Ahhh sorry Yaakov, I was directing that line at Tommo himself repeating it but not heeding his own advice! I’m no good player, people in glass houses and all. Sorry if you took that the wrong way, not my intention.
My bad. Reflex reaction on my part. But Tommo might be after you now;)
In agreement with everyone else here - obssessing over minutiae or a single phrase or exercise is probably a great way to get some quick short term gains in followed by beating the absolute crap out of a dead horse.
Play the stuff you actually want to learn and become good at in order to get there - if it’s vastly out of reach, maybe some exercises can help you gain the technical facility (left hand coordination/flexibility/finger independence, hand synchronization, etc.) but it’s all just a means to an end to get you playing actual music! Don’t fall into the trap of endlessly practicing little snippets of songs licks obsessively unless that’s really what you want to be playing all the time I guess.
I’ve been playing for a little over 20 years now and I can learn a new phrase and get it speedy in a few minutes, but I find if I keep playing it over and over again I get to a point where it starts to regress. That’s usually the point where past me would get frustrated and confused as to why I’m getting worse at something BECAUSE I’m practicing it 
and then try and hammer through until it feels good again. Now I’ve learned to back off and come back to it later.
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N = 178
(you had to be there… at the beginning of the thread, I mean;)
But I hear you, @Philausopher. I don’t begrudge anyone whatever’s working for him/her.
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haha - it is hard when you have something you want to learn that you have to force yourself to take a break from it! I’ve got some ideas for another Yngwie lick I can practice as well.
Also (in line with the try someting very different for different results) I am actually going to back to trying to economy pick this lick - yikes! I know that is how Yngwie plays it - swipes the B to E string - so am practising that too. Thanks for response!
Or you pound on it until you have made about as much progress as you can. Obviously analyzing it and trying to rectify any problems. Sloppiness, picking, etc.
Then move on to something else. Having made note of your maximum speed or whatever you’re seeking on the previous exercise you then go back to it every few days and work it a little bit. It shouldn’t take long to get back up to top speed and then you work on trying to improve it for a little bit. Often times that alone will be enough to improve things. And then you also have worked on other stuff, perhaps improving your picking technique, finger height, etc and that may also lead to improvement with the original exercise.
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Well I’ve hit Yngwie’s speed. Had to change technique a little to get that last 10%. More elbow and less finger movement. Anyway I’ve noticed I still get one or two notes not as perfect as Yngwie (out of the 56 in the sequence). His accuracy is so hard to match!
That’s awesome, @Interestedoz! Hope you’ll soundslice it.
Just curious - if you had to put a % on it, how much of your practice time have you devoted to this Yngwie piece these last 6 months or so?
Hey @Yaakov, I think at some point you could make a summary of your takeaways from this gigantic thread - did you apply any of the ideas in your own practice, and did you get something out of it? 
EDIT: If you want, that is
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Actually, I often do that for my own benefit (this forum isn’t just entertainment for me; square that I am, I take notes;)
Looking it all through, I’d just say again that discovering an entire motion (e.g. single-escape picking vs various forms of double-escape), as revolutionary for one’s playing as it can be, is only part of what takes one’s overall skill level forward.
@Interestedoz and @Twangsta have done, imo, a great job of providing detail for something I suspected - a hypothesis. Namely, while you need to practice challenging licks and such by carefully analyzing and experimenting with what your hands are doing, there’s another key ingredient.
That ingredient is massive repetition of ‘one thing’ (usually something small, like a lick). That, for me, has been the takeaway.
What’s interesting is that there are some who say they never did such a thing (that’s my impression from Troy’s remarks about his own playing, for example), and still achieved an impressive degree of skill on guitar. I don’t disbelieve that. But I personally have not found that frequently changing the lick/riff/whatever is helpful; for me, and seemingly for others, it’s important to invest some major time in that ‘one thing.’
(And I wonder if those ‘not-one-thing’ people who claim to get bored, need to change things up, want to keep it fun so they jump around in their practice, etc. etc… are in fact doing the ‘one-thing’ thing more than realize. I honestly don’t know. But that’s irrelevant for me, I’d say.)
If I’m right about this - for me, that could be as big as discovering single-escape. Maybe bigger.
Now in truth, I can’t say all that I have about ‘one-thing’ with utter conviction yet - because I haven’t made the investment nor achieved the results that @Interestedoz or @Twangsta did. But they clearly have - and that inspires me to consider doing likewise.
Am I willing to toss the highly worked-out practice schedule (I’m on my 24th version right now) and yoke myself to the grindstone for a period of several months with that one-thing - and promise to quit second guessing myself until I cross at least that temporal finish line…??
That’s the question for me right now.
I’m stating the obvious, sorry 
- One lick likely isn’t one thing, it’s a bunch of things tied together. For an insane Yngwie like @Twangsta 's badass playing, it’s not small: fast tremelo picking, switching strings, minimal fretting hand effort, … etc. But by continually focusing on a single lick, you might feel more laser-focused on those areas, because your mind can get deep into the sound and feel that you want – and perhaps that’s the important thing.
