Warning: Practicing unplugged can be highly detrimental

Playing Technique
#1

So for the past 2 months I’ve been getting the Pepsi Lick up to Troy and Vinnie’s speed. I seem to have capped around 140-150 BPM depending on the day at its absolute peak.

I’ve been running the sequence non-stop while watching YouTube or the seminars at night and just today I plugged in for the first time in a long while. What I found was a lot of extraneous string noise and a more “heavy-handed” approach to my technique than I remember.

My theory is that somehow, the brain subconsciously desires to hear the notes loud and clear while playing unplugged, forcing you to use more picking hand/fretting hand strength to produce a clear tone. When you plug in, the results are less-than-desirable - ringing strings, clunkiness.

Just a fair warning to always practice the way you to intend to perform, whether that be guitar or amp choice, the amount of repetitions you perform for a phrase (volume), etc. Don’t be like me lol! After an hour or so of practice things seem to be ironing out and my brain appears to be reevaluating the required pick depth. All of these tiny adjustments are unconscious - I’m not choosing to make them per se - but it’s so significant that I can’t doubt it. The human brain is truly weird!

3 Likes
#2

I think you definitely need to practice both plugged and unplugged. And for the reasons you mentioned… string noise, inconsistent dynamics, etc.

However… the ‘hitting-heavy’ isn’t always a bad thing for electric. MAB developed his lighting speed and clarity almost entirely with his guitar unplugged when he was a kid. He said he was trying to get it as loud as possible without an amp.

Just as a an observation, I noticed that you can kinda sorta group pickers in to two broad picking dynamics categories. 1) light & heavy.

  1. Light might include players like Yngvie, R. Graham, Marshal Harrison, etc. Ones who use a lot of gentle, finesse, economy-geared picking.

  2. Heavy might include MAB, Eric Johnson, Troy, etc.

I was a 1, and have switched to a 2. I go back and forth to acoustic, electric, gain, no-gain. It feels like a pretty seamless switch.

Also, heavy hitters can (and usually do) have a super-relaxed form.

7 Likes
#3

I’ve had, within limits, the opposite experience.

Playing plugged in and with gain is absolutely critical for ensuring your MUTING is in order, no doubt.

But, practicing unplugged was really the point where I began to get my legato in shape, and keeping it smooth, loose, and dynamically even. And, I think there’s a lot of truth to that with picking as well, where you can kind of compensate for uneven technique from the way distortion compresses everything, but if you can play it cleanly and evenly unplugged (and, assuming your muting is any good), then you can play it cleanly and evenly through any sort of gain structure you want.

So, I wouldn’t caution against either, I guess, so much as caution against not doing both.

4 Likes
#4

I have a different experience with that too. Usually I do both, and the way I see is something like:

When playing unplugged you are more aware of what sound you are producing. So the intonation, the details and the dynamics are more in evidence. I think that unplugged makes me more aware of what is going on, helps me a lot with the tapping, hammers and pulls and even with the picking (in a slanted way or in a cross picking approach). It’s like assembling one of those ships inside a bottle.

On the other hand when playing with the amp, you have some help, even if you are not using any OD you have amplification. So all of that you got playing unplugged is gonna be amplified and is awesome! The dynamics, picking softly and aggressively, tapping etc. But the difference is that now you have to deal more with the noises, just like you described. They always been there, but you weren’t listening, now with the amplification they are more in evidence too. So to practicing the muting, the control of the sound is playing with the amp. In this case is like driving a truck in a downhill without the brakes hahaha.

Both are important, and they help in different aspects. In doubt practice both! If you spent some time playing unplugged now do the opposite, and then try to find balance.

3 Likes
#5

When I first wanted to learn sweeping the whole “practice with no gain so you can hear your mistakes” bit held back my progress for about a year. Practice everything with picking threefold, distortion, clean, and unplugged/acoustic.

3 Likes
#6

Yeah if you go switch your 100 watt stack on after a few months of working just unplugged it can be a bit “holy shit I can’t control this thing” but it doesn’t take too much time to refocus a bit on muting and get it sorted, and if it does take too much time this time, it’ll take a bit less time next time.

It’s just another technical issue to solve, and like any other it responds to focused/mindful practise.

3 Likes
#7

Thanks for the input guys. Yeah I think the answer is to do a bit of clean channel and high-gain praticing. There’s a time and place for everything.

That said, I think I’m going to permanently stop unplugged practice for a long while because - and this is the big mystery to me - it seems like my picking hand was too forceful unplugged in an effort to generate a louder sound, even though I know there’s no good reason to apply more pressure. After I plugged in last night I noticed my picking hand felt lighter over the course of two hours or so with breaks. It was so significant that I knew I couldn’t be imagining it. Really odd.

