asturias - and he had never played before. The teacher was saying it took him (from memory) 4-5 years at 3 hours a day to get it to 75% speed - executed with perfect technique. I just remember this giving me a real insight into the instrument. and the dedication required.
Same!! I don’t really want to play faster - I want to play more accurately.
To preface, there is zero intent of sounding like an internet troll in what I’m about to say. We all learn at a different pace. BUT…That sounds like an extreme case and a very amateur student. I would expect this from someone like a surgeon though because their career is so demanding and learning things like classical guitar THAT late in life with no foundation is indeed an uphill struggle. In college I had to learn at least 3 pieces each semester. Probably twice that amount. But 3 pieces would be played in front of a panel at the end of the semester. So 4 - 5 years for one piece sounds crazy. Also…75% speed executed with perfect technique? I’m sure I know what they mean but we know better than that. A technique only capable of 75% speed is the opposite of technique lol That is common in that world. “If you make any mistakes it means you are going too fast. Slow down!”
For me I felt kinda inadequate not being able to play fast. I don’t want to or feel the need to play fast all the time like Yngwie does, but I’m in the heavy metal - hard rock genre. And slow runs don’t exist there. And then when I discovered Claus Levin’s website and read his blog, I felt very inspired to start working toward picking fast.
I have improved a lot. But it’s only come at a lot of hard work and experimentation. If you don’t have a teacher, you have to experiment a lot.
But I gotta say that even with all the professional teachers that are into selling videos and have forums and books and websites, I believe in the end you have to find your own way. You have to find what works for you and what doesn’t.
I wonder if this is because classical guitar education takes the wrong approach to motor learning.
If players are forbidden to increase their speed until they make zero mistakes, they are likely to get stuck in the “musically correct but mechanically incorrect” world of medium-low speeds. Kind of the equivalent of string-hoppable tempos in pick-style guitar.
There was also another post (can’t find it now), mentioning a student who was still playing Asturias at 75% tempo after 5 years. To me this is another huge red flag, suggesting again a wrong (or incomplete) approach to motor learning.
EDIT: I have no evidence for this besides plausibility, but I wonder if the higher average speed of other instruments happens because the correct motions / techniques are more easily learnable even at slow/medium tempos. But for the pick-style guitar at least, we now have terabytes of evidence that this is unfortunately not the case.
I was thinking something similar recently. I practice drums very differently from how practice guitar now.
When I practiced piano (I don’t play anymore), I practiced that differently too. Piano was very much a start slow and gradually speed up process. Keep in mind though, I never reached a high or even mediocre level on piano. The lessons and how I was being told to practice (super slow), was very boring and I lost interest.
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I can’t play piano at all, but I can play 1 or 2 licks on it way faster and cleaner than I could do them on guitar (really stupid stuff, mind you ). I think on piano it’s just easier to “stumble” upon a speed-capable technique (maybe not the ideal technique for a concert pianist, but definitely good enough for some flashy playing).
By the way, I hope my previous post was not too negative. More positively, I would take the 5-y Asturias student and ask him to try the tune at 100% tempo right here and now (maybe not the whole thing, we can work section by section). I assume at this point he has it memorised well enough to at least try it
There’ll be mistakes, but he’'ll get an idea of what he’s “up against”. If he can’t reach 100% tempo at all, even allowing for slop and mistakes, then there may be a basic mechanical problem with his technique, that we’ll have to figure out and fix.
Once we can do the 100% speed, somewhat slop version, we’ll try 90% tempo. Can we clean it up a bit? if yes great, if not we can try 85%.
We’ll keep proceeding this way, working backwards from the target tempo and then back up to it (assuming that the basic technique used is actually capable of the task).
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Not at all. We all know you’re a positive guy 
They do, and they don’t.
Here’s how they don’t take the wrong approach:
They are very good at actually teaching technique. Meaning, how you move your fingers/hands to actually play the notes. Besides Troy and the teachers he has inspired, we never saw that in the electric guitar world. Not by the masters anyway. Everyone’s idea of “technique” was “Oh play this exercise to learn sweeping. Play this exercise to learn switching strings. And make sure you use small motions”. That’s…not technique at all. There’s no explanation of how to move the pick or hands or arm. Sure, for the intuitive they “stumble” upon good technique while playing said exercises.
