IS TI WORTH TO PLAY SLOW...?

Hi!Is it worth to play only fast for a long period of time..1)Will you earn a perfect tecnique??In my previous posts i'm telling tha is difficult for me to play chromatic scales fast..But i realize that is difficult too if you play them extremely slow....2)Have you realize it ???

When playn´ chroma scale for ex. at 240 bpm, it´s much easyer for me to play it at 200 and up than to play it at 140-160 bpm. While playn´ fast for about 25 min. it can be a little hard to play slower things because my mind is allready programed to play fast and that´s why the slower things miss the right feel but if I than play slow for about 10 min, the feel gets back and the speed increases some more (250 bpm) ´cause of the rest and whalla, ready to kick ass no metter playn´ blues our shred.

Dejan, I know what you mean. When I started playing all I wanted to be was fast, and I got pretty good at it. But when I would play something slow, I found it extremely hard to be precise with my timing. I was always alittle ahead of myself. But as I worked on a slower tempo and got better at it. I would go to back to a faster tempo, and I was alittle bit quicker. So I rethought my whole plan of getting to be be faster. Here's what I came up with.

It's better to start at a slow tempo (say 60bpm, I know thats extremely slow but just go with me on this.). It will help you build a better sense of time right from the beginning. Cause at a slow tempo their is a bigger span of time to miss a beat, forcing your rhythm to be more precise.
Once I became precise with that tempo I would slowly go up speed, making sure my rhythm was precise as possible. I did this with every scale I learned, and now I can play everyone at any tempo with almost perfect precision. I believe it's better to start with a slower tempo and work your way up to faster tempos, rather than Vice-versa. Like the good ol' saying, you have to crawl before you walk.

Hope that helps.

Dude,

You totally have the right idea, start slow and work up with accuracy and precision. Not only does playing slowly build this but allows you to earn more control and finger strength. Surprisingly enough i noticed after a while of shredding that my fingers were faster but pressing down lighter. So latley i have been working to bring up my clarity which meant playing slower and more accurately using more force in my fingers. I would suggest starting around 80 bpm and go up by either incriments of 10 or 20 when practicing. Once you reach accruacy at 120 you should be good for a while. Get accruacy at playing up to 32nd notes at that speed. Rhythmic and tonal control as well. The benefits from playing slow rather than just building speed are these. better precision, better accruacy, more powerful fingers, which results in greater clarity, greater depth and control fo dynamics even at extreme speeds, and the ability to speed things up allowing for muscle memory to fill in the gap of not being practiced at high speed.

Honestly, just start at 80 and go up as fast as you wish. Just do the math for how fast you can push yourself. IF you can do 32nd notes accurately and cleanly at 80 then you can do 16th notes accurately and cleanly at a speed of 160. if you can push this to 120 then you would be doing 16th notes at 240. Speed isn't everything, i worked up to being able to play obscene speeds like 240 - 280 and it's seriously only valuable for certain styles of music. Mainly death metal and shredding. Msot rock and metal is slower than this and requires much less speed but greater control. Also if you are going to be doing charomatic exercises get a few different ones and practice different note patterns. Do triplet patterns using your first second and fourth fingers and vice versa.

Hope that helps you some dude.

exactly!

i even suggest that when you play fast that u use a slow metronome click for it. do not rely too much on the click - just use it as a reference point!

for example set the metronome at 70 bpm and let each click be the 1 of each measure ---> click 2 3 4 click 2 3 4 click

now play 16th runs over it (in that case 16 notes per click) and try to hit every click precisely. try to feel the missing clicks 2 3 and 4. you will realiza that this is not easy to do. especially when you go on to play odd timings over it or groups of 3, 5, 6, 7 etc. the lower you set the metronome with this method, the harder it will get and the more you will have to FEEL the beat, rather then just getting used to it.

I had the same problem with fast stuff played at slow tempo in the past too.
When I played things very fast I usualy ignored some slight details, play every thing faster than every body else & no body noticed.

I actualy learned this bad habbit from Slayer , and applied it to everything I played ... Metallica, Megadeth , Pantera & even Vai & Malmsteen.

I thought that this was the meaning of improvisation but I was damn wrong, cuz a realy good player may notice I'm not playing correctly, also I get sloppy when I try to play slower & anybody may notice that easily (I never played fast stuff slower then).

At some point I decided to play things the the real way they should be played, very precise & with max accuracy. So I had to go slower.

It was very hard & painfull, and took me a lot of time to correct everything that I played wrong, but now I feel happy that I play every thing very accuratly & faster than ever.

It realy worth the time & the pain.

Great Advice! I just wanted to add something that I meant to before but I didn't want write too much for one post. I noticed that alot of people sound like your only using 16th notes when playing along with the metronome, which is fine. The thing is, music is made up of other notes too. You should work with whole, half, quarter, 8th, 16th, and 32nd notes as well. Then triplets like 3:2, 5:4, 7:6, if you need me to explain just ask. Once you have learned all rhythms, your precision on you rhythm will be 10 fold than if you just used 16th notes. Leaving you free to explore and apply any rhythm to your music. I want to put this on the tricks page but for some reason I can't get sound files to upload, don't worry it's just my computer. Piece of crap! But here's a good way to build on this, cause steady and smooth progression is the key to achieving any goal.

Using a piece of paper. Start by writing any 4/4 rhythm using only whole, half, and quarter notes. Write different patterns, and play them along with your metronome. Once you get through this, one at a time, start adding 8th notes, then 16th notes, and then 32nd notes. This will help you gradually learn to subdivide your rhythms. Then go on to triplets, once you have done that. You will have mastered all the rhythms.

Notes: Stick with the 4/4 feel at first. It's the most basic and the easiest for the mind to grasp. Plus, it's the most commonly used. After you learn 4/4 all the others will come alot easier. Another thing, most of you already know this but I'll make a note of it anyways. Notes DO NOT dictate how fast you play, just the duration that you play a certain note within the feel. Tempo tells you the speed the music is moving at. Although this is simple, it will help you better understand how the rhythm, speed, and feel thing works with music. Over-all making you the best rhythm player you can be.

Hope this helps you in any way, rock on!

I never got how to play figures like 7:6, 5:4 9:8 and so on. Is there any method by which I can learn them?

i will post something i my host section about it - stay tuned

i have recorded a song that contains rythmic groupings of up to 12:11:10:9:4 and i will explain it all

hold on one sec, somewhere along the line someone posted something about 16ths being 16 notes per click. Correct me if im wrong but i always tought that 16th was 4 per click

thanks

Barhook, I see where it becomes confusing. A 16th note, the note itself, dictates only duration it is played in a particular time signature. Your right the 16th note is four clicks inside 1 click on the metronome only in 4/4 time. In 8/8 it's only 2, and 16/16 it's only 1. The value of the note changes. This is because the bottom note of time signature tells you what note gets one beat. Like 4/4 it's the quarter note, 4= quarter, 8= eighth, 16= sixteenth, 2= half, 1= whole. It all goes by feel, you can notice this if you have a metronome and you play around with. I will explain it alot further, once I start writing up tricks so I can record an audio and you can hear the difference.

k thanks alot

Ok - a polyrythmics-tutorial is up now in my host section that might explain some of it to ya