Our latest lesson tackles an incorrect assumption at the core of one of the most commonly repeated pieces of musical practice advice of all time: Go slow and get all the notes right. How could this possibly be bad advice?
Notes versus Technique
Historically, when we speak about practice perfection, we’re usually thinking about the correctness of the resulting pitches. The problem with this is that it’s really easy to get all the notes right with the wrong technique.
The most obvious example of this is stringhopping – a bouncy motion recognizable to almost anyone, even if you’ve never looked at guitar technique up close before. This becomes even more obvious under the Magnet, in slow motion, where the spiky, vertical cadence of stringhopping visually dominates.
Relentless stringhopping practice does nothing to promote learning the more streamlined motions you need for faster playing. It’s a completely different technique, so why would it?
Warp Speed, Sulu
Instead, practicing above Warp Three – the speed when efficient motions emerge – is the only way to guarantee you’re actually attempting the technique you want to learn. And even then, it’s tricky.
Counterintuitively, Warp Three is not a specific number – it’s different for every technique and phrase. The only way to know when you’ve passed this invisible barrier is to actually film your technique and note when it changes. Only then can you truly be sure you’re not just wasting time on slower techniques that won’t translate to faster playing.
If this sounds technical – it is. To make this judgment call, you actually have to know what fast technique looks like. But it’s also pretty easy to see these changes in slow motion video. Our latest lesson will kickstart your escape motion training with a series of super-clear, hands-on demonstrations that you can easily follow along with even if you’re brand new to this:
Critiquing Your Own Technique
Crazy, I know. But speed-dependent filming is a cornerstone of our Technique Critique process. We need to ensure that players are actually using the techniques they want to learn. And moving fast enough is often the only way to know.
The Warp Three lesson is just the tip of the iceberg. When you film yourself regularly, you will notice all manner of things you never knew you were doing. If you need help understanding what you’re seeing, feel free to get in touch for a Critique – we’re happy to help.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s our latest lesson on practice speed:
This is actually inspired by a recent conversation right here on the forum referencing our older “Starting With Speed” lesson. As I was driving to the studio, I found myself literally monologuing the script for this to steering wheel. Yep, fully aware of the strange line of work I’m in.
The concept here is to show live Magnet clips of exactly how technique changes when you speed up or slow down. It’s super non-theoretical and very brass-tacks. Judging from the comments so far, I think the message is getting across. I don’t think we’ll get nearly as much pushback on this one. Or perhaps a different kind of pushback, if any.
The crux of the teaching, as you’ll see in the lesson, is what I’m calling “Warp Three”: the speed at which high-speed technique emerges. To learn a new and unfamiliar technique, you don’t need to go as fast as possible – you just need to go Warp Three or faster.
Counterintuitively, it’s not a specific bpm. It’s different for every technique and phrase, so the only way to know when you’ve achieved it is to film. The Andy Wood example we use in the lesson is particularly illustrative. When he switches from DBX / stringhopping to DSX, you can’t miss it, even if you’ve never seen slow motion guitar playing before.
So that’s the actual answer to the question most people ask. i.e. How fast is fast enough? Warp Three fast: it’s fast enough to be correct.
Dang, what a great video. Thanks, Troy.
Exactly! There is a certain amount of co-contraction involved in fast playing, where the downstroke muscles never shut off when the upstroke is playing, and vice versa. At very fast speeds, there probably isn’t even enough time to completely shut off.
No, I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to simulate this when playing slowly. This is the computer mouse example I described in the lesson. It just causes fatigue for no reason. Making a more “easy” motion that does not have co-contraction is how slow playing works. It is simply a different technique. There is no reason to try to make it similar to fast technique. It is already optimized for slow speed playing.
There are very significant differences between fretting technique for slow and fast playing.
This is a deep topic, and I can’t explain everything here in this comment, but I’ll try to outline the big picture here.
When fretting slowly, it’s possible to control subtle movements of the individual fingers in ways that are not possible at speed. This level of control is achieved through careful balancing of opposing muscle groups. In single-note playing, these movements are often used for fretting hand string tracking and position tracking. In chordal playing, these movements are absolutely ubiquitous; every chord is essentially a contortion of the fretting hand.
However, fingers are not independent in any sense. The movement of any finger affects the movement of all others (to varying degrees). The type of control mentioned above requires constant activation of muscles that are common to all fingers. In particular, flexor digitorum profundus (FDP) and extensor digitorum communis (EDC). These muscles are in the forearm and are significantly stronger than the intrinsic muscles of the hand. The intrinsic muscles of the hand act against the communal muscles to achieve fine control at low speeds.
We simply can’t achieve this level of fine control when we play faster. The constant activation of FDP and EDC interferes with the smaller muscles. The fretting hand becomes rigid and the muscles fatigue quickly.
