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.)
The topic of “TV practice” has been discussed a lot, but once again, we have to be careful what we mean by “practice”. So just to be clear, what I’m referring to here is more playing for enjoyment with a secondary purpose of coming up with new ideas. The TV usually isn’t actually on when I do that, it’s just the room where I happen to be sitting or standing.
If I’m actually paying attention to what I’m playing and enjoying that, I personally dislike the TV on or someone talking to me, I find it distracting. If the TV is on, and I have a guitar in my hands, nothing interesting happens — the hands just repeat stuff they already know, like mechanical autopilot.
I talked to David Grier about this in our most recent interview. He likes the TV on. It’s not really clear what he gets out of this, but it sounds like it’s at least partly for creative reasons:
Re: glossary, the Pickslanting Primer is the glossary. The topics all exist wherever they exist in the Primer. Edge Picking is here:
And hyperpicking is here:
However what we can do is make an index for the Primer so that you can look up the term and find the pages where’s it’s explained. That we fully intend to do, we’re just, again, swamped!
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Does this mean we’re not adopting “dicking” as term? 
seriously - I’ve written whole pieces by dicking around while watching TV. I’ve also been divorced twice and I suspect that stopping Game of Thrones so I could go record some idea may have contributed.
ultimately worth it.
thank you for all this insight and these links! watching!
I think I use the term practice out of habit, learning would be a better option lol. I have a decent sense of going about learning songs, learning chunk by chunk much like what’s been said in some other posts on this thread. I was an on & off again player for years in my youth/teens & only the past 7 or so months have I bunkered down & really given this my all (cant leave the house/ cystic fibrosis patient). I’ve definitely made progress just by learning songs (24 since January) & made exercises from parts of the songs I’m learning, but I can’t help but think that my picking technique could be better. Gonna get filming some critique videos for you guys hopefully this wee 
Totally guilty of dicking around on the guitar watching the wwe network. Nothing brings good vibes like the attitude era of the 90’s & jamming songs I already know
If I’m actively trying to learn though I become like the paranoid person who has to turn the volume down in the car when driving in an area in unfamiliar with. All silence lol
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