Time to master a difficult piece/Advice for improvement? - (Perpetual Burn)

General Music Discussion
#1

Hey all,

I’ve been working on a few pieces the last 2-3 months, one of them is Perpetual Burn by Jason Becker. I’ve got each individual part of the song pretty well down, although after the main solo section it gets a bit rough. I’ve included a recording up through that part with plenty of mistakes/double picking etc that seem to happen as I tense up.

Mastering a small handful of difficult pieces for playthroughs is a goal of mine for this year, and has definitely been more difficult than I anticipated, I think due to it being something new and it requiring far more learning of smaller sub-techniques that perhaps I’ve overlooked - maybe I can alternate pick certain patterns but others need cleaning up, maybe I can alternate pick and sweep well, but transitioning between them smoothly is hard - working on a piece like this makes that obvious.

On top of this, I think it’s fairly common to tense up when filming yourself play a pre-established piece, which often will lead to fatiguing much faster if you don’t stay aware of when that’s happening, and if you make a mistake or even almost make a mistake, it can really throw you off.

Wondering what others experiences have been with mastering difficult pieces here, and if it’s something that becomes significantly easier over time (I imagine watching Dean Lamb’s Dean Attempts to Learn and Justin Hombach’s 24 hour playthroughs that it gets more consistent as you grow your repertoire of licks so that even if you aren’t exact you have a close substitute you can apply to the song that most people won’t notice).

Any advice for getting better at picking up a piece, and any perspective on how much time it tends to take to master a song is welcome.

Need some sweeping advice!
Does the pick orientation dictate sweep path?
#2

With the way I approach covering Stochelo’s songs or some of his versions of gypsy jazz songs is I set a goal. I know I can play his stuff at around 70% perfectly clean. I use this as my baseline when trying to complete the entire piece by ear. Or by burning it in by practicing each page of the tablature 10 times, next page 10 times, etc until the end, and do this until I have it all memorized. I chop up the song in audacity and adjust tempo on the entire piece by like 50% at first so its nice and slow. copy paste each pages audio section 10 times into one huge hour long track(this is some work sucks but it really works), and turn the pdf page with my foot on the up arrow on the laptop with a tv setup vertically as hdmi output while this slow track plays. Its crazy how fast you can learn a song this way. I can learn a song in about a week or two weeks with this method.

The reason I have it at 70% speed is because I am not competent on some of the technique in certain zones so I have to dial back. I just attribute this to not having Sinti genetics in my wrist, so as I keep playing these pieces throughout my life I imagine I will get faster and faster. It just takes time, and consistency, and probably learning the language more by improvising, because if you know the licks well enough to improvise freely well then speed wouldn’t feel so tough. This is something that I struggle with big time as my ear sucks!

Like Stochelos version of Bossa Dorado I had started at like 70% and I could probably do it almost clean around 85-90% speed now. This was the first song I had learned all the way through. But I know this song like the back of my hand.

Another thing is I make at least an effort to play through every solo I know each day so I don’t forget them as well as know that it will speed them up eventually.

You could also theoretically micro speed things up depending on how kooky you are utilizing audacity’s adjust tempo. Like a powerlifter will micro adjust his weights over a period of like a year. Just microadjust the tempo over a very long period, similar to a 5x3x1 workout system. In my mind this would work, but it also means you need to have the solo burned in so far it’s like walking.

#3

Yeah I think what you’re doing, a 100% honest performance (with no backing tracking or accompaniment) of a really difficult piece, with a camera in your face, no editing, is one of the hardest things to do. It reminds me of what classical guitarists do when they perform. I wish I had some advice because I was classically trained and not once did I ever give a flawless performance lol! It didn’t matter if it was a simple Sor etude or a complicated Barrios piece. I could play each section flawlessly, but never the whole thing. So whatever I was doing was either plain wrong or I just don’t have what it takes. Probably some combination of both haha!

Anyway, killer playing as always. Sorry I have no advice, so instead I offer you my encouragement :slight_smile:

Side note, you’re one the best (the best???) sweepers on the forum. I’d love for you to make a thread and post some general tips, particularly on muting/silencing strings. Thanks to CtC I’ve got the mechanic and pick angles working just fine. The imperfection in my sweeps is typically hearing open strings while I’m releasing a fretted note, or occasionally not separating notes properly.

