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Speed is my weakest area. I can play very fast, but only when I do it on my own terms and only for quick burst. I can’t do it on anyone else’s terms (i.e. play fast passages as written) and I can’t sustain it. Over the long years I’ve learned to create an illusion of speed and accuracy and I can even say that my limitations have helped me in developing something that might be called my style. But the fact remains that I have to change fast passages in pieces.
Tommy Emmanuel once told me that there’s a neurologically dictated speed limit for each player, one that you can’t raise no matter how much you relax, how much you practice, etc. I’m inclined to agree. Not everyone can play Pasquale Grasso’s long, superfast, legato runs, no matter how hard they might try.
Having said that, I’m wondering if some of you might have succeeded in raising the personal speed limit, in the sense of breaking through a ceiling that’s been there for years (as opposed to gradually getting faster with practice).
I’m also wondering how others deal with their speed limits in practical situations like gigs - I’m sure many have been in situations where challenging faster tempos where expected.
Finally, it’s somewhat intriguing why speed doesn’t seem to be an issue for, say, pianists and violinists. Of course they also have limits, but it seems to be that on average they seem to be able to play faster than most guitarists can.
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10-11-2023 12:48 PM
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I think there's a speed limit, but I think it's probably a lot higher than people think. Your true speed limit I think is how fast you can tremolo pick. Almost everyone can tremolo pick sixteenth notes at at least like 150bpm. If you can do that, then with practice you can cleanly play repeated patterns on a single string (even if it's just 1234 for example) at that speed. The difficult part about speed on guitar is string changes, but if you understand the mechanics of string changes and what picking style you naturally gravitate towards, you can find certain lines (again even if just repeated patterns) that you can take across the strings. The hard part then becomes figuring out how within that limited system of picking to play musical things. One way to stimulate that is to come up with a musical idea independently from the guitar (or take a transcribed lines) and then spend time trying to optimize fingerings to maximize the tendencies that are easy for you. I've found that the more you do that, the more it naturally becomes part of how you improvise.
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No. Decided to focus on organ where it's easy to run fast rhythms lol. :P
Originally Posted by Oscar67
Wouldn't your speed limit be more the bottleneck of your left hand fretting the notes? Originally Posted by BreckerFan
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For decades I chased picking speed and accomplished little, following the old 'practice slow to play fast' mantra. Several years ago, I stumbled onto this video and within a few days I was playing faster than I ever thought possible.
I never attained the ability to run fast lines on a whim like a Mclaughlin or a Metheny. But I did break my speed threshold by a wide margin, following this lesson. And the discovery of what my hands (and fingers) were actually capable of doing, put me on a path of awareness of physical technique at a much deeper level.
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Look up Cracking the Code. Buy a month subscription and watch the pickslanting primer. You'll be flying in no time.
Bold statement: The genetic speed limit would be at the upper limits of human movement not at 'fast jazz' or fast music speeds.
How fast can you tap on a table? Probably over 200bpm 8th notes... well that's alternate picking 16ths at that tempo. What about scribbling an arc with a pencil? Or scratching a scratch card with a coin?
Proving to yourself that you can make fast motions away from the guitar is part of the solution.
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Be Yngwie
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There's a lot of good stuff on Troy's site. You can get a lot out of his freebies on YouTube alone. This is the one that got me to pony up for a subscription, tho - just had to see the full interview :-)
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Most of my life is spent trying to temper raw speed into something more in the pocket
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I think left hand is easier to get faster than right hand. With practice I think most people can get their left hand up to whatever speed their right hand is going. And if you just pick up a guitar and make the left hand motions for 1234 on a single string, it's pretty easy to do it very quickly. But there are certain natural limits that the right hand runs into when trying to do an alternating motion like that. That's why I think it's more common to feel tension in your right hand at high speeds than your left. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
Now of course when you're actually trying make real music, left hand, or at least synchronization with the left hand, is probably moreso the speed limit because the patterns become more complicated. But for just raw speed limit, I think the right hand governs.
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My ceiling was broken when I discovered Troy Grady's stuff. I thought that gradually getting faster was how it happened, and that it would simply be a matter of time before I worked up to speed (not even very high speed!). Turned out I was wrong, and that to play fast I had to just... try to play fast. As other people have said, the place to start is the tremolo at speeds at least of about 160 BPM. The speed you already have, it just takes work to be able to do it consistently and for however long you want to do it - and then there are the string changes... Originally Posted by Oscar67
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i think having watched a couple of videos on this that my main
problem is syncing up my
left and right hands ….
