How long do you spend on an exercise or learning material?

[CoreyW]

Say we travel back to the late 80s and early 90s to the hay day of the VHS hot licks videos... or the Guitar World exercise articles, or even the modern day Truefire, Lick library lesson video...

How long do you spend on the material, is a lot of it just get to where you can play what is in that material and move on? Do you watch the video and play through it over and over again?

When you build an a practice routine, how long will you keep an exercise in your routine?

I am really curious how others approach this.

 

[S̷͖͑m̵͎͂á̵̺s̸͚̈́h̴̬̑]

I usually only practice something for a bit then move on. I come back to it a week later and usually can nail it. I work better by not grinding something out. If i try over and over, it is usually diminishing returns

 

[Techdeth]

I just found which was hardest and did that . So that getting was easier . Then I’d play it for days until mastered it . Like playing a Richie Kotzen vhs going to getter you rather than say most work books . Ones with hard concepts that’d look challenging
That’s been my way of thinking since day one . It makes going to say Randy Rhodes solos way easier . Sometimes I don’t finish shit if I find something even harder .
But mastering ONE super hard luck perfecting will do more for your playing than 10 licks kinda half way learned .

 

[DanTravis62]

Unsurprisingly a fellow guitar teacher (tech) is on the correct path here

People learn faster and progress more by mastering something difficult, as long as it teaches something that they aren't used to or is new to them

I do metronome work with a few exercises that i've developed over the years or stole from my teacher that i find valuable

But the answer is it depends - some people need to get it under their fingers and its there forever, some people need to keep brushing up on it. Depends on both the player and the technique.

I don't need to practice 3nps shredding at all and i'm fine, but I need to warm up with 2nps pentatonics and shit like that because I find the motion unintuitive. It's gonna be something like that for everyone.

 

[stephen sawall]

There is so many techniques and styles of playing you can never be good at any of them for very long if your always learning new material and techniques.

As for material I do not use any more time than what it takes to learn it.

As for techniques a few days to years of obsession to master it.

About 2007 because of a hand injury I only played slide a few years. I could play slide a lot better then than I can now.

About 2012 I worked on finger picking for five years.

Just a few examples of dozens over the decades.

 

[schnarf]

I'm going to answer this from a really shreddy angle, like, if you're trying to get better at playing through chord changes I don't know that I'd advocate for this In the past few years I've learned a couple practice techniques for learning harder things that have enabled me to move on. I got them from Troy Grady's series.

I used to take the exercise and gradually increase the metronome speed as soon as I could play it cleanly at a higher speed. I remember John Petrucci and other guitar icons really emphasizing this! But some things I really couldn't progress any further. I just ended up playing through the same thing over and over and stagnating. So here's what helped:

1) Chunking! This word is used in a lots of ways, and it's also a technique for _learning_ long sequences. In this context, I mean breaking something into short 4-8 note fragments. In this case, there's usually an area of the exercise that's tripping me up, not the whole thing. So I'll take 4-8 notes around there. Maybe it's a weird string change or position shift or something.

2) I don't gradually increase tempo anymore for technique. The technique you use to play slow and to play fast is inevitably different. If you practice an exercise much slower than you want to go, you're likely wasting time, and patterning motions that won't work at high speed. Once I've learned the notes (I will start slow and might gradually increase for that), I go up to the fastest speed that's just at the edge of my ability for that chunk. This is a speed where I'm getting it right sometimes but not all the time, and where I'm not tensing up too much. Then I'll play just that difficult chunk at that tempo, focusing on staying in the groove and staying as relaxed as I can. Then once that's solid, I'll increase the tempo as much as I can to the edge of my ability.

Once I've done that for all the difficult chunks to as fast as I want to get, I'll put it all together.

And more directly to your question, there are some things I'm working on that are long-term endeavors. I'm never going to alternate pick arpeggios as fast as Steve Morse or Andy Wood. But I'll keep returning to that. When I practice that technique, I'm usually taking a 4-8 note sequence that's, say, a chunk from Tumeni Notes or Free Range Chicken, that's particularly difficult for me, and working that at a high tempo. I'm not playing through the whole piece so much. I'm focusing on the parts that are hard for me at tempos that are hard for me.

