How Good is Your Technique?

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  • BarneyBarney Frets: 614
    I think technique as got to be so much more than bpm..in fact im not really sure iff i know the meaning of it in the context..

    I understand phrasing..timing ..feel..accuracy ect but never really understood the word technique..i normally associate it with flash :)

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  • dtrdtr Frets: 1037
    Out of interest, is there a benefit to 'speed' other than playing fast?  Most of the instruction in Technique I've seen has a focus on playing faster.  I mostly play acoustic fingerstyle, and have found the best benefits in terms of practicing technique to come from doing the opposite and slowing things down.  I almost never play pieces over tempo.

    Am I missing something by not learning to play fast, and if so what benefits might I expect to see in the kind of music I play from engaging in Technique exercises like this one?
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  • Old_SwannerOld_Swanner Frets: 24
    Any disagreement on these two statements?

    The easier something is for you, the more musical you can be with it.
    The easier something is for you, the faster you can do it.

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  • BRISTOL86BRISTOL86 Frets: 1920
    I can play that at 260bpm but I can't change from an open chord to a barre chord. 

    I'm a long way from a guitar god!
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  • CarpeDiemCarpeDiem Frets: 275
    This type of exercise is useful in a number of ways, such as; dexterity, timing, speed, coordination. The ability to play fast can add more interest and intensity to songs, eg where the pace builds gradually to a climax in a solo. Where and how you use speed depends on how fast you can play and also the style of music you play. It's an essential skill if you play metal, but likely to be used less often if you play soul music.
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  • TheBlueWolfTheBlueWolf Frets: 1536
    dtr said:
    Out of interest, is there a benefit to 'speed' other than playing fast?  Most of the instruction in Technique I've seen has a focus on playing faster.  I mostly play acoustic fingerstyle, and have found the best benefits in terms of practicing technique to come from doing the opposite and slowing things down.  I almost never play pieces over tempo.

    Am I missing something by not learning to play fast, and if so what benefits might I expect to see in the kind of music I play from engaging in Technique exercises like this one?
    Years ago I worked through a few of David Mead's books one of them being "Rhythm". He had several exercises that focused on a scale fragment, going from eighth notes and triplets to sixteenth notes. The tempo was increased after about a week IIRC.

    His theory was that if you find, for example, triplets at 100bpm the edge of your technique level, trying to play at 120bpm makes 100 feel more comfortable.

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  • VibetronicVibetronic Frets: 1036
    speed can be useful and fun, but it's by no means a measure of overall "technique"...and "technique" can't really be assessed by your ability to play a four note lick at speed across two strings, and nor should it. It's a decent enough practice exercise, but as a way to assess someones overall technical capabilities, not particularly helpful.
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  • Old_SwannerOld_Swanner Frets: 24
    Any disagreement on these two statements?

    The easier something is for you, the more musical you can be with it.
    The easier something is for you, the faster you can do it.

    No disagreement so far, hence using simple logic, we can conclude if a=b and a=c then also b=c.

    ie.  The faster you can do something, the more musical you can be with it.

    Any disagreement here?
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  • DanjiDanji Frets: 225
    Totally, 100%.

    I can play bloomin fast, but I really don't think that I could play Red House to the same genius level as Jimi.  Not in the car park of the ball park close.

    Speed is relative, and no is way an indication of ability. I learned to play fast in my teens, and although it's good fun, it's the same as playing slow, only faster.

    Note choice, placement (rhythm/time), dynamics, accents, narrative, and all the other idiosyncrasies that make up your playing should and usually is taken into account when you hear something.

    Plus, I think that the human condition enjoys to hear music not close to perfection.  I'm a massive jazz nerd, I love people like Clifford Brown who had an near metronomic sense of time. But my favourite band ever is the Stone Roses.

    Speed has little to do with musicality it concerns only with the physical. 
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  • guitarfishbayguitarfishbay Frets: 7953
    It's also a matter of how many hours there are in a day.

    To get to a really high level of clean and fast lead playing takes several hours a day.  There is really no other way, all the '[guitar] household name' types put in a huge amount of time to get as good as they got.

    Thing is, fast lead playing isn't the main thing for many players, it's rhythm.  I've met countless guitarists who can kind of shred, but can't do rhythm playing evenly in time and dynamics with good intonation... because they're not practicing it at all.
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  • bingefellerbingefeller Frets: 5723
    A while ago I found myself concentrating on fast picking and I lost sight of what I enjoyed doing - learning songs.  These days I'm more interested in learning songs, and my technique is pretty much OK to cover a lot of the techniques involved.  When it comes to sweeping or fast picking, I'm not good in these areas, so I tend to use a lot of legato instead of picking and re-arrange things so I can avoid sweeping, depending on the shape of the sweep. 
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  • BarneyBarney Frets: 614
    Any disagreement on these two statements?