Concert pianists have this challenge all the time. They have to learn insane amounts of repertoire efficiently and repeat it perfectly to the audience, along with the inspiration they have within the confines of the piano score. One thing that they continually advise is to have a full realization of the sound they want away from the instrument, and really pay attention to the sounds they’re making while practicing, and continually experimenting to get closer to what they’re looking for. Mechanical repetition is largely a waste of time. So sticking with one lick perhaps lets you cultivate that attention and awareness; on the other hand, you could likely work on more than one at a time. Not too many, because that could dilute your concentration.
You didn’t used to tease the brainy kid who sat in the front row, right?..
At the risk of being laughed at, here’s a recent, fairly representative version:
Warm up (2%)
Fretboard mastery (4%)
Pickslanting (11%)
• tremolo
• right hand
• left hand
Chord changes (12%)
• four-chord progressions [9%]
• one particular song [3%]
Play throughs (36%)
• rhythm
• lead
• fingerstyle
Deliberate practice (13%)
• single-note [3%]
• fingerstyle [6%]
• technique (vibrato, muting) [4%]
Proto-improv (15%)
• find the melody [1%]
• ear (interval) training [1%]
• finger rolls [1%]
• four arps in two shapes each [6%]
• two min pents scales, two shapes each [6%]
Learn new songs/solos (7%)
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@Yaakov if it works for you, then do it up! I’ve never done anything like that, at least not written down anywhere. I’m about to stream a practice if you’re bored, too.
Is this all one session? If so, what’s a typical total time that this takes you? Also, just checking, are the percentages tongue-in-cheek? You have a lovely sense of humor but you’re also clearly very structure oriented
EDIT: and please believe me when I say with all sincerity that I’m no way mocking this. I want to help, trust me! What I’m diplomatically trying to say that IMO this practice routine just has too much in it. It isn’t that it’s not good stuff to be practicing, it’s just…too much to keep on a road map all at once. If I had a routine like that, I’d never feel like I was accomplishing anything.
There was a time, many years ago when I was a young man, when I practiced 5 hours per day. I very much had a routine - x minutes for this thing, x minutes for that. I just heard Segovia practiced 5 hours per day so I thought at minimum I should do the same. It was frustrating because it felt like I was getting nowhere, or worse, just ‘taking up the time’ to fulfill my schedule. I cut things way back to 2.5 hours and made things much less rigid. I immediately felt like I was accomplishing more. Anyway, more anecdotal findings Good luck with everything! I can tell you’re very motivated to learn!
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As others have said, its up to you to decide what works for you, but given your posts - I don’t think you are convinced. I agree that this seems jam packed. What intrigues me is that you often state that you think that ‘massive reps’ is important, yet your practice schedule does not contain that much ‘direct’ repetition at all - unless I’m misunderstanding it. From what I understand, the primary benefit of the ‘random/varied’ practice approach is that the act of recalling the task is what helps find, refine and burn in progress - cycling through a small handful of technical tasks gives you the variety and repetition. This makes it managable and very scalable for varying practice times.
Also, my question for you would be - how much of the above are you reasonably capable/adept at already? Is there anything that you can relegate to a lower priority and practice maybe a couple of times a week instead of every time? This would give you more time for focused but relaxed practice on the bigger issues at play.
TLDR: your posts/threads seem to ping-pong between 2 extremes (one thing vs a billion). A healthy balance of variety/repetition and focused/experimental practice might produce better, more consistent results.
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Agreed x 100! I can typically get in 3 hours, to answer your question. But yeah, it’s overload; I’m progressing at a snail’s pace. (And yes, those are percentages of time, and they’re pretty accurate.)
Guilty as charged. I posted this thread largely because I’m trying to convince myself to drop this little-of-everything approach. Thankfully, lots of help towards that end - thanks, all!
As an extremist myself, I’d caution that the best approach often lies in the middle. Just because ‘little-of-everything’ didn’t work out for you, it doesn’t mean that ‘only one thing lots of times’ is the answer either I’d say a common thread of awesome musicians is that they play an awful lot of what they enjoy playing. They are (often) highly intuitive individuals that gravitate towards efficient techniques (i.e. “It feels difficult? Eff it…I’ll do it some other way. Ah that’s easy, I’ll do that”). That means they probably did massive repetitions of lots of things and did this correctly many many times. Because lets face it, I’m living proof that doing something wrong a million times does not magically make perfect technique at some future date If I could offer you one piece of advice, I’d say ease up a bit and have fun UNLESS a super strict schedule is fun for you. Then, by all means, keep doing and enjoy yourself 
Very much agree…
I think that its the understanding the what “little” is thats the issue rather than the approach. This is something that has come up multiple times in your threads if I recall correctly and I don’t think that you have every really quantified - not that it would be wrong or right, but it would give a sense of where along the spectrum you are, in comparison to others . As a very crap example of assumption - your "little is my “miniscule” and your “massive” is my “moderate”…