Dan Mumm's newsletter today on Practice for "absolute guitar mastery"

[superblonde]

I had to laugh. Yes OKAY i’ll admit it! I can’t sweep pick probably because “I don’t use the optimized metronome practice method that Dan Mumm keeps telling me to use.” LOL it’s true…

Also I had this Korg metronome with an interesting feature button called “Period”. Normally this would be set to zero. Hitting the button cycled it through 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. (up to 4? I forget). Then, the metronome would play the clicks for that many measures, and go silent…for that many measures. Then start up again, all with the correct beat timing of course. So this would allow training of the ‘internal sense of time’ I guess. Start that mode, get synced up to the beat, and then it goes silent while you keep playing… when the metronome starts sounding again, you should still be On the beat.

I haven’t seen a metronome with that feature before.

Anyways I’m going to thoroughly test Dan Mumm’s advice on a set of material as soon as I can really be sure my progress & schedule won’t get interrupted by something. “If you are doing it right, you should be starting at least 4 to 10 BPM faster than the day before” Ohhhh believe me, if it doesn’t work, you’ll hear about it here, lol. 😀 ☠️☠️

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[slash]

The next time someone asks you “why don’t you have perfect sweep picking technique?,” the only reasonable answer to give is “I don’t use the optimized metronome practice method that Dan Mumm keeps telling me to use.”

My reasonable response would be “I don’t practice sweep picking because its not important to me” 😉

His news letter actually has a good tip… but I will choose to apply it on techniques and passages that are important to me… sweep picking isn’t one of them. Its not the style I aspire to play 😉

"The blues ain't nothin' but a good man feelin' bad" - Willie Brown
Tip #4 Learn to Play by EAR!

[Igglepud]

I spent two or three months trying to sweep and got nowhere. There is something fundamentally wrong in my technique that I can’t figure out on my own. I have no desire musically to play sweeps, but my ego would love to burn through a couple arpeggios now and then just for the wow factor.

MY ROCK IS FIERCE!!!

[superblonde]

Altho the example is sweep technique, i took it as general advice. I would love to get faster at speed & accuracy patterns from Doug and thus see my overall lead or solo playing pick up a big notch. Im thinking now that i should carve out a portion of my summer day to follow dan’s step by step lesson from the newsletter.. After all i cant be a slow player forever, ehhh..

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[superblonde]

slash wrote:

My reasonable response would be “I don’t practice sweep picking because its not important to me”

are you sure you dont want to sweep, after watching this? 😀

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[slash]

Thanks for trying to persuade me but honestly while I can appreciate the skill, and his playing, it doesn’t inspire me. Maybe if I ever master vibrato, bending and a few other skills I will evolve and want to sweep. Heck I don’t even care that much about strict alt picking. I have direction(economy picking) down. I’m more of a legato player. I like the way it sounds smoother, more fluid. ALL of our journeys are different as are our goals.

"The blues ain't nothin' but a good man feelin' bad" - Willie Brown
Tip #4 Learn to Play by EAR!

[superblonde]

superblonde wrote:

“If you are doing it right, you should be starting at least 4 to 10 BPM faster than the day before”

I dont know if Dan Mumm has any time to read the forum these days but after doing a bunch of repetitive lick practice just now what sticks out to me is the ‘awareness needed to find the range of BPM where technique breaks down’

Because I was playing a set of easy licks at 100% very easily and relaxed and with fingers very close to strings, hovering between notes, all good. Then I wanted to find out my “max.” So I bumped up to 150% and I was still able to play them somewhat relaxed. So then I bumped up to 200% and could almost barely play them after some reps but with very spastic finger action. So I went back to 160% and noticed that I was able to play ok but my fingers were bouncing off the fretboard toooo high and idle fingers no longer feeling relaxed. So ultimately I might choose to stay at 120-140% for a long time rather than getting anywhere near the breaking range, or I might try to spend time trying to narrow down what bump up to the faster BPM causes the problem (and then after that, try to figure out why it is a problem, which finger or whatever).

Long ago when I first started I was always starting closer to “max” and pushing to get the “max” higher. So a bulk of time might have been spent more towards the range where technique had broken down, rather than the bulk of time being spent where technique was very good and then testing up towards a “new max” for short periods of time.

This concept of being able to know where that breaking range is, seems really important and could be discussed more in relation to this type of practice.

