Warning: Practicing unplugged can be highly detrimental

Playing Technique
#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:

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#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.

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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.

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#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.

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#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.

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#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.

#21

In the book ‘deliberate’ practice isn’t described that way really, more of a general process where the person doing the practice does so in a way where they focus on working on their weaknesses and working towards specific goals. He takes the 10,000 hours ‘rule’ and says it’s not the mileage really as much as what you do during that time. (Anders is the one who came up with the 10,000 hours thing originally but it was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell )

Watching the Oz Noy interview the other day I was struck by a similar idea when he talked about practicing scales, he said he doesn’t like to just run up and down them in a typical way but instead tries to concentrate on finding different ways to play them that increase his fluidity on the neck (that example he played of playing a major scale ‘diagonally’ was pretty neat and something I’d never have considered a practical way of playing that scale - I really admire his ability to find something like that and stick to it until he had it fluid, I get the feeling if I had found that even by accident I probably would have discounted it as a not very practical way to play that scale).

Another book I’m reading at the moment is ‘the Inner Game of Music’ which is pretty interesting, in that he discusses cultivating ‘awareness’ while practicing, so in a particular session you might focus say on tone, or dynamics, or simply monitoring how much stress you are holding in your body as you play. The idea being that if you tune in enough to your own internal feedback you can make better progress on an instrument. A lot of that book discusses the intuitive verses analytic approach (he’s much more in favor of the former!) but says that you need to train yourself to pick up on those intuitions, by working on your focus and deliberately giving your analytic side ‘jobs’ to do (like measuring muscle tension etc) so that it gets out of your way and lets your intuitive side work better.

Again I feel in both those examples, playing guitar while doing something else is less likely to lead to that kind of practice.

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#22

Acoustic sound is very different from magnetically amplified sound.
Megadeth holy wars for example, You can peddle on an acoustic low E and play the melody lines letting the low E ring unmuted, due to the way acoustic sound travels, interacts and decays, it won’t over power or muddy up the sound of the melody line much, but do that on an electric and that ringing peddled low E will ruin the sound, muddying up the whole thing. Electric is a mechanical interaction of the string and magnet, very sensitive. Acoustic is directly interacting with the air, kinda spongy and forgiving. You can get away with a lot on an acoustic guitar that an electric will not forgive. That’s why you can be so aggressive and expressive with an acoustic, it’s bouncy, electrics rigid bitch, and will let you know it.

#23

This is a harmonic effect, not a mechanical one. Amplified guitar signals have more upper harmonics compared to acoustic guitar signals because of intermodulation and clipping. (This is true even for clean tones.)

Every note you play has harmonics built into it. Nonlinear amplification adds new ones via intermodulation, and clipping adds more. The new harmonics are dominantly higher order, and two such signals added together will inevitably result in a signal with high harmonics that are very close to each other in frequency. This results in sum and difference frequencies evident in the combined signal. These frequencies are the ‘muddying up’ or ‘overpowering’ effects you refer to.

#mansplain #nerdrant

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#24

I’m not particular as to whether someone plays unplugged or plugged in with a clean tone. I do both just because I’m sitting around and I don’t always feel like turning on an amp. Or it’s late and quiet. A loud clean amp with a lot of headroom will reveal weaknesses in your attack immediately. Hitting the bass notes on clean even slightly too hard will rattle your skull.

Regardless I do think that high gain players need clean practice (of either kind), because, ironically, high gain can’t teach you everything you need to sound good with high gain.

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#26

Wrong reply, my mistake

I feel like this thread got slightly derailed halfway through but the point was more to make a few observations for the forum. I figure that’s what we are about here, the more intellectualized approach to guitar practice.

If anyone finds this post through a search function, I noticed the following over the past few days after switching exclusively to plugged in clean or hi-gain practice:

  • More effortlessness in playing (biggest observable change)
  • Less time to warm up (5 minutes or so to reach top playing abilities)
  • Better control of dynamics, more even pick tone across clean and hi-gain channels
  • Extreme reduction in extraneous string noise, if I had to hazard a guess, around 75% reduction

What did I do before switching to plugged in practice?

I would say 90% of the time I was unplugged in front of my computer before work or late at night watching YouTube videos and running sequences or licks over and over again for about 40 minutes, then a break (10-30 minutes), then repeat.

What happened to my technique while doing this?

I recorded quite a few video clips and one interesting thing is that my typical DWPS/TWPS stuff involved a little more elbow movement, though it was still primarily rotational.

My theory is that that the brain applies more force to the fretting and picking hands to generate a louder sound. On the rare occasions I would plug into my monitors, I would notice my fretting hand pressing the notes a bit out of tune. One distinct thing that massively stuck out was how much easier and relaxed things felt after adjusting to the amplified sound. As ridiculous as it sounds, it only occurred to me in the past few days why that might be.

