-
scales....straight 1/8ths....1/16ths....practice slowly till your mind and hands are on the same page...practice slowly to learn faster...the speed will come in time...play everyday....for technique building I have my students run through violin studies from violinonline.com..
time on the instrument ...pierre
-
02-05-2009 09:58 PM
-
I remember what someone told me once about speed. Some players learn certain things by playing them at full speed and then work on correcting the sloppiness over a period of time. Other players start out slow and over a period of time build up the speed while concentrating on good technique so sloppiness doesn't creep into their playing. In my opinion, it's much easier to learn the second way because you only concentrate on what will get you where you want to go and you don't need to go back in and correct bad habits. It really works.
-
Music is music, if you are still at a stage where you talk about better or worse music, you should practice more. There is more to music than complexity and there is also more than only emotion. And most importantly, there is more than just you.
As far as "building speed" everyone has a different idea about it and how to utilize it. Jazz players certainly, speed comes secondary to articulation. If you play a line it's about all the notes in that line building something, if you can't articulate every note the way you want to, you are sacrificing a lot of your musicality, and for a jazz audience, that will not earn you any points.
-
Technically speaking, as many said above, practice regularly with a metronome at a speed you can manage. But there is one important thing I've learn to gain control and speed : watch closely for too much tension in your muscles : mainly in the shoulders, in the arms, in the hands and fingers. You would be surprise, if you stop at it, how many times or how often we get cramped with this undesirable tension. Often we don't even notice it. And you can forget about speed if you have any tension of this sort when you play ! Learn to detect this tension (it's not always evident) and when it happens, relax and start over, slower, concentrating on staying relaxed.
-
Absolutely. Speed is just a tool for the toolbox, but playing jazz fast without focusing on content or phrasing is lame at best. You can get away with than it rock/metal, as the harmony is very elementary (bands like Dream Theatre not with standing), and you have thick distortion to cover a multitude of sins.
Originally Posted by Joe Dalton
With jazz, you are playing a cleaner tone (usually), with more complex harmonies that rarely stay within one key. Better to do it right at first, work on timing and phrasing and allow speed to evolve over time. Remember, music is not an athletic event or competition, and thoughts about who is the fastest is the fodder for teenaged boys who read Guitar World.
Not saying that is your point at all xador, and I am not targeting the above at anyone in particular. It is just a topic that continues to crop up from time to time.
-
I prefer "quality" to "quantity" any day.......
-
Joe, Guy, derek and bud. You guys have said it all beautifully. To paraphrase another famous musician, you can take one note and wring it out in such a way that you can make that girl in the first row cry her eyes out and raise her heart rate.
-
O.K. now ! So that's what you're looking for Originally Posted by hot ford coupe
-
that may be so......If I was 50 lbs lighter.......30 yrs younger......and had a full head of hair...... Originally Posted by hot ford coupe
...that young lass may be shedding tears...but I am sure am sure they would not be tears of joy or passion..
.
-
Haha, it's very true though, a single note can be a lot more powerfull than people think.
I remember meeting my teacher for the first time, he played one note the way notes are meant to be played and I knew I was with the right teacher.
Even after I moved, I made the trip to study under him once every 2 weeks.
-
Playing fast is cool, but I like playing slow the most.
-
a good thing to practice is slowly increasing speed over a year. it may sound like a huge undertaking, but what your really practicing is developing ideas at a faster rate, and being able to think of lines at speed. so really if you start slow, quavers at 180 or 200, then stay with that, then increase, you get use to creating lines and being forced to create them. then when i comes to application, you just pic and choose the ideas that come out, dependant upon how you feel, and hold off others and breathe.......
Long story short, get used to thinking faster.
-
I think playing slowly and right is allot harder. Less flash, longer notes that have to be just right where in shredding type play the note(s) go by so fast it's pretty hard to detect the errors as well. Originally Posted by soulkat9
-
I'll never be a fast player, I haven't got it in me. But I'll be sure to get to the point where I'm a GOOD player, that I have in reach. Also, I'd rather be good than fast, if forced to pick one or the other. But practicing slowly, paying attention to every note, brings some sort of clarity to my otherwize dizzy mind. It pays off, and even if I have this synch problem due to the bang in the head way back, by being persistent it gets better, so I think being at it all the time and never to quit is good...
Peace
Skei (the all the time one)
-
Actually, I played with Pinetop Perkins for awhile and we would do Ellington/Basie/Parker heads against the band and he would laugh his head off...depends on the kind of blues; you can't do that with the SRV types.
