Technique changes

Playing Technique
#1

As always when I post here, if this topic has already been covered, please point me to it, lots of material to wade thru here, which is awesome.

Anyway, I’m really interested in how long it takes and how the process in the brain and muscles works for when you make a serious technique change. (like pick grip, and right hand motions, in my case, etc…) I’m sure most people who have tried to make a change have noticed the thing where you practice the hell out of the new technique at home, but it takes a long time for it to cross over in live performance/heat of battle/unconscious mode. And then (hopefully, if you’re lucky) the new stuff starts to seep into the live performance situations. But it seems to take a long time to be able to fundamentally change your technique. And it seems like the more subtle the change, the harder is. It feels like it would almost be easier to learn basic technique on a brand new instrument that subtley change something you’ve been doing for years.

I figure it’s gotta be the same for golfers or baseball pitchers, etc, etc and I also figure this process must have been scientifically looked at somewhere; there’s too much money in sports for it not to have been. Lots of people I’ve talked to or read have general chicken soup advice, like ‘well just keep working on it’, etc, etc, but I’m very curious if there are studies on this, or people with basic, practical understanding of how the changeover process works.

I would like to know how the neural pathways change and just how long that can take, and what the best approach is. mine has been to just focus on the new techniques at home and hope they eventually appear in my performances. but I’ve had mixed results; no matter what, I often revert back to my old technique under pressure.

Anybody?

edited for typos

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#2

Hey!

I’m a decent test case for you, because I just joined up a month or so ago. I’ve been playing about 25 years, upward pickslanting exclusively. In my formative years, practicing anywhere from 1 - 5 hours a day was pretty normal. The past 4 - 5 years I haven’t played nearly as much since I started a family and no longer pursue music for gainful employment.

Anyway, after learning about the principals preached on CtC, I understood right away why certain passages I’d always struggled at, or plateaued in speeds not quite as high as I’d liked. So I’ve been working at learning downward pickslanting the past month or so. I’ve never angled the pick that way in my life, so it’s definitely brand new territory. I won’t say it feels like ‘home’ yet, but it’s natural enough that I’m making what I consider good progress and can even play (sustained) at certain speeds that I used to struggle with after only a measure or 2. And of course I’m talking specifically about patterns that leave string on an upstroke and start the next string on a downstroke. In the old days I was just trying to brute force this, and obviously making inefficient string hops along the way, which were just killing my speed and stamina. Right now I’m not doing hours per day or anything, just 15 - 30 minutes here and there, making sure I’m programming in only ‘good’ movements. If it feels unnatural, I either take a break, re-evaluate, or slow down slightly until it’s a smooth controlled motion with the proper upward escape happening.

Another interesting thing is that I’ve always gripped the pick between the pad of my thumb and index finger (angle pad grid). I thought when I first saw videos of Troy using the more ‘trigger’ style grip that it looked so weird lol! But…the more I started playing with the downward slant, I noticed the pick was comfortably and quite naturally drifting toward the trigger grip. So that’s 2 really significant changes I’ve introduced, over literally a lifetime of doing things ‘some other way’.

I guess we’d have to get a study together for a good answer. For me I’d say inside another 6 months, at my current allocation of working on this, I’ll have this feeling as natural as my technique I’d used for the bulk of my playing career.

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#3

I’m at about month 5/6 since finding my first fast/effortless motion (i.e. 10nps and up) and am just feeling like it’s starting to gel. Anecdotally, I’d say 6 months to start making a new technique an unconscious ‘go-to’. The limiting factor in live performance at this stage (for me anyway) is a relatively limited vocabulary (i.e. everything sounds the same…or suspiciously similar) when hitting the fast runs. I’m having fun filling out that vocabulary now and I anticipate this taking another year or so. I hope this helps somehow.

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#4

There is a term used in research on motor learning and memory called “interference” used to describe how certain existing skills can affect your ability to learn new similar ones (and vice versa, the new skills can “interfere” with the old ones as well).

See this comment from Troy — I don’t think we really have strong data on exactly how this works for e.g. learning guitar technique, but practically, may be helpful just knowing that it’s indeed a real thing that happens! And if you can focus on one specific motion, say, and get a tight feedback loop by identifying when you’re doing it correctly or not, that may make the process a bit faster.

This discussion has some good examples of players here who have described making pretty big changes in their techniques:

A couple other topics, more generally on the process of trial and error learning for technique, that may be of interest as well:

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