Does anyone else find themselves doing more practice in the area of technique vs learning songs? I find myself doing this a lot and wondered if there is an optimal balance.
I spend most of my time on exercises.
They are musical so in my mind not different than songs.
I guess ive never understood “learning songs” vs learning technique.
if someone doesnt have technique, how can they play ANY Yngwie or Paul Gilbert “song”??
I spend approximately one hour a day learning songs, not necessarily difficult songs, for example today I was learning Hammer To Fall by Queen and Coma White by Marilyn Manson. I would then spend about 30 minutes practicing picking, legato or tapping - whatever I choose.
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100% me, and only recently stopped doing that. Now I’m learning songs with the techniques that I want to learn in them already and using sections of songs as exercises. I spent months trying to get a Paul Gilbert exercise at 100%, and I accomplished that and only that and it’s a bit silly out of context.
Exercises are great, don’t get me wrong, but that’s all I was doing and it was like training for a sport without actually playing it.
Thats how I feel. Most bands are not Yngwie clones but collaborations of players playing songs so that’s why I asked. Any specific songs you’ve been working on?
Alluvial - Colony, for the intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKmwbbJvStk
Liquid Tension Experiment - Universal Mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEZC0ZJ1AW8
Racer X - Scarified https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPGA3vjMLgE
Scarified is on the top of the list. Universal Mind is really long and boring but has some great sequences.
So the songs you are practicing are technique heavy. Kind of killing 2 birds with 1 stone.
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Yeah that’s the way to go in my opinion: find/write songs containing the techniques you want to study.
I think there’s a huge difference between doing technical drills, even if they’re patterns designed to be melodically appealing, and between actually focusing on impovising a musically interesting lead break.
Generally, if you’re working on a drill, even if its a “musical” pattern, you’re talking a fast, repeated grouping of notes, with a very repetitive structure. Even some of the odder stuff, like some of Yngwie’s 7-note patterns, even if it’s an “unusual” grouping of notes… It’s something designed to be repeated rapidly.
When you’re playing music, though… Repetition can be used to build emphasis or build tension, as can speed, but the focus is on paying off that tension. You’re thinking about note choice, which notes you want to resolve to or sustain on, about how you want to break up the rhythmic flurry of notes, combining different rhythmic groups, occasionally even pausing and including silence, etc.
Technical drills are, idunno… I was a literature major here, so technical drills are like building the vocabulary and sentence structure you see in a David Foster Wallace novel. Practice with a focus on musicality is how you take that dizzying technical aptitude, and write Infinite Jest. They’re definitely not the same thing.
I, too, have been VERY focused on the former lately, probably to the detriment of the latter.
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