So just to be totally clear- even if it sounds okay, even if I can play it 10x in a row, I wouldn’t want to continually practice at or beyond 170% because that is beyond where I believe my technique breaks down (as of today). I would want to test for a new max with several reps but in general stay and try to bump up from the range of where my technique is good, which is the slower rate around 130%.

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[superblonde]

Sooooo…
I applied Dan Mumm’s advice to one of Doug’s licks from the Complete Course, over several days (nights) so far.

The lick is at 12th fret position. After 100’s of reps at increasing tempos, this is the isolated finger move where I notice a breakdown. The ring finger goes spastic and can’t make it to the fretboard in time.

So the questions become..

1.. now that I isolated a problem, should I change to just working on that, or continue to run the whole lick. (isolating just those finger moves will increase the number of rep’s possible, there’s surrounding stuff to play)

2.. should I invent a drill to improve this particular isolated problem, or just continue to run the lick as-is for all those rep’s.

3.. should I instead switch focus to the other hand (in this case start looking at the picking hand) while I continue to run the lick at slightly slower tempos until this problem area clears up

4.. if the problem doesn’t resolve then it means I cant increase by 2 bpm per day or maybe even can’t increase by 1 bpm per day. Then what to do?

Quite a while back I posted about a highly trained musician telling me, in relation to my speed building problems on solos, “try to sing it. if you can’t sing it that fast, you can’t play it that fast.” well I dunno about actually singing a shred speed lick at shred speed, eh. But in this case it would mean singing “beee daaa dooo” at the faster tempo rather than (or in addition to) trying to play at the faster tempo, and according that outside advice, it could (would?) improve speed.

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

Attachments:

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[superblonde]

I believe that these Dan Mumm newsletters should somehow incorporate “THE TEST” from Doug’s lesson in Week 21. The Test, i.e. recording the practice against the metronome and checking for beat alignment visually on the waveform.

then, using The Test, it should be possible to really see where the “actual max” is, which is likely lower than the perception of the max. And then the BPM focus can work towards peaking at the actual max, rather than putting lots of practice time into BPM’s which continue beyond that speed..

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[superblonde]

I ran across this Adam Neely video where he live-streamed a “full day’s” practice session on the major scale. The video is almost 5 hrs long. It would have been better to not live-stream the practice itself but instead video his long practice session, then go back later to livestream annotations & narration over it. To actually “see a real practice session”.

So in this video he spends lots of time explaining what he is going to practice and then practices it.

5-hour major scale practice routine

One of my oldest requests for metal method was simply that: “how about a lesson video of how to practice by doing a video of a practice session”. The reason is simple, because people learn quickly by watching & mimicking others. I had thought to make some long-form videos of myself practicing piano but it was mostly of a technology limitation.. but back when I was doing Speed Kills 3 practice, I made a lot of videos of brute-force guitar lick practice (with mixed results). It is definitely not a photogenic process. In the meantime my entire approach to practice has changed (much more daw heavy), so… still kind of mystified that serious, dedicated players spend 6-8 hrs a day practicing yet rarely spend 6-8 hrs studying how to practice. Easiest thing to do would be to collect tons of videos of practice and see which ways look better.

The biggest thing I noticed from watching Neely’s video here is that he does each run once. Even if he messes up, he continues to the next run. This seems simple but is very different from how I practice (10x reps for each one or etc). His practice is much more mentally taxing because of constantly having to work out the notes to play, each run is different, rather than spend most of the time repeating the same phrase.

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[superblonde]

Practice routine of a metal pro as described in a metaltalk interview.

“what works it is creating that routine”

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT – FOLLOW THAT ROUTINE: AN INTERVIEW WITH JAKE BOWEN, GUITARIST OF PERIPHERY

Do you have a specific routine that you follow and do you have any tips for our fellow aspiring or practicing musician readers?

JB: Well, thank you. If you are at the level where you are on the road, touring with your band, I think that knowing the songs inside out is the thing that I focus on the most. When I am at home and I know that there is a tour coming up, I usually give myself plenty of time when I start a routine. I wake up, make my coffee, check my email, then I take my coffee in the other room and I play the songs. I play either the whole set or I’ll play a song I am having trouble with over and over again. I make sure that there is not one section of that song that I don’t know and I do that every day. A couple of hours every day, at the same time and I am very rigid.

Some people play all day long, other people record themselves and only play for twenty-five minutes. For me, what works it is creating that routine and sticking to it, so, usually, by the time the tour comes around, I am ready to go.

http://metaltalk.net/articles/periphery-jake-bowen-interview.php

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[Author]

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