Nowadays working on anything new or difficult to play and creating content for students.
In the beginning it was all about learning the neck and exercises from Instructional videos, which were VHS for all the kids on here.
I try to at least work on everything a bit, although focus shifts from day to day.
So that includes alternate picking, economy, sweeping, legato, hybrid, improv and learning full songs.
The ideal thing would be to just be able to combine the technique practice with improvisation, but when I improv I just fall back into my safe zone of easy 3 nps alternate patterns and Satriani style legato. So the middle ground for me is to at least exchange the metronome with a backing track and force myself to do technique xzy. It helps that I just bought half of Rick Graham’s store and some JTC stuff as that mostly includes very cool backing tracks.
Yeah, I can pick way faster using the setup/mechanic you coached me into. The 20-40bpm is no exaggeration either. Now, I cannot control this movement or get my left hand to keep up with it at its top speed of ~220bpm, but the fact that I can even move my picking hand that fast is amazing to me. I can now clearly see that doing reps/sets with the motion I did prior to this would never have led me to this speed. Doing reps/sets with the new motion in chunks, gradually chaining in more notes and stitching multiple chunks together, at speeds slightly below or near my max are going to be key for getting the control and stamina I need though. At least I think!
But to respond directly to the thread, I have no routine. I’m done with all that. Years ago I would do things like play every scale/mode in every single key, then do metronome practice, then work on site reading <insert other dogma that makes the whole thing take up 4 - 5 hours worth of time> etc.
I’m just playing for fun right now. Typically playing etudes that play ball with DSX. Long term goals are to be able to play any EJ or Synyster Gates solos that I’m in the mood for at the tempo on the record. I’ve been close to this most of my career but due to stubbornness and not knowing about escapes made the final 10% of the speed never happen. Seems totally doable now, with some practice and awareness. I’m gonna have to get real creative with the EJ stuff since DSX is more natural for me…or eventually get back to working on USX and just pick a better motion mechanic than what I was trying to shoe horn in before Troy knocked some sense into me. Wrist or forearm. Elbow is out for USX!!!
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@joebegly where can I learn more or see what what you worked on?
Sounds like we have much in common. Learning Marty Friedman solos, there’s a lot of stuff I play differently than him. USX challenges me but I’ve adopted some of it in the tornado of souls solo.
( after months of struggling to really play those fast two string arpeggios evenly, I took Marty’s own advice and found a way to play that that I can do consistently well every time – now I just tap it.)
Awesome and helpful as anyways @Troy. I hear this as years of practicing non productive motion won’t magically make it productive!
So… what do you do when you practice, Troy?
Thanks for the replies, everyone!
I’m an open book, man 
What are you referencing specifically here? Like, specific etudes I’m doing at the moment? EJ solos I’m trying to work up to speed? All the stuff I wasted years of my life on (which I don’t recommend) like all the modes in all the keys? Let me know and I’ll get some stuff together for you. Though, full disclaimer, I’d strongly caution anyone against doing things I’ve done. Before I changed careers I put my entire life into music and heavily put preference into conquering the guitar. The fact that I’m still just “pretty good” (by the standard of average guitarists) and not “great” are a strong indicator I do not have good answers Even after immersing myself in CtC concepts for 6 months, once I submittied a technique critique it was pretty clear I still just had not gotten it. I truly thought I was on the right track too! What I was feeling wasn’t quite reality. As much as there are ‘naturals’ with the intuitiveness of Yngwie, I think I just may be the polar opposite on the non-intuitive side hahahahaha! But, I enjoy the process and I’ll keep playing. It’s fun.
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What I wrote must not have been very helpful if you’re still asking me about “practice”.
Kidding aside, again, practice is an umbrella term that doesn’t tell us anything about what the person is actually doing.
Am I learning a new piece with some existing technique I already have? That’s mostly memorization. Conservatory-trained musicians have all sorts of great advice for this which almost always boils down to playing shorter sections of the larger piece from as many different starting points as you can and then stitching them together.
Am I trying to learn a new motion where I have no idea how to do it correctly? What step of the process am I at? Can I do it at all, or am I completely new and have no idea? The newer you are, the more you do totally random experimentation at normal motion speeds to try and “get the hang” of something. The more familiar you are, and sure that what you’re doing is correct, the less random you can be, and the wider range of motion speeds you can include (slow and fast) to try and increase accuracy across a wide range of common songs / phrases / picking and fretting patterns / etc.
Again, we need to stop asking about “practice”, and start talking more specifically about what activity we’re performing, and what step of that process we are actually at.