(I can tremolo pick on one note ok)
(I think my left and right brain
hemisheres are out of touch with
each other a bit generally ….)
i’d like to be able to alt pick fast
runs , like a proper muso
but hey , I get by in a kinda CC
way …. slurs hammers etc etc
still I’m gonna work on it
Strasbourg St Dennis
here i come !
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That's what I'm talking about. Your left hand has to be able to fret the notes and match the rhythms your right hand is doing. What good would not making real music be, ie your right hand just spazzing out without your left hand playing the notes right?! How about I go do a roll on a snare drum and call that my top speed for guitar playing. Wtf. Originally Posted by BreckerFan
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Yea... do spider drills on single strings as shown above, but also across strings, Up and down.
Simple and works.
As Christian said, once you have chops.... it's another step to develop feel or as said being able to lock into pockets, but you need chops to be able to subdivide before that can happen, at least at tempo of jazz.
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Well but like I said, you have to work on developing the technique before trying to use it. It does you no good to just try and brute force play lines that mechanically you can't play and hope that with enough time you'll get faster. Instead, you should work on single string top speed, then figure out what string changes come naturally to your technique, and then figure out how to play the musical ideas within that system. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
But if we're talking about absolute mechanical top speed, the limit is your right hand. And there are actual good musical ideas you can play at that speed. I think John McLaughlin is a good example of that; he uses a lot of patterns that 'shred' guys would also use and that are conducive to actually using your full right hand top speed, but he also has the harmonic abilities to play interesting lines with them.
Basically my point is just that there are ways to fret musical ideas that make them easier to be played fast. But it's not really possible to increase your tremolo picking speed. That's basically locked in by your physiology and the motion mechanic you use.
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After 6+ decades of playing, I’ve come to realize a few things about speed that have drastically changed my approach to playing. I don’t teach students in a formal setting, but I’ve mentored a lot of fine young players, many of whom find their way to my gigs and ask for advice. This is what I think they need to understand:
The first and IMO most important thing is that speed kills. Trying to play fast at all costs kills creativity. It kills any chance of developing a coherent style that balances the things that really make your playing special. And it kills musical growth until you either give up in frustration or master it and get past it. The technical things that make a player sound great are creativity, consistency, control and accuracy - you have to be able to play what you hear in your head. Playing what you hear others play exactly as they play it is fine if you’re in a cover band or you have no musical imagination of your own. But no amount of speed will overcome weak musicianship. And obsessing over speed distracts from improvement in other areas that are far more important (again, IMO - you all may disagree).
The second thing I’ve learned is that a lot of recordings we think are blazing aren’t as fast as they sound when you actually clock them. What makes them seem faster than they are is the careful, deliberate, confident way in which they’re structured and played - the notes simply flow. Inaccuracies in timing and choice of notes make a solo sound like a struggle, while perfectly articulated playing goes beyond the notes themselves. It’s the forest that’s beautiful, so stop getting hung up on the trees. I’ll mention confidence again here, because it’s critical to a polished and professional sound. If you’re not confident that what you’re about to try to play fast will sound good, and you can’t hear it in your head well enough to nail it, you’ll sound like you’re struggling with speed at any tempo above a ballad. But what you’re really having difficulty with is developing ideas and putting them together.
The third thing I’ve come to embrace is that you have to have a line in your head or your subconscious to play it well at any tempo. A lot of players known for speed play note formulas, mathematical note clusters, scales or scale fragments etc. They’re not creating melodic lines and they’re not building their solos in an organized way. They’re not creatively interpreting heads with outside runs and long, structured phrases. They’re blowing the same old same old and relying on speed to make it sound interesting. There’s certainly some truth in the “left brain / right brain” explanation for why some can play faster than others. But I think it’s more often a lack of ideas and the ability to build those long interesting lines we love than it is a physical inability to play them.
And the last thing I’ll say about this is that most of us are faster than we think. Anything you do will seem problematic if you’re struggling with it, whether physically or just emotionally. Record yourself on your phone whenever you can, eg at jams or just playing at home with a backing track. You’ll probably be surprised at how fast some of your playing sounds. Even more are fast enough to play lots of great music very well if they’d just stop worrying about speed and focus on creativity, consistency, control, and accuracy.
