Poll: How Fast Are You?

[Flyin' Brian]

To me a more musically relevant question would be. "Can you play interesting ideas at 60bpm without doubling the time and using nothing shorter than 8ths notes?"

[ronjazz]

To me a more musically relevant question would be. "Can you play interesting ideas at 60bpm without doubling the time and using nothing shorter than 8ths notes?"

Why is that more relevant? It reminds me of Henry Ford's choice of only black for his first cars: rather boring. Playing interesting ideas slowly is not better than playing them quickly.

[Flyin' Brian]

Why is that more relevant? It reminds me of Henry Ford's choice of only black for his first cars: rather boring. Playing interesting ideas slowly is not better than playing them quickly.

I'm not suggesting that one play slowly all of the time, therefore the black car analogy is faulty.

My point was that playing fast for the sake of playing fast isn't musical. Neither for that matter is playing slowly just to play slowly, however it's much harder to "hide behind" if you will, a bunch of well practiced speed licks when you're playing at 50-60 bpm.

That also doesn't mean that I'm saying that everybody who's tearing it up a fast tempos isn't playing good stuff. Just that it's harder at slower tempos because good listeners both on the stage and in the audience will know if you're jiving them with some well practiced licks from David Baker or of you're actually creating something.

[princeplanet]

Playing fast, yeah, had that down as a kid. Now thinking fast, that's a whole 'nother ball game. When I can finally get good at that, I'd like to say it is what separates men from boys.....

[TheMorningFrost]

If I play it over and over and gradually increase, I can speed it up to around 140. Starting out fresh for the day though, only maybe 90 and that may not be clean. I need some time to warm up.

Straight 16th notes on the Low E string, I've gotten to about 220 maximum, but that's bound to cause tendonitus to try to stiff arm that for a whole song (bands like Cryptopsy).

Gotta work on getting that speed with relaxed picking.

[KeithEG]

Why would guitar playing actually make your fingers longer?

While playing guitar, the fretting hand gets a more vigorous workout than the picking hand. The fretting hand grows stronger muscles as a result. For a youth or adolescent logging enough hours at the guitar, the bones of the fretting hand fingers will also grow larger (longer) as an adaption to the increased workload, even the left hand fingers of a normally right-handed person.

It's like Reggie, in the M. Night Shyamalan movie "Lady in the Water", the body builder who only worked only one side of his body, boasting of a 4.5" difference between his right and left arm.

Or maybe it's more like the line from the Hoyt Axton song:
Work your fingers to the bone, and what do you get?
Bony fingers!

[KeithEG]

For a youth or adolescent logging enough hours at the guitar, the bones of the fretting hand fingers will also grow larger (longer) as an adaption to the increased workload, even the left hand fingers of a normally right-handed person.

FWIW, I did not simply invent this hypothesis, but instead first learned of it while reading a reputable guitar publication about a year ago. "That's impossible!", I scoffed out loud. But the next thing I did was to put my hands together, aligning the crease at the base of left & right hand index fingers, and sure as shiite, my left hand fingers were all longer than the right hand, most noticeably the LH ring finger, about 1/4" longer than RH ring finger.

On another occasion, I was hanging with a friend's cover band during a break, and they were discussing hand anatomy. So without telling them the hypothesis, I asked all four musicians, all right-handed, to carefully compare LH & RH finger lengths. The guys on keys, bass, and drums had equal finger lengths. But the guitarist -- one of the best I've heard, a lifelong musician, and viola performance major in college -- had noticeably longer LH fingers than RH fingers, which lends further support to the theory.

[docbop]

[Stevebol]

I'm the fastest guitar player in the world and I'm unemployed.

[Stevebol]

I want to know who the slowest guitar player is. Now that would be interesting to see.

[edh]

I want to know who the slowest guitar player is. Now that would be interesting to see.

ummmm....that would be me.

[TF]

The key is to become the band leader. Even better, compose your own music.

Then you can play as slow as you like!

[marcwv]

This guy will make you all Jealous....from one of the other threads!

[AleikhBaba]

whoa whoa whoa! that's hot - and then subsequently boring.

[Vladan]

That's just the Gipsy way of doing it. Lots of people like it, lots of people do not. I don't, but this guy is among the better I've heard.
BTW, he is a genuine Gipsy, by birth, from my very country. Now lives in Austria.