I think terminology we’re used to is hard to shake. I don’t advocate excess sugar, but I’ll often ask for a ‘coke’ when I just want some sweet carbonated beverage haha
We’ve heard the term thrown around so much over the years it’s hard to disassociate “Time with guitar in my hands” from the word “practice” I think. You’re right though. If we can’t agree on what words mean, conversations are difficult. I was the only one in my band who knew theory, and writing sessions were always interesting because my bandmates couldn’t understand what I meant, and the words they used to describe what they meant didn’t mean what my ‘proper’ definition of those words were haha.
I think what @jjsnibor is getting at, and I’m sure we’re all a little curious about since we look up to you and your accomplishments, is “What does Troy Grady do when he has a spare 30 - 60 minutes and he chooses to spend that time with a guitar in his hands?” Probably a different answer every time that scenario presents itself I’d imagine. Plus, you have different demands than the rest of us. If you’re about to film something, you need to be solid enough on it to demonstrate it with authority. If you have this spare 60 minutes tonight and tomorrow you’re going to film yourself showing crosspicking, my guess is some of that time goes to crosspicking.
Do you ever find yourself doing ‘maintenance’ on the various picking techniques you show? If so, would you play solos that employ that technique, or an exercise that exploits it more? Stuff like that, not to put words in @jjsnibor’s mouth or anything.
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Once you get to “maintenance” very, very little work at all is needed beyong semi-regular playing for fun. It might be interesting to ask if certain skills require more or less than upkeep than others, but I think the answer is still that very little is required overall. Way, way less than seems to be the general impression.
Look at Batio. He didn’t warm up at all when he did the live interview with us. But I was tooling around with cameras for 20 minutes or something because stuff wasn’t working. So he was chit chatting with people with the amp off and I could see his hands were moving some of the time. But he wasn’t paying any attention to that. When we were finally ready to go, the first three sweeps in the “Rain Forest” intro tune were off, everything else was fine.
So yeah, if I can reach “maintenance” mode on anything I no longer pay much attention at all to that. That is in fact the test for whether I’ve reached maintenance mode. If it’s just there all the time, then it’s probably learmed.
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I meant I’d be interested to see the before and after of the work you did with @Troy to increase your speed 20-40 bpm on that particular passage you guys were referencing.
no, you nailed it Joe. I didn’t think to use a different term other than “practice”.
so I’ll ask again with different language ---->
What do you find challenging when playing guitar right now @Troy and where are you in the process of addressing the challenge?
Ah gotcha. The before is here:
The after…guess I need to film another clip. I’d been meaning to, just to make sure I’m on the right track. I actually filmed one a couple days back and noticed some wobbling/rotaty stuff in my forearm at the higher speeds so I wanted to try fixing that on my own before submitting.
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You didn’t fall asleep? lol jk glad my mistakes can help someone else. Troy’s pretty amazing at this analysis. Moral of the story, unless anyone is ripping through stuff at Batio speeds, they would be wise to submit a video for critique.
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Good reminder that I need to get back in the habit of filming myself daily === even if it’s just for my own reference.
thanks @joebegly
what’re you working on now?
Mainly this, in efforts to get my DSX more controlled, while sounding hopefully not too exercise-ish. It actually sounds a little like Bach if you play it around 140bpm. 186 is the goal for me.
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lesson for me - don’t waste an hour warming up. just do the stretching, 5-10 min warm up and get into songs and pieces that are more useful than exercises like chromatic stuff.
the B Maj. DSX exercise looks like it’d help me. I’ll try it today! 186. wow.
this is exactly what I needed to hear. I need to get off warm ups and exercises and get back to shooting video of myself playing actual pieces that I care about. freeing.
Mostly nothing. I tried to get the hyperpicking motion to happen while stuck in traffic the other day. But I just tense up and nothing happens. If anyone looked in the car window, that would have been pretty funny. Thankfully it was raining.
Otherwise I’m not working on learning pieces of music, so that type of learning, I really just don’t do it at all. And the picking techniques I know are all at or pretty close to the end of the road in terms of being where they need to be. I’ve already done that work. We’re super busy trying to figure out how to write and present this stuff, that’s what occupies the majority of my time personally.
If you want to know what I do when I play guitar, on the days when I get a chance to do it, mainly I just sit on the couch in front of the TV and dick around with whatever pops into my mind. Sometimes I’ll come up with a cool lick or riff or something and play it for a while until I get bored. Some of these things eventually become tutorial examples we can use.
Personally, I have always gotten the best mileage out of that, not routines. I don’t enjoy doing things for specified amounts of time or even at all on some / many days. I only want to play when I’m excited to do so, and I only want to play things I’m excited to play for the length of time I want to play it.
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I like the idea of less practicing and more dicking and I think we should adopt this term* here at CtC!
seriously , this is re-assuring. I spent a LOT of time doing exactly that often mindlessly just playing stuff until ideas strike me.
- is there a quick ref glossary of CtC terms on this site? could be useful. I still don’t’ know what edge picking or hyperpicking are.)