Here’s how they do take the wrong approach:
They teach scales, arpeggios and tremolo with the “start slow and use perfect movements” approach. They also emphasize lots of mindless reps (“play scales for the first hour of your practice!!”) in each of these techniques. Ironically, it has to work on some level because there are countless elite classical guitarists (though we don’t know if they got good by being “naughty” and playing faster than their teachers told them to lol). I think any time you get elite level players of ANYTHING, you’re dealing with highly intuitive individuals. They are just going to get good at stuff.
The ones who suffer are the amateurs. With an approach more like Troy’s, they’d probably advance more quickly and not be as mediocre. I think the 5 years of Austurias at 75% speed is pretty common. When I was in those circles I came across plenty of middle aged adults that just seemed like they’d never play the pieces they wanted to. They were either stuck with very simple pieces, played “ok” or they had total slop fests of the more challenging pieces (still nowhere near tempo). I do think overall it’s a very difficult instrument. Amateur pianists can play pretty convincing interpretations of Beethoven sonata’s while classical guitarists at the same level rarely have similar facility.
Regarding the scale playing I think a huge part is repertoire. Scales on any instrument, un-accompanied, sound really boring so not many guitar composers write it into the solo pieces. Piano can accompany itself (left hand lol) and pretty much every violin piece ever (besides the slow ones) have Yngwie level runs in them. So those instruments have to play fast scales because the repertoire demands it. I could be wrong but I’d bet the number of Tuba players who can “shred” scales is pretty low too.
There are plenty of classical guitar pieces with fast arpgeggios and tremolo though, and it follows that most good classical players can play fast arpeggios and tremolo Maybe occasionally during their mandated daily 1 hour of scale practice they look around to see if no one’s watching and they try some scales in the 180 bpm range, but we’ll never know lol
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No not at all, I didn’t interpret anything you said as negative in any way
IMO that’s the crux of it right there, this is a planet that requires relatively few elite classical musicians. With classical guitar you need someone who has that tone, IMO it’s virtually impossible to teach. Then there’s technique, and here’s the trouble: on violin scales and arpeggios stay the same, you learn them and that’s your core technique forever. But with classical guitar when you progress to harder pieces the rules change: that major scale you learned early on won’t work, your pinky finger (or whatever) is busy doing something else. Maybe an open string or a harmonic? Do you have any spare fingers on the right hand? Maybe you can make something work. You have to memorize all that and even if it works it won’t come in handy again, most likely.
Ugh,
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Let’s do a thought experiment: Pretend that we have a time machine, and that we go back 223 years to 1800 AD, to catch (say) a Paganini show. I’m sure that we wouldn’t be disappointed, and that it would be face-meltingly awesome.
Now, consider this: For hundreds of years, violin teachers—technical monsters—have been developing their teaching techniques. So, are they taking a “wrong approach to motor learning?” I suspect that what they’re doing is likely optimal, as they have been experimenting on countless students for hundreds of years.
I would argue that for any of the top-tier classical instruments (voice, violin, cello, piano, possibly more) classical musicians are always the best, and not by a small margin, but by a crushing margin—and they regularly train people up to those levels! So, overall, deviating from their practices makes me suspicious, given their very pragmatic nature and extensive human experimentation.
I suspect that you are right! I bet that most guitarists will play the same piece with different picking depending on the speed. I suspect that this is an inevitable consequence of not really worrying about where every stroke should go in advance, to practice exactly that at slow speeds.
Ah, but show me the proof that this creates superior musicians! Is there any? I suspect it won’t work, the reason being that the classical people don’t do it (?). Now, this might be due to a lack of imagination on the part of the classical musicians, but that would really surprise me.
Lol didn’t you post a video of a classical violinist showing how he practices and IIRC that was an aspect - play at/above the target and work backwards, and measure progress by how (over time) the point and where we start getting cleaner is a higher tempo than previous sessions?
Edit: I may be conflating posts, sorry. Maybe you posted a video by a guy and I found another video (by the same guy) where he did the “work backwards from a high tempo” thing.
Both videos are linked here
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