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#4

Hey - I’d be glad to go over my sweeping mechanics/muting etc in detail - I’ve actually been working super hard on that since the end of last year trying to get it really precise, although back in highschool when I was first really serious I also managed to get it in pretty solid shape from basically working out of MAB’s No Boundaries/Speed Kills and a bunch of free stuff that George Bellas used to have that’s now behind a rather expensive paywall. I’ve gone so far as to try a handful of different mechanics and use them interchangeably so I’ll go over each of them.

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#5

I will say a couple big things for me have been left hand wrist angle, changing the angle going through the sweep shape so that the fingers can lay more flat and the distance is closed partly by the overall hand rather than just the fingers - and flattening out the right hand so that the palm is covering more space.

On top of that, I’m using all of shoulder/elbow movement, thumb movement and wrist/forearm movement in trying to control the evenness of the picking and I’m pretty much always either anchoring my palm or the index + ring finger to guide string tracking, with little/no forearm contact on the top of the body. I originally used palm but was sloppy, moved to adopt anchoring with my fingers which has some benefits for stability but makes certain things awkward, and I think limits my alternate picking, but not terribly so to where I don’t think I couldn’t learn how to get around those limitations.

One of my big inspirations lately has been Jason Richardson, and I’ve been trying to adopt his approach to not barring any sweep patterns and his somewhat unusual fingerings of different patterns (basically, if you follow the rule of no barring with a couple small exceptions for reach - and never alternating ring and pinky finger whenever possible, you’ll if you have his patterns). If you haven’t seen him play Titan live - check this out - you’ll see what at least appears to be several different anchorings and pickslants, crosspicking etc. smoothly switched between ( and at 2:40ish he hits 21 NPS sweeps so there’s that):

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#6

Thanks for the great tips. Gotta say I’ve never tried avoiding forearm contact with the body and going all elbow/shoulder. I can immediately hear an improvement when trying that. Maybe it forces some moderate palm/side of the picking hand to contact the strings, dampening any would-be-ringers during as the fretting fingers are releasing. I’m pretty sure it’s always the ascending sweeps where I notice the slop in my own playing. I think when descending, by fretting hand usually dampened just fine. I’ll play around with this more.

And sorry again I don’t have any tips for you. I’ve always wondered how the classical musicians (not just guitarists, but pianists or violinists etc) do this stuff so flawlessly. There has to be a very specific way they practice things that people like myself just aren’t doing. Even though I’m classically trained I never got advice other than “Just play everything really slow and don’t make any mistakes when you practice”. It was university level too, though it was just a regular college I attended, not a conservatory. Best of luck with everything and keep up the great work. At least you’re already awesome :metal: :metal: :metal: :metal:

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#7

I hear ya. At times my brain tells me maybe they are cheating using PEDs to help their hands. I mean some of these players do miraculously fast things, for very lengthy periods of time at very fast tempos. I almost put it on the level of like the agility, strength, and speed of an extreme climber. But this is just me trying to always find a way to justify something. People are just different, Steve Vai is right in this regard. Some people are blessed with musical genes passed down from musicians in the bloodline, and some of us arent. But we can make that change, and pass down what we learn.

#8

Yeah I think the combination of flattening out the right hand for more surface area - I try to get it just above the string that’s ringing out as I’m ascending - and using that bigger arm movement in the sweep helps stabilize things and ensure that you’re tracking with the right hand muting. For 3 string sweeps on the high end this can be accomplished with a wrist movement instead, if that works for you. Plant the palm and sweep through with the wrist, letting you mute with the lower edge of the hand as you sweep through, that’s how I handle the rapidly changing direction on the 3 string patterns and I tend to involve a bit of forearm rotation and finger movement there in the escape motion and mess around until something sticks.

#9

Yeah those, I have no issue with. Most “Yngwie” type arpeggios that are USX exclusive on the EBG strings are pretty easy. It’s a drastically different setup than what I think is needed for the ascending/descending 4 and 5 string sweeps, which is in agreement with your above recommendation. I’ve had the most success in those 3 string sweeps with a gentle palm mute and seems to silence any ringing. It was always the MAB type that I struggled with, but I feel like with your suggestion I could probably make it work. Thanks again!