I also find that if I learn a really hard technique, if I take a few weeks off, I won't have it immediately, but using this motor learning strategy, it'll come back pretty fast. I just go back to those difficult chunks at a fast tempo and it comes back.

Like others are saying, I think the point of practice is to be doing stuff that's on the edge of your ability. Is there a specific exercise you're working on?

 

[CoreyW]

I understand what most of you are saying...

I have been taking lessons from Tech for over a year now... and part of that was what led me to asking these questions.

I feel I can safely say, I typically have more time available to practice than alot of people... excluding this past month, I can usually set aside 2-3 hours a day... now I do struggle a bit with time management regarding my practice time, which is a me problem that I have to fix.

So, the crux of the issue is.. I get a solid exercise from Tech... spend the first few days with it memorizing it, and then work to apply it... I usually write them out in guitar pro then find the speed that I can play it clean at.. set the speed trainer to do something like 5x or so at that speed then increase it a set % and just keep going... the speed, and reps, and increase are figured out on a exercise per exercise basis... but for example... I can start something at 50%, set it to repeat 5 times then increase between 2,5, or 10% again depending on how I feel with it.. I always go past where I can play it cleanly and struggle with it and keep going until I cant keep up at all... depending on how much time I have, and how long I have spent on it, I may restart it.. when I can bust through the walls I hit and usually continue progressing closer and closer to the desired tempo this way.. somethings take way longer than others.

Where my questions rise... I get ex1.. I have a lot of time to work with this.. the time I need to spend on it decreases as the individual reps are getting faster and faster, so when I start say I am spending 30 mins, and after a couple weeks I am getting the same amount of reps in 10 or 15 mins.. now we add exercise 2, again... spend more time on it initially then that time decreases as I get more familiar with it... then we add ex3.. so I started having 30 mins to work on 1 thing.. now I have 3+ exercises stretching out over an hour, and it just keeps adding up the more exercises I add... the problem is I have not mastered any of them, but I am getting them all better and stuff I am working on in the newer exercises is helping me improve on the previous ones.. so on and so forth.. where ultimately I can be 3+ hours into a session and all I have done is a handful of exercises.

I guess I am asking, what can I do about adding more structure and not just rely on trying to brute force my exercise habits.

 

[PDC]

I always believed that the way the brain develops physical coordination - as opposed to intellectual memorization - is a process of individual practice sessions over time as opposed to maximum repetitions in a single practice session. If I do something that feels awkward or challenging over and over in one single practice session until it starts to feel automatic - and then come back to it the following day - it is going to feel awkward and challenging all over again on day 2. The difference is it will take fewer repetitions on day 2 to get to the point where it begins to feel automatic - like it did at the end of the previous practice session. But adding 100 or 200 repetitions the previous day doesn't eliminate that awkward feeling - at first - during the following practice session. Depending on how challenging the task is, you no longer experience that early awkwardness somewhere between the 5th and the 10th practice session - but the awkwardness is not as intense and doesn't last as long each progressive practice session.

From a physiology standpoint, what is happening in your brain is that you are building more efficient neural pathways with myelin each time you struggle to complete a new skill - but your brain can only myelinate so much per individual session. That's why mastery of a musical instrument is a process of years as much as it is hours.

When I was at my practice peak, I had 2 or 3 simple scale sequences for 2-note per string pentatonic shapes and 2 or 3 sequences for 3-note per string diatonic modes. The sequences were split between triplet feel and 16th note feel. I would work all 5 Pentatonic Shapes and all 7 Diatonic Shapes in all 12 keys with one triplet sequence and then go back and do it all again with a 16th note sequence. As I got better, I would select sequences that emphasized whatever string crossing pattern was giving me the greatest challenge - then going back to simpler sequences felt much easier.

I could knock out that whole scale sequence process with a metronome in about 90 minutes - I would then spend at least 90 minutes learning songs or copping leads by ear. I found that If I pushed myself much beyond 3 hrs a day, the tendons in my left hand would get really sore and my mental attention would drift. So I would do 90 minutes in the morning and 90 minutes in the afternoon or evening depending on my work schedule at the time.