In one way or another this method is fairly common.
I was taught to do something very similar but by increasing the metronome count by 5bpms rather than 3 notches up a mechanical metronome (in hindsight, it’s probably less boring doing it by 3 notches).
This seems to be very similar to what top violinists or pianists do. It helps build muscle memory to learn a passage and I think it’s complementary to the CtC method and content for guitar.
I’m still not convinced about the “slowly increasing bpms approach”.
And I am a guy that, as a kid, did it for 2-3 years, 2-3 hours a day. With the metronome I always remained stuck at 120bpm 16th notes or so.
On the other hand, I also remember doing some “procrastination” where I just switched off the metronome and played some random fast licks. Ironically, that was probably the only useful part of my practice, and the reason I developed some speed.
One very obvious problem (in hindsight), is that even if you were to reach your goal, say 180bpm 16th notes, you’d be mentally and physically exhausted by then.
For example, suppose we started at 100bpm, increased 5bpm at a time, and did 5 repetitions per tempo. That’s 80-85 repetitions of the same lick. Can one really play the same thing 80 times and remain focused on tone, rhythm, phrasing etc.? Methinks no.
My current approach is to basically work with only 3 tempos
Random example:
Slow = no metronome, whatever works for memorization. Fast = 180bpm, Medium fast =130~150 bpms
I wonder if it makes sense to say like this: with clarinet (perhaps other horns/monophonic instruments), whether you play the lick fast or slow, the mechanics are essentially the same. It’s more an issue of coordination and relaxation to make the faster speed go. If so, then the metronome-creep method would work. (Unlike string-hopping on guitar, which is clearly a case of “largo-only mechanics” which must be abandoned)…??
I can’t be the be-all and end-all that is purported to be but there has to be some merit to it.
I know guitar has its own mechanics but being in an orchestra is a different gig altogether. Playing to the right tempo is the difference between having a job or not, so there’s value in metronome-based training.
If complemented with another type of intuitive training just like you mention this must be very good.
I am being provocative but I am still not convinced - this does not mean that I can’t be convinced 
I do concede that Peter Hadcock’s approach is potentially a little less boring and more nuanced than the “5bpm at a time” thing. Also, if I understand it correctly it involves a lot of playing at or around the target tempo, which I have the feeling is a good thing. And let’s face it, he is a much more accomplished musician than me! So I may actually give this a shot at some point
Still, my basic questions are:
Again, this is just to be provocative and hopefully understand more about these practice methods. Are they actually good? Or do people think they are good just because of tradition, and we could learn things much better / faster with other methods?
And finally, this is all coming from a guy that did loads of metronome
Sorry, just saw this after I posted
Totally, tempo / rhythm is king and the metronome can be useful to learn to follow the correct tempo! I guess I am asking more about how to use the metronome. At the end of the day, we need to play the piece at 160bpm 16th notes (or whatever the goal is). We definitely want to lock-in with the beat at 160bpm, we want to play clean, we want to sound beautiful and musical. How do we get there?
Hadcock’s is a two-part approach. The first gets you to hit the target tempo of 160 just once, and it looks like a guy scaling a climbing wall. You reach high with your hand - it’s a stretch, but you can barely do it - and now with that hand-hold you can bring your foot up higher than you would have been able to without the higher hand position. In other words, ‘grab’ a higher tempo once, and now your comfortable, lower tempo can be a little higher, too.
As for part two… So you’re there at 160 - but you made it just once. The multiple-reps-lower/once-higher thing builds you up to stability at the higher tempo.
Does that answer your question? (I’m wondering, not telling;) Yes, in concert, it’ll be once at 160 - but you need it to be a stable, guaranteed 160, and that’s what all the ‘rock climbing’ is for.
Me personally, I feel like that’s worth experimenting with.
But is he actually advocating the entire progression in one session, or is it a progression to pursue over the course of several sessions, based on degree of satisfaction with the previous session? That is, is he actually advocating starting at square one every session, or does the starting point change after mastery of the lower tempos is achieved? You could even revisit the lower tempos on a schedule that doesn’t require you to do so every day. For example, you could allow for a new start point every time a certain level of self-assessment is satisfied, but still plan a “soup to nuts” review once every week, or 30 days, or 90 days, or what have you.
If you’re not forced to start at square one every session, I can certainly see how there would be benefit in refining accuracy, timing, dynamics etc. through a progression of tempos assuming an efficient technique has already been discovered (“start with speed”) and informs any lower tempo practice.
But if you instead do start at square one every session, I imagine that might cause you to lose focus and become fatigued (physically, mentally, or both) before you arrive at the tempos you have yet to master.
Interesting, thanks for sharing your three basic steps. Is this the basic structure of your learning process as a whole or how you structure the single practice session?
According to your three steps, my way has always been 1.) - 3.) -> working up (in 5 bpm steps, try to play it five times in a row perfectly) to 2.)
Your explanations make a lot of sense though. I practice that one solo with unusual fingering to reach 220 in triplets. My step 2.) starts at 170, so if I would nail every level first take (which basically never happens), I’ve played a chunk 45 times before I even hit 220… multiplied by infinity to cover all chunks and all the mistakes in between.
