I think JustinGuitar is wrong about playing slowly to get faster

allen

His mantra of playing perfectly before you go faster has annoyed me for a long time so I did a video explaining why.

TeleMaster

I'd say spend less time overthinking these things and more time just playing the thing mate. Justin is right, it's common sense. 

Blaendulais

a fundamental educational tenet i am afraid

hollywoodrox

This is an excellent video. Great job Allen  you are spot on . Really well presented too 
  Thanks for sharing 

guitarmangler

Yup. Go fast and then clean it up. As endorsed by Shawn Lane

RevMatt

Great video Allen, love the way you persuaded your family to feature in the ball throwing section!

allen

hollywoodrox said:

This is an excellent video. Great job Allen  you are spot on . Really well presented too 
  Thanks for sharing 

Thanks. Much appreciated.

allen

RevMatt said:

Great video Allen, love the way you persuaded your family to feature in the ball throwing section!

You have received a lol. At least you watched it!

Although if that was my wife I wouldn't be wasting time every evening talking to you lot on here.

Lewy

Great video, and absolutely spot on. Learn the chunks slowly, so you really know what they ought to be, then floor it to get faster. 

Bigsby

I think the points you make about paying attention and noticing your mistakes are both well served by slowing down. I tend to find I can't hear mistakes when practicing something fast. But if I slow down for a bit, hear the mistakes, correct them, then pick up the tempo, I find I can now actually hear the mistakes at the faster tempo. 

Perhaps you're both right in a way - you need to slow down to the point where you can hear the mistakes, as opposed to slowing down to the point where you're not making mistakes. But you really have to be able to hear the mistakes, or you'll end up practicing them! I think that's the essence of Justin's argument too (don't practice mistakes).

the_other_ed

There is no either/or here. Both are important to control, I would say.

And, isn't there a Discussion area on the forum for Technique...

octatonic

People tend to teach the method they were taught.

Barney

I think iff you want to play fast just go for it and then make it less sloppy ...iv heard players who can play fast though and struggle with medium or slow tempos cos the technique will be different ... I think that is where start slow and increase the tempo slowly works 

digitalkettle

RevMatt said:

Great video Allen, love the way you persuaded your family to feature in the ball throwing section!

That wasn't his family...he had to draft in reserves after the earlier wrench throwing session went wrong.

digitalkettle

I think the important point here is that one's 'regular' playing is probably quite physically different to one's 'fast' playing, e.g. picking hand motions may get a lot more direct/flatter...anchor points may change, etc.

Tannin

Good, thought-provoking work there @allen - and so refreshing to see someone articulating a well-thought-out view that doesn't simply follow the mainstream and indeed challenges it. 

My own take: there are different ways to learn. Some methods work better for some people. Some methods work better for some tasks. There is no single One Right Way. The trick is (a) to find what works for you, and (b) to be prepared to switch methods where your normal method isn't working. 

Thanks for posting!

sweepy

I am firmly in the Shawn Lane, Andre Agassi camp, fast as humanly possible then refine the technique, builds better muscle memory according to Agassi's coach 

Dave_Mc

I've never really understood that argument either- the "don't try to run before you can walk" approach. Problem is, don't most babies kind of totter/run before they can walk? EDIT: I wrote that before I saw the video, lol. I'm working my way through the video, and I have to say- nice work, this is basically what I've always thought. Except I don't make Youtube videos and I'm not a guitar teacher.  

I guess the way I would look at it is- can the person telling you the way to play fast play fast? If not, I'm disinclined to listen. If they can, I'm more inclined to listen (while still realising that different methods may suit different people).

EDIT: Oh yeah. I remember having a PE teacher at one point who attempted to teach us how to walk properly. We were 13/14.

....

That same teacher attempted to teach us how to play tennis, too. I guess it was starting from first principles. Maybe it would have been good if there'd been time. I don't remember, by the end of the year, ever getting anywhere close to even playing an actual tennis match.

BillDL

The bulk of Justin's tuition videos are aimed at absolute beginners through to campfire strummers, not "shredders".  From what I recall of having seen a few of the videos in which he reiterated his advice about not rushing, the point he was making concerned chord changes, not sweep arpeggios, van Halen type tapping, or legato hammer-ons and pull-offs. In context with those particular videos I can fully understand what he was saying and tend to agree with it i.e. ensure that you are fretting every string accurately without any fret buzzes or dead notes and slowly practice chord changes until you can change chords accurately and then work on getting it faster and more fluent.

Isn't it more sensible to learn Buddy Holly's Peggy Sue at a sedate pace and fretting all the notes well than immediately trying to play it at the song's original tempo with strings buzzing and wrong notes being sounded?  That is what I believe he has tried to emphasise in the videos I have seen where he tells people to start off slow and accurate.  A real world analogy would be somebody learning something like archery or snooker, where starting off slow and deliberate helps with accuracy and consistency. 

Now, there might well be some other videos by Justin that I haven't seen in which he covers more advanced techniques aimed at intermediate players - the type of playing where it's very hard to almost impossible to slow the playing down and still have it sound like a piece of music rather than producing a series of plodding notes.  In those instances it makes more sense to try and achieve a reasonable tempo from the start and work on accuracy as you build up speed.

prlgmnr

Anyone ever seen a baby play Eugene's Trick Bag?

relic245

100% and very well explained. 

Also agree, in my 20's I spent a long time practicing scale patterns slowly with a metronome and trying to speed them up. It never worked and I concluded that I didn't really have the technical ability. 

Now (fast approaching 60) I was inspired to start playing faster after going to download.  I just started playing faster, nothing else. At first it was horrible, messy and inaccurate. After just 1 week I was noticing improvement.  No practicing and breaking it down, as you say, just going for it for 5 to 10 minutes a day. 

I guess if I was a guitar teacher it would be good business practice to tell people to practice slowly and build up. They will take longer to progress and so you have a client for longer