#8

I think another point that’s interesting is that guitar seems to be (to my knowledge) the only instrument where you regularly hear people advising ‘mindless’ practice, by that I mean people often suggest you sit there running scales or picking exercises while watching TV.

I wonder sometimes about the merit of this. One possibility is that you just pick up bad habits and potentially incur RSI as you are not monitoring very closely how it feels in your body while doing this. There’s also a likelihood (this is just a personal hunch!) that that kind of mindless noodling can make its’ way into your playing.

Having said that it’s something I’ve done for years myself. But recently when learning a new instrument (cello in this case) I’ve found I seem to make better progress when I’m switching off all distractions and focusing completely on one area of technique like bowing, vibrato etc.

Maybe it’s the nature of the instrument though, there’s something about the guitar that makes it comfy to sit back with one in your lap and noodle, not something you can do with the cello! Maybe the tendency to noodle then is an idiomatic offshoot of this.

Just thinking out loud really but interested to hear what you guys think -have you noticed a difference between more ‘noodling’ and more focused practice on the guitar ?

3 Likes
#9

The noodling mindless only helps to get a feel of being complete relaxed ( don’t watch horror movies while doing this though :wink: ) and to build up the so called muscle memory.
Otherwise being realy focused when practicing is way better in my opinion.

3 Likes
#10

Practicing both with and without amp is good.
I agree that when you practice too much without amp it is harder to execute things when playing with an amp; a balance between the two is good.
Same goes for practicing sitting and standing and same goes for practicing with the amp at bedroom level or perform on stage level.
When i have a period of less gigging it is always a schock when being on stage again with the amp at higer levels, totaly different feel and sound.

Picking light works best, in my opinion, when you use more gain. With more gain you will have less dynamic and more compression anyway, so picking to hard will only generate to much noise you don’t want to hear.

1 Like
#11

So, I think there’s a couple important things in this thread.

Firstly, I think the question of the correct way to practice is really important in how players develop and I wish I was aware of the research being done on this a long time ago back when I had all the time in the world to practice. :slight_smile:

Anyways, I think the idea of practicing a certain way and excluding any other forms of practice is something that should be done with caution. Certainly, if there is research to show that a particular kind of practice has no benefit then it should be avoided but my instinct is that most methods of practice have some benefit. Furthermore, I think the idea of varying how you’re practicing is very important. My understanding is that research into the area shows that varying how you are practicing improves results. I think the canonical example is having basketball players practice only from the free-throw line vs. having them practice from all over the court. If I recall correctly, the latter actually resulted in better performance from the free-throw line when tested. In the case of guitar, practing unplugged, plugged in but with a clean signal, plugged in with gain, and whatever other variations you want to throw in gives you better insight and develops subconscious abilities to adjust your playing as needed, basically making your more flexible in the moment as a player.

Secondly, I think it was Andy Wood (someone please correct me if I’m wrong here) that was talking about how sometimes it’s important to push yourself and accept a certain amount of slop early on in the playing to work out the mechanics of a particular passage. Once you’ve got the mechanics understood and are able to play it at the desired speed, albeit it with some level of imprecision, then you start focusing in and refining it. I think this is counter to the idea of playing slowly and trying to always play perfectly. Sometimes, it seems like there’s a benefit to pushing yourself, in this case playing without an amp, to get 90% of the way to where you want to be and then refining it in a more practical way, i.e. with an amp/gain/etc…

Sorry, for the long post. This one piqued my interest. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#12

Yes this was Andy. And what he is saying concurs with the best science currently available about motor learning and skill acquisition. It’s not really “pushing” yourself: it’s more like doing the motion in a way that is as close as possible to the way you want to learn it. Think about it like this: You can use an inefficient motion, really slowly, and get all the notes perfectly right. Or you can use a motion that looks really similar to the one you want to learn, has similar speed and smoothness to the motion you want to learn, and feels similar to execute… but the notes are a little off. Which of these approaches would get you closer to learning the target motion correctly? The second one, of course.

What I wrote above is what I think is going on with “TV Practice”, as mentioned by lots of people, maybe most famously Eddie Van Halen, who said his brother would go out and party and he’d sit on the bed with the TV on and a guitar in his hands. The idea here is that you are trying to produce a natural motion through trial and error. And the TV distracts your conscious brain so that your motor system can perform this trial and error without interference.