I think I’ll try to switch to your approach for some time. But gazillion hours of shred instructional material I’ve consumed in the last 20 years make it really hard to overcome the “work your way up”-strategy.
Nothing wrong with being thought-provoking!
I’ve had time to think. And cheat. I’ve reached out to friends who have some level music education and play different instruments and they have shed some light on this for me.
This caught my attention. “If it’s beyond my skills, I need to work on it very slowly on the metronome for rhythmic purposes but I’ll have to jump back and forth between real tempo and slow tempo to absorb the piece, and even then, I might need months to develop those skills”.
But here comes the good part. “When I endlessly work on slower speed is to improve my articulation and dynamics. Slowing down a paced section allows me the luxury of zooming in on details that I can’t possibly work on while playing fast”.
He was unambiguous: “By the time we work with the metronome, we can already play at the target tempo. It’s the accents, dynamics and articulation we work on”.
The guy who plays guitar says he does the “increase-by-5” quite often, even though he can play Steve Vai songs. Why? He wasn’t as eloquent but he reckoned “it just helps me nail it”.
So, @tommo, I’m like you. I’m actually worse. I’m a bedroom player, I don’t have that background and I find metronome-trining as mind-numbing as it gets. But others see the point of it.
Ultimately, it’s not about the speed according to them, but that’s only 3 people sharing their thoughts with a friend about their own unique experience.
This is where I think there may be a distinction between electric guitar and classical music. The latter musicians spend a LOT of time on the finer details of musicality (intonation, dynamics, articulation, etc.). Not to say these things mean nothing in rock/other popular music, but its seems that a guy in a rock band taking these things as far as, say, a violinist in your local orchestra would border on obsessive.
Are dudes with Strats using metronomes to make their music beautiful? Not saying that would be wrong or crazy. But it doesn’t strike me as a popular approach.
Is that why
…?
If you are learning (say) clarinet your mechanics will be perfect because your conservatory-trained teacher will be pounding you on the head if they’re not. From what I can tell there is every other instrument (teacher), and then there is guitar, that’s self-taught, with all of the associated catastrophes. (Well, I’m sure that the Spaniards are great at teaching flamenco and classical guitar.) Being self-taught is perfectly fine for some types of music (punk, etc.), but it’s tough for anything really demanding, but at least we have the beautiful light of plectrum-based guitar, CtC.
The interesting question is if students at GIT or Berklee can get reliably get turned into shredders over a few years, I don’t know.
Concert pianist Ruth Slenczynska had a special-order mechanical metronome that moved 1bpm, if I recall. Today we are spoiled rotten with metronome apps on iPhones, but great pianists often do bump 1bpm. I believe that their practice is indeed extremely boring. I recall attending a master class with John Nakamatsu and he was explaining his practice regimen, it was something like, “I move my hand around for a few minutes and decide exactly how I want it for when I hit the chord, then I get up and walk around my piano a few times, then I sit down and…” Of course this goes on all day. I would not have the attention span to be a concert pianist, that is for sure.
I wonder how much of this is really useful, and how much is just due to traditional thinking of the form “you have to do a lot of boring stuff to get good” or the more modern “no pain no gain”
We also have to be careful that great performers are not always the same as great educators and / or good scientists of motor learning. They may think that they got good by doing X, while in reality it was Y and just a bit of X.
Just to be provocative once more, it could be that out of the 8 hours of practice they did really useful stuff only for 1 or 2 of them.
But you are perfectly right that other instruments have well-established techniques, so whatever you do with them in your practice your probability of success will probably be higher than “self-taught shred guitar”.
Again I’m not sure this is true if we look at the “elite” players. Think of the original G3 formation:
Or also modern players like Lari Basilio, Rick Graham, Tom Quayle, Andy Wood, Molly Tuttle etc.
Every single note they play is shaped to perfection. Or more poetically, “they make the guitar sing”. That can only be achieved by paying great attention to the details you mention (either consciously or just by “using their ears” as they play and practice).
I think this method is more in line with my current “beliefs” i.e., that quality is much more important than quantity.
Having a clear idea of exactly what you would like to hear, trying it, listening carefully, assessing what needs to be changed etc. seems the optimal way to proceed to get really good.
It involves much less playing than the mindless metronome reps, but I think it is much more difficult yet rewarding.
That being said… do I do this all the time? No because it requires high levels of concentration that I can’t reach that often. I wish I could though
I think this makes a lot more sense when you consider this is specific to practicing on a clarinet, not a guitar.
On a clarinet, you don’t have the mechanical challenge of getting the pick over the string to contend with. Your mechanic at a slow speed is identical to your mechanic at a fast speed, and the only limits here are how fast you can move your fingers and blow (heh). On a guitar, it’s as much a physical challenge as anything else, and mechanics that work just fine at slow speeds can’t be done fast enough to work at higher tempos. “Starting with speed” is basically a way to force you to learn/adapt to one of the techniques that CAN be done at speed, since alternatives quickly become impossibl.
i still think starting slow/ascending can be useful for things like hand coordination and developing a sense of timing and feel and getting in the pocket. As a guy who spent long hours gradually increasing metronome speed in his dorm room in college, though, I’ve come around to the belief that it’s not a very effective way of building alternate picking speed on a guitar (I still can see it being useful for something like legato, when you’re working on smoothing out and evening out your playing technique, and some of the mechanical challenges present in picking don’t exist).
