Warning: Practicing unplugged can be highly detrimental

Playing Technique
#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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#32

Looks cool! We’ll put it on our list. The motor learning variability study was done by Maurice Smith and his lab. You might need a subscription to grab it or if you’re a student you may have access. Here’s the link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3616

#33

Thanks for the study. I think Noa Kageyama talks about this kind of stuff a lot on his blog. This idea of too much body awareness is like “practice” mode. So what about “performance” mode?

We all talk about deliberate practice - constantly looking for weaknesses and improving. But too much of this leads to training to look for mistakes. When performing, you kind of want to forget all this self-monitoring and to just focus on continuing (“performance” mode).

There’s a popular golf experiment that’s often cited. It found that golfers who focused on their body and technique while hitting the ball performed worse than those who focused on the target and some general “feeling” of the correct movements.

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#34

Yes, the learning of picking motions is all done by feel. You’re not really fixing notes, per se. You’re trying to zero in on what correctness of the motion feels like and get that feeling again. Generally, this leads to the notes also being correct in the long run, but not at first.

#35

Coming late to the discussion, but my two cents on original topic.

  1. Much unplugged playing comes from, as pointed out, the inconvenience of plugging in all the time. Definitely can be a horrible habit. (Caveat, protect those ears.)

  2. Listening to tone—any tone—different from what one plans on actually performing with may set up a disconnect between what comes naturally and what is needed. (Similar may be said of playing with and without appropriate accompaniment.)

  3. We learn different things with different feedback from our environment. It’s often important to switch things up a bit to keep the brain interested and to develop consistency. Not so weird. :slight_smile:

Cheers all, Daniel

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#36

I’m not a fan of mindless practice at all, and I say this as a person who has done a ton of it. To a certain extent, it isn’t terrible, and if you are watching TV anyway why not rip a few licks during the commercials? And perhaps you increase hand strength and dexterity a bit.

But don’t really learn things or get better as a musician doing this. To get better you have to focus on things that are hard or uncomfortable. Can’t do that in front of the TV.

#37

In theory, I would have disagreed; it would seem like playing unplugged allowed you to better hear your interaction with the stings. In reality though, no, and especially if you play with overdrive/distortion. I have learned this firsthand through experience.
You have to realize that the amp is an integral part of the instrument when talking about electric guitar. It is not an add-on. Playing unplugged does not help you master muting and reigning in the extraneous noise that high gain makes inevitable. Furthermore, you may find yourself picking a little too hard to hear an instrument that is not naturally acoustic - that’s what the amp is for! This leads to wasted exertion and bad habits.

This said, if you were to practice on a semi-hollow body like an ES335, then that might be different. But for solid bodies, use an amp.
Lastly, I would add it also helps to practice both sitting and standing up, I find both positions demand slightly different angles from my hand and arm and mastering each separately is essential.

#38

HUGE UPDATE (you won’t believe this):

I’m serious when I say haven’t played anything on my clean channel since October lol. I exclusively played distortion these past few months. I switched to clean today and drumroll…

I sound literally exactly the same, just with a clean tone.

#39

this one post was worth the price of admission :slight_smile:

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#40

I primarily identify myself as a singer first and guitarist second so allow me the following. I think singers face a similar situation when it comes to singing with and without a microphone. There’s a whole other element of thought that goes into mic control (i.e. not blasting the input volume on the loud notes) but the microphone also allows you the opportunity to sing something that you may not have been able to do without the microphone. For some people, their high range is weaker than their low and singing into a mic offers an acceptable volume which would not be the case without a mic.

Also, with regard to @Troy’s point about “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.” As a singer, i started out with a very weak range. I wanted to be able to sing zep and ac/dc so i forced myself (but didn’t force my voice) to sing those songs in falsetto and slowly, over the years, work my way towards it sounding the way i wanted. Now i routinely sing those bands, queen, journey, etc and no one would believe i didn’t have that range.

With regards to the random motor learning, my vocal evolution implemented that as well. In the privacy of my shower, i would experiment with my voice especially at the break. 90% of the sounds that came out were awkward, weird, in appropriate, or just plain funny sounding. But sometimes i would hit on something that would be useful and I would practice the shit out of it so i could reproduce it in a band setting.

I suppose the point i’m trying to make is that the concepts in this post might be universally applicable and not isolated to guitar. thanks for all the comments

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#41

Totally. I would think any kind of mechanical or motor skill acquisition would follow a similar process of “figuring it out” via experimentation. This is even true if you have teaching, because the teacher can only show or explain so much. You still have to learn to recognize what it feels like when done correctly, to be able to replicate.

Now if they could only make a waterproof guitar!

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