There is a landmark study in motor learning that showed that your motor system has natural variability when performing unfamiliar activities. Not only that, but they showed that people who have more of this variability learn new physical skills faster. There is real work being done, but it’s not conscious work, it’s motor system work. And it is not consistent repetition with the TV on. It’s lots of little variations while your motor system attempts to figure out the best way to perform the action. I think this is what accounts for the “genius” types sitting there with the TV on and figuring out complicated motions that other people fail to figure out.

6 Likes
Practice while watching TV
#13

I agree here, pushing yourself is probably not the right way to phrase this; that implies a type of intent that I didn’t mean to convey. In this case, I don’t think the goal is to push yourself, like I suggested previously, but instead I agree that the goal is to try to replicate a more realistic playing situation. I think a side effect of this, though, is that you end up forcing your skills to progress and improve through this process.

2 Likes
#14

So, it is okay to watch TV while practicing, at least for 1 hour a day?
Since I was 15 years old I’ve been avoiding TV in order to invest that time on practicing. Is it time to do some “TV practice”?

#15

Hey John,

I did literally 90% of my practice time with YouTube, which is basically TV practice. However, I was not plugged in and that led to the problems I described in my first post. If you’re going to do TV practice, make sure to be using the distortion or clean channel that you intend on using to play or perform whatever it is you’re working on.

I think the big takeaway is just this “Practice exactly the way you to intend to play.” If you do this, you really can’t go wrong. I just picked up a Yamaha THR10X for the purpose of using it while watching YouTube. You don’t need a huge 100W head and cab or anything.

#16

Interesting responses guys thanks. I guess part of what made me think about this is that I read ‘Peak’ by Anders Ericsson recently which discusses ‘deliberate practice’ quite a bit.

My 3 week review
#17

oh my… I can combine two of my three favorite things.

#18

To clarify, you can’t just turn on the TV, play whatever you want without thinking, and magically get better. What the greats did that worked for them is that they have super intuition for knowing immediately when things are working, and switching their mechanics to those things. This is a skill in and of itself. Simply repeating the same thing is not what makes practice work. It is making small changes, even subconscious ones, when you feel that there is a more efficient way to do something.

So by all means, experiment. The main thing to keep in mind is that when you are trying to learn a certain picking motion, then at some level, you must be producing change or nothing will happen. That’s the goal. If playing with the TV on produces effective change, then more power to you. If it does not, then don’t keep doing it.

Does Anders elaborate specifically on how to “be deliberate”? Because that’s what is I think a little misleading. The term conjures up images of someone who is focusing really hard on playing the right notes, super duper correctly, in order to get better. But we know from our interviews that the greats are not always super conscious of the movements they are making, what they did to create those movements, when they learned those movements, or precisely how long it took. That certainly doesn’t sound too “deliberate”.

However, again, what the greats are truly great at is having finely tuned intuition for movements which are efficient, and gravitating toward those movements over time based on feel. This is perhaps “deliberate” in the sense that they are doing a type of evaluation of their technique, and making changes as a result of it. But it’s a far cry from what we usually think of as musical practice, where you really sweat these details and try to be as correct as possible in a super conscious kind of way.

2 Likes
#19

I will disagree with this along with what others have said. Let’s say you want to play high gain. Often, because the amp allows even legato notes to sound loudly, you simply cannot tell by sound or feel if you are really picking a certain note or missing it entirely. Clicking off the gain can make that clearer, because the note will disappear if you’re not really hitting it.

In other words, high gain is not great at dynamics. You can hit some notes really hard, and others softly, and others not at all, and the differences will not always be obvious. How many times have you heard high gain players say they can’t play clean. It’s not because clean is harder - it’s because they don’t have the technique they think they have. If you can play smoothly clean or unplugged, then you can definitely play smoothly with the gain turned up.

On the flipside, as others have said, clean practice teaches you nothing about noise control. Open strings can ring all day and you will never hear them. Ditto for acoustic guitar and unplugged electric. So to practice muting and harmonics, you gotta practice with gain.

Ergo:

Do both! And constantly cross-compare. Just reiterating what others have said here.

3 Likes
#20

Thanks Troy, I will try this recommendation out. After thinking it over, I think you’re mostly right. I’ll try about a 50/50 split hi-gain and clean channel this week. I think this will rectify any troubles I’ve been having.

That said, I don’t think I’ve seen any guitarists mic their unplugged electric guitar on stage. I just do not see the utility moving forward for unplugged electric guitar practice. It’s the equivalent of learning Latin if you want to learn English; sure, there’s an argument to be made for some carryover between the languages, but if you’re wanting to learn to speak English… Learn to speak English.