I’d argue that this is what makes the elite players elite - not their technique (if I’ve learned anything from YouTube, it’s that really fast technique is not really all that rare anymore, or at least is common enough thay there are a whole bunch of guys in their bedrooms who can blaze through scale runs), but in their touch on the guitar, the way they phrase and accentuate lines, their note choice, and their compositional ability. I think the thing that seperates the aforementioned youtube bedroom shredders from the guys who do this for a living and, at least in a pre-Covid world, could at least break even on touring, is what you describe as their ability to “make the guitar sing.”
Ironically, after a little more than a year at CtC, and after a period where I haven’t been THAT diciplined about practicing due to the insanity in the world around us cutting into practice time, I think I may have gotten pretty close to the point where I don’t really see my ability to alternate pick as a limiting factor for me. Increasingly, I’m finding it’s things like my abilty to play a fast line and resolve keeping it wntirely in the pocket, or finding interesting/melodic things to say on the guitar while using speed as an accent. I’m finding that the best way to practice this stuff is actually to slow down and spend more time thinking about quarter note runs or really making sure my vibrato is in sync or playing fast lines comfortably inside my comfort level buy really focusing on nailing the downbeats and making sure I’m not rushing the beat, etc, and really thinking about some of those things that help a guitar melody line or solo “breathe” and “speak.”
The pianists have a pipeline where they suck in normal people in and spew out some very impressive players, where the students only need do what they’re told. I think that the teachers are so pragmatic that they would take any shortcut to get students ahead faster, and they’ve been working on this keyboard thing for hundreds of years, where their instructional material is untouchable. I’m not sure if I suggest this or not, but if there is a master class near you with a famous pianist, cellist, or violinist, possibly go and see (a) just what should a 7 year old sound like, and (b) what is wrong with their rendition of the piece? Once seen, it cannot be unseen, and then walking into Guitar Center is just never the same again! 
Wow, that escalated quickly. We have to think about regular performers who get ahead through average workouts.
The giants you’ve mentioned are virtuosos whose practice routine might help develop their talent but we will never be on their level even if we practised as much as they do. (In saying that, Steve Vai’s 10-hour workout routine is as exhausting and mind-numbing as it gets…).
The average guitarist is good enough to play a lot of fast solos but will not last in a studio session, whereas most other musicians hold their own pretty well in session. There has to be a lesson to be learnt.
I’m sure this community has cracked the code on certain mechanics -and some of the lessons we have learnt go against conventional wisdom-, but we have to be careful not to discard the entire corpus of music training that came before just because we have figured some mechanics specific to our instrument.
Ops, sorry it was not my intention to confuse things by mentioning the G3 members. It was a little digression where I wanted to show that it is possible, in rock music, to pay as much attention to detail as in classical (phrasing, dynamics, etc.).
Back on topic:
Of course! I hope I was not going too far with my provocations!
I certainly don’t want to discount all the “traditional” practice methods, and that is certainly not the intention of CTC, sorry if I gave that impression. You and others on this thread have given very good arguments in favour of certain types of metronome practice.
…because indeed there is not a single way to use the metronome!
I should clarify that I am also not against metronome practice
But looking back at my hours with the metronome, I thought I was working on “X” but really i was working on “Y”, or more pessimistically, I was just wasting good chunks of my practice time.
So… I just think we should question all the practice methods critically (no matter how rooted they are in tradition), and figure out what each of them is good for. Most of us are willing to work hard on the instrument, so it’d be good to put these efforts in the right direction.
Do I have the answers? Unfortunately not, at the moment I have mostly questions 
I take your point, and for sure it’s true that elite players are shaping every note to perfection, as you put it. What I mean to say is that while the metronome can be used to work on exquisite musicality, that’s often (usually?) happening at slow tempos. That’s using the metronome to keep things slow so you can focus intensely on all the finer points.
But Hadcock is talking about using the metronome to speed up - which is what most of us here are trying to do when we play with a click. That’s the kind of metronome use I’m trying to figure out.
I think it’s worth mentioning them tangentally, though, for the point tommo seems to be making here - those three guys are notable not JUST for their technique, which is world-class but also it’s become far more common to find bedroom shredders who are capable of playing legato runs like Satch or picked runs like Vai, and there are a couple members here who have posted absolutely amazing Eric Johnson covers, or improvised solos in his style. Increasingly, that raw level of technique is becming pretty attainable.
It’s more their touch on the guitar, their phrasing, the solidity and control when they fret a note even at tempo, their vibrato, and their composition, that makes (ignoring the fact his technique is just better than mine, anyway, lol) Joe Satriani fill arenas, while I’m stoked to get a couple thousand youtube views for one of my videos I cut in my bedroom.
That stuff absolutely matters, and has very little to do with pure “playing notes fast” technique.