-
Mind you, it's a little bit easier to sustain one note and get a lot of emotion out of it if you have about 50 special effect pedals, solidbody guitar, etc..
It's a bit like the way that Kenny G. appeals to VAST NUMBERS of people with one simple blues lick played over and over again, while Coltrane appeals only to jazz musicians, for the most part. Sorry, it has to be said. Let's not get carried away with this "one-note" beauty stuff. Boring!!
-
Really? Tell that to Miles Davis. He was the king of the one note. Same with BB King. King can't grab his ass with both hands when it comes to theory, chord or speed. However, he can kill you with that voice and that one or two notes. Originally Posted by franco6719
I guess it all comes down to taste. What do you want to hear (rhetorically speaking)?
-
Sure, I love them both. But I also like to listen to the blind Art Tatum fly from one end of the piano to another piano on Jupiter with just his right hand while playing like three more pianists with his left, or Oscar Peterson swing his tail off with massive lines that never end until my head has fallen to the floor at uptempo speed, or Pat Metheny playing "too many notes" (according to many people on Youtube) on "All the Things You are". I can enjoy one or the other. Different styles is what life is all about. I just wanted to put in for the other side of things a bit. Originally Posted by derek
-
As far as developing speed, I think you want to try to avoid the obsession with developing speed for the sake of speed. It reminds of an anecdote that Tommy Tedesco told at an appearance at Berklee one time. He said he had a student who could play the C Major scale faster than anybody he ever saw. But that's all he could do!! He would just play the C major scale as fast as he could and he thought that was "great playing" or something.
You have to develop dexterity of both hands, knowledge of the fretboard, accuracy, tone and other things as part of technique. All i can recommend is hard work, persistence and graduality (like anything else basically). There are some good books all over the place nowadays for technique. Pratice arpeggiois, lines, scales, patterns. Violin and other classical stuff is very helpful, as people have pointed out on this site (usually requires some reading ability though).
I don't like speed for the sake of speed. There is such a thing as musicality and emotionality at fast tempos (listen to Paco de Lucia, for example): brio and sensuality. If it gets robotic, Guitar Hero stuff or Yngwie Malmteen types, than I just fall asleep.
-
Speed is just a tool that you use to say what you wanna say---if that's all you have to say or if it's well-placed quarter notes on a ballad, what the hey? It's a big world...but either approach can be stultifying with the wrong intentions.
-
Playing with a metronome is not the vehicle to speed. In fact, most virtuoso pickers seem to report that their technical developments all happened relatively quickly- in a matter of months even- wherein they went from struggling with technique to truly mastering it. Personally, I suspect that these periods of clarity stem from a very detailed analysis of the way they use their plectrum. Without trying to seem haughty, I believe that this idea is true because I also underwent a complete chops transformation. I went from struggling with simple sixteenth note passages one month to flying over up bop tunes the next.
Play very, very slowly and examine your technique- are there any ways you see at this slow tempo that would contribute to more efficient technique? Are there specific aspects of your right hand technique that cause you trouble? How could you remedy those problems? Would solving them balance your overall playing ability?
If you're still finding difficulty with your technique, check out Cracking the Code. It's a documentary dedicated to the guitar plectrum, and the cast list is out of this world: Frank Gambale, Steve Morse, Mike Stern, Tommy Emmanuel, Rusty Cooley, Jimmy Bruno. Even if you're happy with your technique, it's interesting to see these musicians talk about their approaches to the instrument.
-
I thought this passage was particularly interesting, and supports the experience I had:
Cracking the Code: The Secrets of Virtuoso Picking Technique
-
No shortcuts in my experience and, more importantly, people I have spoken or studied with who have the outstanding technique. Hard work. Period.
-
Another thing is that you can develop the right hand and leave the left hand neglected (this actually happened to me) or viceversa. Focus on the LEFT HAND and you will be able to play legato, staccato, etc..
-
There are plenty of books that have great advice. There are also tons of free sources for exercises, but I would suggest picking up a copy of Guitar Speed Trainer - speed isn't so much of an issue for me, but I use the program still to practice with or to work on difficult licks that I have come up with. Its a great training resource though for people who want to tackle speed.
Reply With Quote
2 new & excellent Jazz Comping Truefire...
Yesterday, 10:22 PM in Comping, Chords & Chord Progressions