    The easier something is for you, the more musical you can be with it.
    The easier something is for you, the faster you can do it.

    No disagreement so far, hence using simple logic, we can conclude if a=b and a=c then also b=c.

    ie.  The faster you can do something, the more musical you can be with it.

    Any disagreement here?
    Yeah ...iv heard really quick players that are not musical at all and very little feel...so no i dont think they are linked at all.. 
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  • HoofHoof Frets: 491
    195bpm for me before things start falling apart.

    That said, I've not really worked that much on lead technique. I always figured that you spend most of the time playing rhythm so I concentrate more on that. The other guitarist in my band has far better lead technique than me but often struggles to play quite easy (to me) rhythm parts cleanly.
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  • Old_SwannerOld_Swanner Frets: 24
    edited May 2017
    Lots of subjective opinion in response, but not much meat.

    When possible I like to remove human perception from the equation as it can cloud things considerably.  When we're dealing with facts, things are much clearer.  In this case, someone is either better, or they're not than the last time they measured.

    This is proposed as a test, not an exercise.  It is expected for most, that once familiar with the pattern, no amount of repetition will yield improvement in their top speed.  One of the classic misinterpretations of this sort of thing is that if only we had the time to repeat it for 8 hours a day we'd all be as fast as <insert your speed hero here>.  I've proven to myself that that's just not true, and I've pushed many others to do that too.

    That's when this sort of examination gets interesting and productive!  Bypassing cognitive dissonance is often the first step.  Of course, for those of you 100% happy with your own playing, there's nothing here for you.
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  • dtrdtr Frets: 1037
    Lots of subjective opinion in response, but not much meat.

    When possible I like to remove human perception from the equation as it can cloud things considerably.  When we're dealing with facts, things are much clearer.  In this case, someone is either better, or they're not than the last time they measured.

    This is proposed as a test, not an exercise.  It is expected for most, that once familiar with the pattern, no amount of repetition will yield improvement in their top speed.  One of the classic misinterpretations of this sort of thing is that if only we had the time to repeat it for 8 hours a day we'd all be as fast as <insert your speed hero here>.  I've proven to myself that that's just not true, and I've pushed many others to do that too.

    That's when this sort of examination gets interesting and productive!  Bypassing cognitive dissonance is often the first step.  Of course, for those of you 100% happy with your own playing, there's nothing here for you.
    I think you're saying that to progress from my current level on that test I'm going to need to make actual physical changes to how I play, perhaps moving away from playing with the tips of my fingers to keeping them flatter against the strings?

    I've got no doubt that making those kind of changes would make me not only faster but also increase my capacity for musicality when playing fast.  But I still wonder whether those changes would increase my capacity for musicality when playing anything.

    To twist you analogy a little, MacDonalds are expert in making burgers.  They even have their own burger making university, so it's fair to say they know a hell of a lot about making burgers.  They realised that to increase their burgers-per-minute they couldn't just keep the usual guy-at-the-grill, they needed to make real physical changes to their kitchens and machinery, and they keep iterating over the design and their bpm keeps going up.  They can churn out burgers super fast, and each one meets their standards of tastiness and cleanliness, etc.

    Are they therefore the tastiest burgers in the world?  They may be the tastiest ones produced at that high rate of burgers-per-minute, but its a joke to even consider that they are the tastiest in the world.  The physical changes they have to make to their kitchens to achieve their desired bpm are designed to work at that speed, and needed to achieve that speed, but they make for a very different kind of kitchen than you'd find where the aim is to make the tastiest burgers.  Even the best chefs in the world would struggle to make anything particularly tasty in a MacDonalds kitchen, because the physical changes that have taken place there are all aimed at increasing speed.

    I don't mean to suggest that this is the same with guitar - I don't know nearly enough to say - but I do think it shows that the simplistic logic leading to "The faster you can do something, the more musical you can be with it." isn't particularly meaningful when combined with making physical changes.  I do currently practice speed exercises.because I agree to a point with the faster=easier logic, but I currently try to keep what I'd consider good fingerstyle technique which I feel I develop more (in terms of the physical form and precision of my fretting hand, or how I pick the strings) from playing pieces slowly than playing exercises fast.

    So I'm at the point where I would need to make technique changes to progress with this test, but I'm still wondering... are those always a good thing (i.e. changing how I play so that I could improve on the test would benefit my acoustic fingerstyle playing) or do they become an end in themselves, changing my technique towards that of a shredder and actually away from where I want to go?
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  • gitapikgitapik Frets: 19
    The ability to play clean at extremely fast tempo doesn't mean that you have to all the time.

