A breakthrough.

diminishedrun

Hi

I have only been learning gypsy jazz for a month or so and I’m steadily progressing, mainly focusing on rhythm. However, for a long time in playing other styles speed on lead guitar has eluded me and I have never understood why.

As a matter of coincidence I stumbled across a website that had an ebook called ‘The Ten Minute Virtuoso Guitarists’ and it consists of 100 or so tips on becoming a substantially better player. Much of these tips were concerned with slowing down and playing the tough stuff with utter focus. As it happens I have a friend who is a concert violinist with a famous orchestra but I don’t see her too often. I saw her a week ago and I took the opportunity to ask her about speed and her reply completely echoed the ebook’s advice. She told me to play very slow, with sheer relaxation and laser focus on accuracy - and use a metronome. She was 100 percent confident that if I employed this method it won’t be long before I would have some great success.

Armed with this information I decided to try an experiment. I decided to take a two octave G Major scale and set the metrome really slow before forcing myself to stick with it. Perhaps more importantly was that I tried a really really light and loose grip on the pick - something I have found incredibly difficult to do. What happened was interesting. Firstly I immediately noticed where my week spots have always been: namely, the string crossings with the rest stroke on notes D to E and whereever this aspect appears in the scale. Basically, I had to force myself to be incredibly accurate and play every note as evenly as possible. Somehow, only a few days later I had significantly increased my speed and I had this feeling of left/right hand connection that I never experienced before. I was very surprised at how a very light pick grip helps because it almost feels as though there is a kind of drag on the strings but without any loss of speed.

I have found a new way of practice. I’m going to have to accept that this is the reality of getting better but if playing uber relaxed and slow is the way to speed I’m pretty sure I’ll stick with it.

Bones

Yup, that's what most of the good lead players seem to say. If you practice too fast you are sloppy and tense and that is what you are training your muscle memory to do.

wim

Yes, slow and steady is the way. Sometimes it takes me literally years to get a song up to Django's speed. To paraphrase what Bones just mentioned: if you play sloppy when you practice, you're practicing how to play sloppy. Essentially, you will learn how to perform badly.

diminishedrun

It’s strange though how easy it is to play slowly and yet an awful lot of players seem not willing to do this - I know I have been reluctant.

I have issues with my right hand in that I have developed a very strange tense feeling and `I’m hoping that over time it might go away.

terrassier

I know I struggle to practice slowly and some lines I learned sloppy early on are ingrained that way now and some more challenging lines that i learned later are much less of a problem.
Last few weeks I have noticed that my grip on the pick is becoming really light and relaxed which I know is a good thing.... but my tone seems to be thin with a relaxed grip and I now have the pick rotating as I play sometimes , all phases of improving I hope

Scoredog

I would never encourage a student to practice faster than he is able to play cleanly, but for myself there are times now where I practice faster than I can play to learn what a line feels like fast, learning the picking pattern and feeling it. I often now pick up lines quicker than I used to with this technique. I sat in on a class with with Yorgui Loeffler and he said he does not practice slow. Now he had an interpreter and maybe i missed that but I think I understood it correctly.

When I was learning to play tennis as a kid they had you hit the ball slowly and consistently and build up your technique and power. Now days they take a young player out and teach him to hit the ball hard and then reel him into getting the ball in the court thinking the power aspect is the first thing to master.

Slow is the tried and true way but there may be other options depending on line.

richter4208

another technique I've been using is say you are struggling with a line that you can play fairly cleanly at 180 bpm. Set your metronome up to 200 bpm and play it for a few minutes.....you struggle. Now set it to 190. 190 now starts to feel like a doable tempo. Over simplified but the point being is sometimes its good to push beyond your abilities if you do it with a purpose.

steffo

diminishedrun wrote: »

It’s strange though how easy it is to play slowly
[...]

It‘s not easy at all (I think)

Buco

You're definitively going the right way about it @diminishedrun

That philosophy shows in every genre of music at the highest levels of performance.
I've either read, heard or talked to people about this from the top jazzman to classical virtuosos to metal shredders to top Broadway shows performers.
Now, a lot of these guys depend on performing a complex piece impeccably note for note.
Yorgui and top GJ guys like him don't care if they flub a note occasionally and they do.
If a Broadway show performer does that during a solo piece on the other hand, that person is out of a job right then and there. Flubbing a single note isn't an option.

But you need to practice slow to get to an advanced level of improvisational music too. Paulus Schafer says that in one of his videos, something like "practice slow and accurately, the speed will come with time".
Unfortunately not a lot of players in amateur and semi professional circles take that to heart. But practicing slowly is really a faster way to get there.

Now, what Craig said, you do need to attempt things at a performance or your goal speed at the end of your practice routine. You might recognize a more efficient fingering, you might realize the picking needs to be changed, play some hammer-on's or some pull-off's. Most importantly and I don't have any backing for this, but somehow I think that you need to send signals to your brain that this is what you're trying to accomplish so it can start to crunch ways to get there.
All of or most of the people/stories/books that I talked to/heard/read say that too, you need to attempt whatever you're practicing at full tempo a few times but don't practice that way.
Otherwise it's: junk in/junk out.

Try this technique for getting something up to speed: whatever your goal tempo is, practice at half tempo for a given chunk of time at the end of which go to your goal tempo and do it a few times. Take note where you flub or fall apart and isolate that part and only practice that with a same approach. You could micro isolate these parts to as little as two notes. Then build from there.

Lastly, slow practice isn't necessarily easy. Try taking the tempo down to 20%. You'll find it becomes very hard to stay focused and be able to play a whole piece that you might think you own, without a single mistake. But this is how you build even better accuracy.

Bones

One thing I worry about is that when I play slowly I am not actually using the correct motions to play faster. I wish I could find the link but I think it was a vid by maybe Joscho Stephan or Christiaan Van Hemert where they say when you practice slowly you still need to play LIKE you are playing fast. I'm not sure what that means but probably not big strokes with the right hand or unnecessary movements or inefficient fingerings. Totally makes sense but probably easier said than done.

diminishedrun

This has been my concern too but what I am finding is that if you periodically test your development of speed you start to arrive at the same technique for both.

But I feel there is more to it than this. For example, even on a basic major scale I was simply not playing in time or hitting every note correctly. Now, I am being very critical of how cleanly and accurately I am playing which, when you think about it, is critical.

Again, going back to my discussion with a concert violinist (who obviously, is ridiculously fast and accurate) she said that refusing to accept bum notes and playing slowly is the stark reality of what is required. She also said that working with a metronome is critical.

Personally, I feel that because we rarely get to see a pro guitarist do this work we assume that their talent alone has got them there.

A confession. A year ago I was studying classical but had to give up because of hand injury. I was gifted an expensive series of lessons from a world class classical guitar player called Denis Azabagic. He was, in a kind way, brutal about my sloppy playing and pretty much told me the same as my friend and other commentators here. I never really took that advice, hence why I’m still discussing this issue.