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From my experiences I actually think it’s way different to tremolo pick than to pick lines.
Repetition can lock up really easily.
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If you tremolo pick as a rubato effect then yeah. But if you can tremolo pick 16ths to a metronome and find the highest speed you can do it for like 30 seconds to a minute straight, there's no reason you can't play single string patterns at that speed. And then there's no reason you can't take that pattern across strings with simple, consistent string changes that align with what's naturally comfortable for you (USX/DSX). The feel breaks down when the string changes/notes per string become more irregular. But that's why I think it's useful to work on preformed musical ideas and try different fingerings to find what gets you closest to that feeling. In my experience that's how you build real usable technique. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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There's a difference between hand fast and thought fast. There's also a similar duality between fretting hand fast and picking hand fast. Each of these contributions conspires in a musical line.
Sometimes we see speed as a one dimensional thing and that reflects in the way practice time is used.
Is your speed limit reached because of hand coordination? Having no ideas of where to go? A disparity of the way you think when you're playing a lyric line and a connective speed line?
Fast is an extremely general term and each person has to find what keeps them from the potential of the music, including speed.
I happen to think that playing smarter leads to the ways to playing faster. If you can out-visualize your notes lines, it can make playing longer and faster lines more natural.
Or maybe not for you.
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I always go back to thinking of my guitar playing as just another voice. (That may be because I play at home and my family doesn't stop talking/doing what they are doing when I play. I have to compete for space
) So there is a speed limit on how I can sound to compare it to a human voice. I also admire players like McLaughlin that have perfected alternate picking lightning speed runs. Sometimes he strings them together so that a voice seems to come out. Other times they just sound percussive to me. But that isn't a bad thing and is probably his intention. I also agree with nevershouldhavesoldit that a lot of us assume that we can't play fast but actually do. Sometimes my family members turn their heads and drop their jaws when I play something that is flaming fast. For me I am just working something out. It is better for me to be intentional than to just try to shred for shredding's sake.
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this has not been my experience. I found tremolo picking to be mechanically completely different from picking lines, scales and arps etc. The latter I was able to do right away while the former came later and needed me to work on a different aspect of my technique. Originally Posted by BreckerFan
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Here's what I think is a good discussion on how to increase your limit:
Why Slow, Accurate Practice May Actually Be the Problem —Noa Kageyama, Ph.D
The article at the top is good background and the violin video seems more relevant to us, but I found the trombonist's method of 'forward chaining' actually helped me get something like Donna Lee where I wanted it. He talks his theory behind it for about 5 minutes. You can skip to 4:50 to see his process in action. Dedication!
He's working on getting a tricky lick by playing it faster than he's actually able to play cleanly, but in little chunks. In a way, just kinda going for it. He does some other things towards the end.
The forum discussion is good for the most part, but in usual fashion arguments start up like "But that's not how they taught us at such and such place! You have to be able to play it slow and clean first. You have to walk before you can run!" etc.
There's definitely truth in that, but these guys have already done decades of it, and they're really just trying to get that last little bit of needed accuracy and speed. They both talk about diminishing returns with 'start slow and ratchet up'. It's not an either or thing. You can do both.
Just for the record: I certainly don't believe that speed is music. But I do enjoy playing along with Bird and Miles. (& Wayne,& Joe,& Browny &,&,&...) I need some for my confidence.
Back in the 70's speed got you gigs. That's how the civilians could tell you were a good guitarist :-)
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nevershouldhavesoldit and Christian said it all.
I would just add that of course you're going to have to play fast if that's what it "says on the chart" LOL. You're also going to be required to do many other musicianship related things.
When soloing, intensity and inspiration can come out in many different ways, a speedy burst of notes being just one of them.
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I guess you said it. Sounds like you found it different because you were using a different mechanic for trem vs 'regular' picking. Do I have this correct? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Many use the exact same mechanics for both. Especially the really speedy rock guys.. well some have multiple techniques too.. anyways... I just think there's something to learn from them even if you don't like the music or their harmonic/improvisational conception is usually limited.
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Sadly, I must agree with Christian :-) Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I guess it depends on what kind of music you're trying to play. Tremelo will help with Ywingie, J. McLaughlin, Dick Dale (!) and the like. I don't think it does that much for BeBop heads like Joy Spring, or Post Bop like Freedom Jazz Dance.
But like we always say, guitar learning is cumulative. Seemingly unrelated study will cross over to other areas.
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