Example: Pepsi Lick

I had been practicing the Pepsi Lick unplugged throughout August and September, over and over and over again. I got it so fast as to be sitting around 145-150 on my best days. This was the strangest part - throughout the past week after plugging in, my abilities dropped down to about 120-130, where they are consistently at. I have no explanation except for a possible slight change in technique that my body is working through to build back up with the appropriate amount of force necessary to hit those extreme speeds.

I will try to post a clip once I get the Pepsi Lick sorted. I’m not sure how long this will take me, but it’s pretty mindblowing how different I feel with the instrument since Tuesday when I started this more deliberate regime. There’s this argument in the guitar technique world where people say big change tends to take time, speed takes time to develop, etc but the more I learn the more I am convinced that this couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re on the right path, you should start seeing results more or less immediately.

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#27

I say mechanical because when the string passes over the pickup it interacts with the magnetic field and creates an electrical impulse, this then gets amplified by the amp. It’s a mechanical system based on the back n forth movement of the string. This is a very sensitive setup, and it shows when you so much as touch the string. This is also why tonewood does not affect an electric guitar.

An acoustic is mechanical too, but it’s directly interacting with the air, the air does not amplify anything. I agree the waves amplify each other but this is true for both acoustic and guitar. More so for acoustic, as an electrics pickup only receives part of the overtones based on where it is under the string.

#28

I agree that practicing unplugged is detrimental. I’ve always been lazy in plugging into an amp and turning it on. After playing unplugged for awhile and then plugging in, I can notice all the missed notes.

I’m confused why people are equating unplugged with acoustic/clean… Unless you’re playing a semi-hollow or archtop, playing unplugged sounds way different - if you can hear any sound at all. It’s almost inaudible. You’re more likely to assume you’re hitting all the notes correctly, especially when the notes go by really fast during shredding.

With clean and acoustic playing, you get enough volume to actually hear what’s going on. And yeah, is there ever a situation where your audience is going to listen to your electric unplugged? It’s always either acoustic, clean or distortion.

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#29

My two cents…I’m 46 and been playing since I was 8 years old. Virtually all of that time I have practiced on unplugged electric and for me personally it has been almost nothing but beneficial. By and large, I can “feel” the unwanted vibrations that I know will cause problems in a plugged-in, high volume and higher gain/distortion/feedback situation. If I have any issues adjusting to playing plugged-in/high volume etc., they go away fairly quickly. Also, I’ve usually played an old strat straight through an old Fender Super Reverb on 8 or 9 when playing live…I was heavily influenced by SRV growing up mostly in Texas and it’s what we do! As much as I’ve studied Van Halen most of my life, I’ve only gotten into using a relatively higher gain Marshall sound over the last 10 years.

I will say that my major stumbling block is playing sitting down versus standing up…THAT is something that I have to force myself to do and it is difficult, especially as I get older and my feet and back are more prone to discomfort. When I regularly played in bands and played out it was obviously less of an issue, but now that I’m a 46 year old Dad of a 3 1/2 year old daughter and an 8 month old boy I find it hard to get any playing time in much less finding motivation to practice standing.

These days I work on transcribing more than anything and I rarely play out, but in my experience I have to say that I agree with Troy and others about practicing in ways that yield results for you personally. If you try a certain method and it doesn’t work for you as well as another, then by all means focus on what works better for you. It is great to experiment with different methods though…

Another thing that I think benefitted me greatly was the fact that I have had several different instruments and switching from one to another and working on different pieces at the same time has REALLY helped me. I am one of those mindless TV practicers and I often focusing on practicing the same lick for hours and hours over months and even years…and I LOVE switching to working on a piece on an acoustic 12-string, a mandolin piece, playing slide on my lap steel, working on a classical piece on my nylon string…it’s great to give my hands a rest from the same movements while still challenging the muscles in a different way on a different instrument. Of course I do this because it’s fun to me too! People think I’m a robot because I can work on the same Van Halen lick for YEARS, but to me it’s still super fun…I LOVE playing guitar and practice isn’t practice to me-it’s all fun!

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#30

I think the dynamics of my picking benefited from playing with high gain and with the volume knob on the guitar rolled way back. Maybe I don’t remember correctly, but doesn’t Paul Gilbert advise this in Intense Rock? The accents of note groupings can be made very clear, but at the same time it’s much harder to get a consistent attack level compared to playing completely clean.
So what I did was playing with the volume rolled back, having to try really hard to make it sound even. After that, turning the volume knob and that way gain up to 11, admiring how awesome, easy and well rounded everything sounded now. :smiley:
Didn’t get me to play Technical Difficulties though. :disappointed_relieved:

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#31

Do you have a link to this study?

btw I came across this interesting video about Implicit Motor Learning:

It’s long but he talks about conscious vs non-conscious learning, particularly in sports. It sounds like non-conscious learning is less susceptible to error from pressure, nervousness… He also describes how prehistoric humans probably had robust, non-conscious motor skills - long before conscious learning evolved. If a man got too self-aware every time he threw a spear at a saber tooth tiger, he wouldn’t have survived.

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