#10

I was just practicing again the songs I know from the rosenberg academy, and 80% to 90% is such a huge jump. At 80% speed of Stochelo, I have to know it by heart, and it feels like I am cruising at 80 mph. At 90% speed it’s like getting close to redline, and if I misstep once it crumbles like a house of cards. Then I just start laughing cause I don’t know how he cruises at the speeds he plays at sometimes. It is truly amazing!

I use this webpage often or the app. https://app.musicspeedchanger.com/

#11

Hey there! I’ve studied piano and read a lot about this, and have tried them out for my own recitals. I put some points down at https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/o0m8iq/question_how_do_i_not_panic_when_playing_infront/

There are specific practice things you can do for performance of classical pieces, which have different demands from improv and rock, but prob a lot of things can be carried over. Perhaps material for another thread?

Cheers, jz

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#12

Some interesting advice there thanks!

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#13

Nice post @jzohrab. I guess that’s the stuff I feel like I spent a good deal of time on and sort of solved. When I studied classical guitar, I didn’t even realize I had performance anxiety until my first recital lol! I’d played plenty of shows in a rock band context (not the video game) and was always fine. There is something very unnerving about being the only person in the room making a sound, with everyone’s eyes and ears glued to you. That got better and better as the years went by. This discussion is all quite relevant to the thread topic.

I think what I’d like is a more general “how to practice” thread, and that is a little different than the intent of this thread, at least I think. The classical pieces I played, never once, even in private, did I ever play an entire piece flawlessly. It could even be a ‘simple’ (there is nothing in classical guitar that is simple lol) arpeggio etude. Granted it wouldn’t be atrocious, just a random note that wasn’t fretting cleanly in measure 22, or a misplaced rest stroke in measure 36 etc etc etc. I could target the problem section and play it flawlessly over and over, but put the whole thing together and strange random errors would happen. I never solved this. It’s possible I just have a learning disability :slight_smile: I definitely put in the time. Hours and hours each day as a music major, but clearly something was wrong. At this point its all a hobby for me. I’m just interested in what was missing. The improvement I’ve seen in my picking thanks to CtC shows me just how important it is to do things correctly. Years of practice jamming a square peg into a round hole don’t help.

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#14

Yeah that’s really more pertinent, if anything playing live in a band is less of a concern - they can adjust to my mistakes or slow down the tempo a bit etc. Being solo and hitting really reducing error frequency to as small as possible over time seems difficult, and exponentially difficult the closer to perfect your performance is. I think a big part of that is using techniques that give you the widest possible margin of error to get out the notes you’re playing and also finding the most comfortable transitions between parts.
But this is difficult and to some extent personal to how you move almost, I look at Christian Meunzner as an example, he’s altered his playing style somewhat (I think more tapping heavy) to accomodate his issudes with focal dystonia - but that could apply more generally.

There are perhaps some movements where consistency from player to player is different for different techniques, not sure. Perhaps overall consistency is more biology based than we realize as well, certainly Itzhak Perlman or some other master classical performer would be an extreme outlier vs someone who mostly manages to play covers at a bar.

#15

I just dont know how these two guys do it well three now that i think about it. Theres one more guy that I know but I forgot his name. Hes a recent flamenco player.

#16

Grisha is a freaking MACHINE. I wish more people knew about him. The heir of Paco IMO.

#17

Did you see the tech at 3:17, beyond him, Grisha, I can only think of maybe Shawn Lane doing this or maybe perhaps Van Halen did it to. But the difference here is this guy is using his finger instead of a pick.

I don’t know what it is about Yamandu, but he is like on a whole 'nother level of musicianship compared to alot of players. Untouchable almost.

#18

Friend of mine who studied classical guitar at one point mentioned this technique showing up - he described it as ‘tracing out harmonics with the right hand’, hadn’t seen it in action until that clip.

#19

Yeah they are pretty common in classical repertoire. I have used them in several pieces. Artificial harmonics is what I’ve always heard them being called.

Lenny Breau combined them with pull offs and took them further than anyone I have heard.

#20

I know those simply as artificial harmonics. I’m surprised to see them considered rare. I’ve seen them pretty widespread since the 80’s, both tapped and picked. If you google artificial harmonics, you’ll get plenty of links to instructional videos and articles. NB: Sometimes pinch harmonics are also called artificial harmonics, which can be confusing.