Playing fast fingerstyle rest strokes is harder than I thought...

[RJVB]

True … but ask any instrument but guitar what their technique work looks like and you probably won’t hear a word about speed.

With jazzguitar maybe, or shredding schools (isn't there one that sells a gadget so you can film your picking down from the strings?)

My classical guitar lessons really focussed on playing slowly in order to be able to play fast, there was no point in discussing anything else! But I can tell you that working on speed was definitely part of violin technical work, I cannot remember many etudes that were only about slow playing with controlled dynamics etc. But that may be because those bored the heck out of me at the age I had to be working on them instead of just using actual music for this purpose

[jazznylon]

Ugh I hate the 12th position I was practicing an incovenient scale fingering there but I just kept making mistakes even at 60 bpm.

Thats it. No more. Back to working on tunes

[pamosmusic]

With jazzguitar maybe, or shredding schools (isn't there one that sells a gadget so you can film your picking down from the strings?)

My classical guitar lessons really focussed on playing slowly in order to be able to play fast, there was no point in discussing anything else! But I can tell you that working on speed was definitely part of violin technical work, I cannot remember many etudes that were only about slow playing with controlled dynamics etc. But that may be because those bored the heck out of me at the age I had to be working on them instead of just using actual music for this purpose

Classical guitar is a bit weird. Loads of work on tone production and lots of work on gliss and hammer/pull slurs as technical things or where they turn up in music (i spent too many hours on the opening to Capricho Arabe) but articulation is more of an integrated part of jazz stuff. There are predictable ways to work in slurs and accents and they’re usually related to rhythmic placement so any time you work on speed, you can be working on those things too. Classical is a bit different in that respect. Probably until you get into masters level baroque interpretation or whatever.

[RJVB]

Thats it. No more. Back to working on tunes

Didn't you post in the "11 yo thread" that you started at a later age? That can't help and TBH you seem to be getting pretty good results already for someone who didn't start playing any instrument (well) before 10yo!

Probably until you get into masters level baroque interpretation or whatever.

Heh, I was close enough to that (for taking summer-school/masterclasses with an actual master player) well before taking up guitar

[jazznylon]

Didn't you post in the "11 yo thread" that you started at a later age? That can't help and TBH you seem to be getting pretty good results already for someone who didn't start playing any instrument (well) before 10yo!

Yep and thanks! I didn't seriously start practicing until I was around 19-20. I then took a 7-8 year hiatus of barely playing due to heavy depression. I'm 30 now and thankfully over it for the most part I think

[James W]

IMHO you need to do both.

Well, of course. On another thread recently I advocated choosing three tempi, slow, medium and fast to begin working on the picking hand. But the topic in question here was about playing fast and about how in playing faster than you're comfortable with you might learn mistakes. My point was that it's only once you're aware of those mistakes that you can start doing something to get rid of them.

I wonder if the OP has the books Pumping Nylon, Bradford Werner's Classical Guitar Technique or The Bible Of Classical Guitar Technique.

[jazznylon]

Well, of course. On another thread recently I advocated choosing three tempi, slow, medium and fast to begin working on the picking hand. But the topic in question here was about playing fast and about how in playing faster than you're comfortable with you might learn mistakes. My point was that it's only once you're aware of those mistakes that you can start doing something to get rid of them.

I wonder if the OP has the books Pumping Nylon, Bradford Werner's Classical Guitar Technique or The Bible Of Classical Guitar Technique.

Pumping Nylon I have but barely used it. I do remember reading Aaron Shearer Learning the Classic Guitar Part 1 a lot when first starting out. A few other books I used were the fernando sor 20 studies, villa-lobos collected works for solo guitar, and the segovia scales. Back when I was in standard tuning of course..

[James W]

True … but ask any instrument but guitar what their technique work looks like and you probably won’t hear a word about speed.

Horn players work on articulation, articulation, articulation.

If you don’t have a command of that stuff, then you probably won’t sound good at tempo, no matter how clean and fast you’re playing.

True, about articulation.

But I think guitarists face more obstacles than horn players in playing fast. Normal, traditional practice of starting slow and gradually increasing speed doesn't work for many guitar players, at least for the picking hand. Certainly didn't work for me. I don't know about horn players, but I suspect the traditional route to technique probably does work for them. Again, my knowledge of horn playing isn't much, but I'd wager that there are more variety of correct ways of using the plectrum than there are in playing a horn. This is or can be a strength or weakness for guitarists. I'm not sure if there is so much a variety in fingerstyle guitar - but when I played classical guitar I was made aware that there are different schools of thought when it came to the picking hand.

Speed is more of a given for horn players than for guitarists, hence why they don't need to fret over it. It was only recently that we've really started discovering the many ways of using a plectrum.

[pamosmusic]

Pumping Nylon is awesome.

[pamosmusic]

True, about articulation.

But I think guitarists face more obstacles than horn players in playing fast. Normal, traditional practice of starting slow and gradually increasing speed doesn't work for many guitar players, at least for the picking hand. Certainly didn't work for me. I don't know about horn players, but I suspect the traditional route to technique probably does work for them. Again, my knowledge of horn playing isn't much, but I'd wager that there are more variety of correct ways of using the plectrum than there are in playing a horn. This is or can be a strength or weakness for guitarists. I'm not sure if there is so much a variety in fingerstyle guitar - but when I played classical guitar I was made aware that there are different schools of thought when it came to the picking hand.

