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.
There is something interesting: Everybody lets their picking hand move as slowly as possible to match the beat, and the picking hands never quickly jump and then wait. This is very different than the fingering hand. It is this tying the speed of the picking hand to the beat and never waiting (but abruptly turning around) that seems to create the things that you observe. I wonder, is there anybody that moves their picking hand quickly and then waits, resulting in more uniformity at every speed? My guess is, “no,” nobody does that. And why not?
Anyway, thanks for the video!
This matches very well with my experience, which is that the slowest speed that you can’t “fake it” at is extremely important to practice at. It’s like 150-160 sixteenths for 3NPS lines, for me. Can’t tell what it is for 1NPS stuff.
This is exactly what i am working on forba few months now.
Most of the faster stuff i now am able play with the same motion when playing slow.
My experience is that most comes down to how big or small the motion is.
When playing fast the motions of course are very small.
Most of us willl make much bigger motions when playing slow, and that is where the string hopping comes in.
I am making the motions as small as possible when playing slow, and when i speed up there is no noticable difference anymore.
The one note per string stuff is still not the same but most of the other lines feel pretty much the same now.
However, i am still working on getting the same dynamics.
I tend to hit the strings harder when playing fast, which is difficult to do playing slow with very small motions.