Is there a right balance of practicing at a slower comfortable speed and at the edge of your ability? A part two to this question is how long should you be able to loop an exercise at high speed for? Like the standard Paul Gilbert one for example. The other day I played it pretty cleanly at 140 bpm (sextuplets) for 8 beats and then it started falling apart. I guess I should just work on stamina so I can play everything indefinitely, but I was wondering what others thoughts were and perhaps what sort of practice method would be best.
How do you practice at the minute?
If you haven’t already, try recording yourself playing the lick until it falls apart, get a good close up of your picking hand. Then watch it back in slo mo, you should be able to see the problem.
If there doesn’t look like there’s a problem with the picking hand then do the same thing again but with a close up of your fretting hand.
hope this helps.
When I was taking lessons from Dallas Perkins he told me he spent about 90% of his practice time playing slowly, sometimes so slowly that he said I wouldn’t believe it. He spent the other 10% playing very fast and he had absolutely amazing technique both in terms of speed and playing cleanly. He could do everything from alternate picking to sweep arpeggios to 8 finger tapping. If you spend too much of your practice playing extremely fast, you’re likely to end up hurting yourself.
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Just don’t forget the corollary, that if you spend none of your practise playing (or trying to play) extremely fast, you’ll never play fast.
One thing to try is…just don’t always give up any time it seems like you can’t play something at a certain speed, sometimes it takes a bit of flailing around sloppily that sounds terrible to bring something out of your playing.
Put another way, slow & precise and fast & loose are both tools on the way to fast & precise.
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I do a few reps at a slower speed (like three notes per beat) then try to play at a really fast speed (six notes per beat). 140-150 bpm usually. Which is very fast. I will record myself. I’ve been meaning to do that since I’ve made improvements anyway.
The main issue is finding the comfort spot for my arm and really making sure Im not tensing up my bicep too much. I have a tendency to tense up and start lifting my arm off the guitar when I try play really fast. But there is a sweet spot of comfort that I can usually find. Sometimes I’m just fatigued or having an off day though which is annoying, but just part of life I guess. Also playing mostly on one guitar and not using the other ones as much makes it more difficult to find the comfortable position on them. The most comfortable is my strat and I just have to replicate that feeling on the others.
As has been discussed quite a bit on this forum, you need to spend at least some of your time practice fast in order to validate whether the stuff you are doing slow will “hold up” at high speed. That is, fast practice can help you identify deficiencies and feel your way into a motion that has the potential to work at high speed.
Don’t have thread links handy, but @Troy has made some excellent posts recently about the “trial and error” aspects of motor learning.