Speed is more of a given for horn players than for guitarists, hence why they don't need to fret over it. It was only recently that we've really started discovering the many ways of using a plectrum.

Yeah guitar players have some physical resistance to speed that horn players don’t have. The same way horn players have some physical resistance to sound production that guitar players don’t have so much.

But still.

Here’s another thought … I tend to think 60 hours of practice on speed is better spread out as ten minutes a day for a year than 6 hours a day for ten days.

It’s one of those things that I think of as working that way. I think in part because it requires so much other scaffolding, like all the articulation, the vocabulary, etc etc. So pure fast is never satisfying because what we find impressive is the execution of real music at tempo.

(That bit isn’t contrary to what you said by any stretch … just elaborating on what I said)

[BreckerFan]

Technique practice should focus on sound production rather than just hitting a tempo. Doesn't matter how fast you can play something if you can't play the notes clearly and cleanly. I'm with Pamos that articulation should be more of a focus for guitarists. Make sure what you're playing sounds good before you try to play it faster.

What I do is take an exercise and play it at a very slow tempo where I know I can cleanly play every note, maybe sixteenths at 80 bpm. Play the exercise 3 times. If you play it perfectly each time, as in really perfectly where each note is properly articulated and controlled, increase the metronome by 10 bpm. Do this until you fail the test, and then drop back to the last increment.

Once I have that tempo x, I work the exercise at x-10 bpm, x bpm, and x+10 bpm (original bpm at which the test was failed). Do this over time, focusing on sound production, and at least for me tempo x has crept up. Obviously some techniques do not develop linearly, so this isn't a cure all for all tech wise development, but it's worked well for me in developing facility that sounds good.

[Christian Miller]

One irritating thing is you can’t simply practice slow and expect it to scale up to fast. Some movements are never going to work fast. So you need to work out what those efficient optimised movements are for the fast playing and then use them when you practice slowly. Some people have a better intuition for this than others, and the people who can explain what to do are like gold dust.

For me it’s always worked that I’m very quickly basically able to roughly do the thing fast - and if I can’t I know there’s a hitch somewhere. If I can basically do the thing at tempo, it’s the matter of working on it so it actually sounds any good. Which usually means evenness, working slowly with a click and recording myself and so on. But you have to take the feeling of how the body is working into your slower practice, otherwise the evenness won’t scale.

it also pays to be super analytical. Often a technical issue is actually based around one or two notes. If you isolate those your practice will be efficient and you can do it in gap between being shouted at for juice by your children or whatever.

if you need to practice pure technique for more than 15m a day, you are doing it wrong imo.

been working a lot on legato atm … that’s an interesting one. Very hard to get even and slow. Speed itself is often trivial

[pamosmusic]

Technique practice should focus on sound production rather than just hitting a tempo. Doesn't matter how fast you can play something if you can't play the notes clearly and cleanly. I'm with Pamos that articulation should be more of a focus for guitarists. Make sure what you're playing sounds good before you try to play it faster.

What I do is take an exercise and play it at a very slow tempo where I know I can cleanly play every note, maybe sixteenths at 80 bpm. Play the exercise 3 times. If you play it perfectly each time, as in really perfectly where each note is properly articulated and controlled, increase the metronome by 10 bpm. Do this until you fail the test, and then drop back to the last increment.

Once I have that tempo x, I work the exercise at x-10 bpm, x bpm, and x+10 bpm (original bpm at which the test was failed). Do this over time, focusing on sound production, and at least for me tempo x has crept up. Obviously some techniques do not develop linearly, so this isn't a cure all for all tech wise development, but it's worked well for me in developing facility that sounds good.

+ 1

And to incorporate what James was talking about with needing to push the tempo to get a feel for the tempo …

If you’re shooting for 16ths at 80, I like setting it for 75 and doing, say, 8th notes three or four times, then 16ths once. Do a few series like that, and then move the metronome up to 76. And start pushing the tempo that way. The 8ths need to be perfect but you just get what you get with the 16ths. Keep pushing until the 16ths just aren’t there. And then go back

[pamosmusic]

It’s also worth mentioning that the bar for classical guitarists is clean 16th notes at 125-130 bpm.

There are concert guitarists who are of course faster than that, but that’s sort of the reasonable bar based on the big standard rep. And that’s for cadenza style scale runs, rather than a sort of baseline subdivision.

I mention that because that’s fast-ish but not as fast as a pick style guitar would be able to get and definitely not as fast or for as sustained a period as an electric guitarist can get with smart slurring etc. So there’s probably a much lower ceiling for the speed on the fingerstyle stuff than for the pick style stuff. So if you’re playing fingerstyle, it’s presumably for a different reason.

[jazznylon]

Thanks for the advices everyone! Back when I was starting out with a classical guitar teacher I had to learn to be super attentive to tone and the finger movements. Admittedly over the years I got more lax because I assumed I got the basic technique down pat. So I just ended up on autopilot for the most part when working on technique. As for the reason I started fingerstyle I didn't have a pick with me so I just decided to go for it anyways. Its not much of a reason but whatever