[jzucker]

a more interesting question is:

How slow can you play with a good time feel and locked in 8th notes?

The standard metronome only goes down to 40bpm. When I was at the university of miami, we used to practice at 30-35 bpm...

[ChrisDowning]

Be careful what you wish for. This sort of thing can become an obsession. I had a student turn up and tell me he had achieved playing at 32 notes per second and was working that up to 64 notes per second (sweeping and tapping!) He went on to a famous London contemporary music school - hundreds of students at any one time. I met the Principle a few years later at a summer workshop and was telling him this story in the bar. Out of all thos students over the years he remembered this player immediately and named him!! Perhaps not the best thing to be remembered for!

[bobby d]

Love SRV but he wasn't exactly a slow, soulful player. He played plenty fast for a blues-guy

Yeah, faster than Muddy Waters. Playing fast is always amazing but just 3 notes played with feeling can be more musical. It's like in 1990 shred guitar came to an end and Kurt Cobain was the new thing. Back to simple, slow lines that a beginner could learn in one lesson.

[jzucker]

I don't think you can really generalize about this. There are plenty of guys who can play fast who are very soulful.

Bird,Trane,Diz,Martino,Pass,Metheny,Tyner.

But if you mindlessly practice fast scales, you will get good at playing fast scales.

The most important thing is to diversify your practice routine and IMO, it's more important to be able to be in the pocket at slower tempos than be able to burn at ridiculous tempos.

[AlainJazz]

a more interesting question is:

How slow can you play with a good time feel and locked in 8th notes?

The standard metronome only goes down to 40bpm. When I was at the university of miami, we used to practice at 30-35 bpm...

So true. Playing slow with good time feel is extremely difficult and it is also difficult to play at that speed and keeping it interesting without boring everyone to tears. Takes a lot of practice.

[wizard3739]

a more interesting question is:

How slow can you play with a good time feel and locked in 8th notes?

This concept truly separates the men from the boys in the musician world.

wiz

[ChrisDowning]

Interestingly, the bluegrass flatpickers play fast at times, but the other big thing to be able to play very clearly. So practicing in that stule is alla bout starting really slowly playing each note the very best you can and right on the rhythm. In Brad Davies and Dan Millers book on "Speed, Accuracy, and Tone" they get you started on improving all these by playing 8th notes at 60bpm - that's only two notes a second! A classic example of less is more.

[KeithEG]

So true. Playing slow with good time feel is extremely difficult and it is also difficult to play at (30-40 bpm) and keeping it interesting without boring everyone to tears. Takes a lot of practice.

I'm so slow, I can play at 0 bpm -- or at least I could, but I won't, because every time I do it, it makes the world stop spinning on its axis... (I'm pretty sure it's inverse-Superman-effect, as ably described earlier in this thread :-)

[KeithEG]

Importantly, someone pointed out that "playing 16th-triplets at 160 bpm is not the same [in difficulty] as playing 16ths at 240 bpm". This is true. Clearly, playing anything at a 50% faster tempo is inherently more difficult, as noted in earlier discussion of cerebral challenge of fast-hard-bop. When I wrote otherwise, it was in a discussion of pure physiological limits, expressed in (notes/second); ie, both are 960 notes/minute, or 16 notes/second.

And in terms of pure technique at speed, regular 16ths are tougher than triplet-16ths, because to play it musically, one has to prominently accent the downbeat, accenting every 4th rather than only every 6th note. Focusing on the accents means you gotta think picking hand just as much as fretting hand, which only compounds the difficulty. But it makes all the difference in the world musically, especially in a post-shred-guitar-paradigm, where anybody can blaze scales at a million miles an hour, but it sounds just like that, just blazing scales (or worse yet, shortcut-shredders whose left hand and right hand aren't keeping up with each other, they just wiggle both AFAP and hope for the best!! :-P)

And remember, the key to fast bop is accenting chord changes while blazing a stream of 16ths, which means first ya gotta be able to throw in accents at speed. Check Wynton Marsalis playing "Cherokee":

[koenibaby]

For your record : 160bpm,Dmaj, 4x up and down on a jazz box. Shape doesn't matter much.