Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Speed and Stamina

I've been thinking lately that speed and stamina are what I should be working on.  I feel like my lack of speed and stamina make certain 8th note passages harder than they ought to be.  To that end, I've written myself an exercise.

Here's the link.

Step 1:  Find a tempo where I can play eighth notes on a single string comfortably for a long time
Step 2:  Set a metronome there, and go through the exercise once as a warm up.
Step 3:  Raise the metronome speed a few clicks and repeat.
Step 4:  When I get to the tempo where I can't get past exercise E, park the metronome there and repeat a little bit.

I recommend doing this at the end of practice, rather than at the beginning, because it will wear you out.

4 comments:

  1. I should do something like this too. Granted, I still consider myself as a beginner, since I've been playing guitar now for about 9 months. But I feel like I hit plateaus as far as picking speed goes and it takes something extra to get past that. Repetition seems to be the key. I really need that for cross picking exercises, as the hardest thing for me is to keep the alternate "up-down-up-down" going especially when you have to skip over a string. There is a certain amount of attention to detail involved in doing that. I'm guessing that playing single string notes or something other than a tune would get to be boring pretty quickly. Perhaps even just playing a chord progression over and over would be better than nothing. Or I'd take a simple tune like Liberty or Soldier's Joy and just keep playing it until my wife yells "Enough already!" LOL

    ReplyDelete
  2. Max, if you haven't already tried them, you should check out the "John Moore Exercises" tab on the left of the screen here. It addresses exactly the troubles you're talking about with keeping the down-ups going correctly.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cool, thanks Dave....I'll give it look!!

    Max - AZ

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice post. I was looking like this. Really it is very useful and informative post. Thanks for sharing. Thanks again!

    ReplyDelete