    It's like a baseball pitcher who's got a supreme fastball. If that's all he throws, then he becomes predicable. The hitters are going to count and, eventually, start hitting the ball out of the park.

    If, on the other hand, the pitcher has other pitches mastered, as well, then the fastball becomes a serious force. 

    It's important to have the ability to play fast and clean. But it's no more important than any other technique in music. 


    G.A.S. = "Git a Sound"
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  • Old_SwannerOld_Swanner Frets: 24
    Good points here, it's getting "meatier", especially with burger connotations!

     Here's a personal example.  I spent time last year learning 16 bars of Pat Martino's "Sunny".  It's about 130bpm on the record.  After a couple of weeks I could get it to about 115bpm fairly comfortably.  I managed once through at 130bpm but was right on the edge, so it would never have worked in any sort of pressure situation and certainly wasn't consistent. 

    It really boiled down to one run.  Whatever speed I could get that up to, I could do the whole thing at (sound familiar?).  Hence it made sense to pull that out as a representative pattern.   I pulled it out, benchmarked it, wrote down the date and my measurement (115bpm) and put it on the "file and forget" stack, to return to at some point in the future.

    So, if I come back in 3 years and that measurement is still 115bpm, would you imagine it would work any better when trying to play it at 130bpm?  Probably not.

    If the top speed on the tricky bit made it to 130bpm I'd hope to be able to get through the full thing no problem, but I'd still be at the edge of my ability and liable to fall in a performance situation when the pressure is on.

    If however, it (the trickiest bit) is up to 150bpm, how will playing the full thing at 130bpm feel?  What about if I could get it up to 170bpm?  There'd be 40bpm of headroom now.  I'd say it's that headroom that gives you the mental space to be more musical with the notes you play.  Less processing power taken up having to get the notes out, therefore more to focus on "musicality"!




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  • Old_SwannerOld_Swanner Frets: 24
    dtr said:

    So I'm at the point where I would need to make technique changes to progress with this test, but I'm still wondering... are those always a good thing (i.e. changing how I play so that I could improve on the test would benefit my acoustic fingerstyle playing) or do they become an end in themselves, changing my technique towards that of a shredder and actually away from where I want to go?
    With students I encourage them to build a collection of bite sized patterns relating to the stuff they want to learn.  The pattern i use here is a "one size fits all" test to give a general overview of where things are at with their technique.  Takes about five minutes and can spark quite a lot of interest.

    If your problems are left hand related, then everything you learn about your left hand that gives you a speed increase on this test has to relate to other things.

     Same for your right hand, and the same again if your issues are related to the co-ordination of both hands.

    Once you've exhausted the initial improvement in speed you get by bashing it for a bit, you'll need more strength somewhere to improve.  It may be right hand, it may be left hand it may be purely mental, but that extra strength is then available to be used in other situations, the ones you're really interested in.
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  • gitapikgitapik Frets: 19
    Old_Swanner said:
    If however, it (the trickiest bit) is up to 150bpm, how will playing the full thing at 130bpm feel?  What about if I could get it up to 170bpm?  There'd be 40bpm of headroom now.  I'd say it's that headroom that gives you the mental space to be more musical with the notes you play.  Less processing power taken up having to get the notes out, therefore more to focus on "musicality"!
    Cool thread.

    I'm totally into the concept of developing physical skills in order to clear the way for better expression, but with a caveat on this one:

    The idea of isolating and practicing the difficult passages is key to developing as a player, whether it's a cover or your own tune. The logic here (if I'm getting this right) is that the faster you can play a passage, the easier it will be to play at a slower speed, later.

    I think this can vary according to the individual. Muscle memory is a tricky thing and it applies to everyone...some more than others. So if someone has been practicing at 170bpm and then plays the tune at the 130bpm, he/she might run into some problems, especially with the transition both into and out of the passage. The hand still wants to play that one passage at a faster speed and, according to the player's bent/experience, might need to be trained, once again...but to slow it down this time. 

    My personal would be to work up to mastering the difficult passage at 130 (140 tops) and, once that's down, practice it to tempo and include the phrase leading into it and the one which comes afterwards in order to ensure continuity. It's easy to tighten up just before or after the hard passages, knowing "what's coming" or "phew...it's over". Make sure everything's seamless by getting it right seven times in row, to tempo, with no mistakes and then play the full piece up to and past that point.



    G.A.S. = "Git a Sound"
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  • gitapikgitapik Frets: 19
    edited May 2017
    I'm new here and felling a little self conscious about breaking any rules of etiquette with those who've been here longer. So I'll refute myself by saying that, if you're a pro or aspiring to be one, then you'll have to be able to play it at 170bpm if the gig calls for it.
    G.A.S. = "Git a Sound"
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