We can’t fix the problem by focusing on “finger independence” at slower speeds, because fingers are not independent and can not be trained to become independent. Trying to focus on “economy of motion” at slower speeds doesn’t work either, this just increases the level of cocontraction.
More than that, when playing slowly, it is possible (and often necessary) to fret with gradual pressure in a way that’s not possible at higher speed. At higher speed, fretting forces must be generated much more suddenly. Imagine the difference between “pressing” the string and “striking” the string.
When we play at speed, we have limited ability to “aim” the fingers individually. The fingers must closely follow their natural arc of motion (like a reflexive grasp). We can not “aim” the fingers, so we must “aim” the hand.
As an analogy, think of a WW2 fighter plane. The machine guns were fixed, so the pilots couldn’t aim the guns. Instead, they aimed the plane through aerial maneuvers.
The “aerial maneuvers” of the fretting hand are often not necessary when playing slowly. However, these maneuvers are absolutely essential in fast playing, so the fretting hand must be maneuverable.
The “maneuvers” required are characteristic to each pattern or lick. They are inherently rhythmic, connecting the fretting hand to the internal clock. This is critical to chunking and synchronisation.
Practicing too slowly allows for the type of fine finger control mentioned previously, and so does not reliably result in the emergence of these maneuvers. Practicing in a fashion that is non-representative of fast playing can actually impede their development.
Unfortunately, none of this is actionable until we deal with some more foundational issues. We have to accept the natural interdependence of our fingers – some fingerings are just inherently inefficient. We also have to address the reuse problem and develop strategies to minimize the frequencies of our movements. The efficient digital cycles are the generic “optimum,” but we can also utilize situational movements (the rock, the roll and the reveal) while fretting.
When all of this is understood, we can at least start with things that we can reasonably expect to be fast. If we can habituate fretting postures which are similar to the hand at rest, which naturally align our muscles to the task and which are maneuverable, then we can actually practice those things in a manner that promotes the emergence of the appropriate movement patterns.
No problem!
I’m glad to help.
I don’t mean to be obtuse or to deflect, but I think this would be quite difficult to do exclusively through text. As I said above, this is a deep topic. There are a lot of prerequisite concepts to understand the “why” behind everything, and different examples are required to demonstrate different concepts clearly.
We have to begin with a fretting posture based on the resting position of the hand which is both maneuverable and naturally aligns the muscles to task. There is no universal fretting posture, there are different archetypes each with their own strengths and weaknesses, so we need some idea of which posture or postures will be suitable.
That much in itself is a huge topic (at least a few hours of instruction), but assuming we have that, we need to solve for fretting sequence which avoids bad cases, which minimizes movement reuse frequency and which facilitates fretting hand flow (that is, the fingers used must result in the hand moving in the intended directions).
Then, we need to start working the fretting sequence on the guitar. With the understanding that we will not be able to achieve the type of fine control that was described in my previous comment at speed, our goal is to find the gross “maneuver” of the fretting hand which will “aim” the fingers. With the understanding that movements will inevitably become smaller and less powerful at higher frequency, it’s actually better to start with large, powerful movements which feel easy.
See my comment about Fitt’s law and forced oscillators here:
More than that, we need the gross maneuver of the fretting hand to be rhythmically regular and clearly perceptible. We need to be able to feel the pulse in the gross movement of the fretting arm and hand, not just the fretting of the individual fingers. In order to synchronize with the picking hand, we need to ensure that the gross movements of the picking and fretting hands and arms have compatible movement phase. If we can ensure this, synchronization is immediate, automatic and stable.
Then, we train for speed as I’ve outlined in my other comments.
Most sweep fingering have been sufficiently well “vetted” at this stage, so assuming that you have the appropriate fretting postures and the understanding the situational movements that are used to reduce movement frequency (the rock, the roll and the reveal), you can get started in applying the fretting sequence and trying to find the gross maneuver as described above. There are some optimizations I could suggest for specific shapes, but the usual fingerings for most of the standard 1 and 2 octave major and minor shapes are reasonably good.
Never ignore the picking hand.
It’s fine to do some repetitions without the picking hand to allow you to focus on feeling the rhythm of the gross maneuver of the fretting hand, but it’s critical to understand what the picking hand will be doing and relate them to eachother. If we focus on playing everything for the fretting hand with hammers or pull-offs, we’ll force a sequence of fretting actions which is not representative of the version which incorporates picking.
More than that, we need the movement phases of the picking and fretting hands to be compatible to ensure synchronization. Starting with each hand separately and trying to combine them can result in building two one-handed coordinations which are not rhythmically compatible and which cannot be synchronized. Trying to match individual pick strokes to individual fretting actions will not produce stable synchronization if the gross rhythmic movements of the hands are not in phase.
I’m quite busy this weekend and I really don’t have time to write up a complete post that goes into all of this in more depth. I should have some time on Monday and I might be able to make a video discussing some of these ideas and provide an example.