I'd bet that at any given moment you're not practising at the best speed for what you're trying to achieve. Most people sit somewhere in the middle, a bit slower than the song but not really slow, and that middle ground is where progress stalls.
So here's how fast you should be practising, why you're probably not there, and why I think medium speed is a bit of a dead zone.
You need two practice speeds ▶ 0:32
You should have two distinct practice speeds:
- Slow practice, for learning.
- Fast practice, for developing.
There is a place for medium speed, and we'll get to it, but almost all of the time you want to be in one of these two.
Slow practice: learn it at talking speed ▶ 0:49
Slow practice is for the learning phase. If you're still learning a part, or you've learnt it but the muscle memory isn't there yet, you should be playing very slowly and making almost no mistakes.
And when I say very slowly, I mean very slowly. Not just a bit slower than last time. Whenever I say this to students, they slow down about this much, when I meant that much.
One way I like to think about it is talking speed. You should be able to tell yourself every single thing you're doing as you do it. If you're not sure what the next note is, you have time to look and think, "right, that's the 7th fret".
This phase really matters. I had a student who used to get very frustrated when we learnt a new riff or song in a lesson. He was a decent player, so he could pick up the ideas quite quickly. The problem was he'd then try to play the new piece at the speed he played all his other songs, before he'd actually learnt it and built the muscle memory. He'd get frustrated that he couldn't play something he'd only learnt five minutes ago, or that it was full of mistakes. And when I told him to slow down, he'd slow down a tiny bit. I meant a lot.
So the learning speed should be intentional and incredibly slow.
Fast practice: push the speed and accept mistakes ▶ 2:03
Fast practice is the development stage. You move on to it once the muscle memory, and the actual memory of the song, are in place.
If you've properly locked the parts in, you should be able to get up to near top speed quite quickly. Your progress won't be a steady straight line. It'll be flat for a bit and then shoot up, as it clicks and you think, "oh yeah, I know what I'm playing now".
In this phase you should be making plenty of mistakes, because you should be pushing yourself. Not so many that you can't hear the part, and you'll find your own tolerance, but as long as you're getting it roughly 50 to 70% accurate, that's fine and you can develop it from there.
If you know you can play it perfectly, what you need to work on is playing it imperfectly at speed, so you get used to that higher tempo. A big part of why people struggle to play faster is that they just freak out at the higher speed. You need to get used to cruising there in a relaxed state of mind, whether you're playing it accurately or not.
How I learn songs for gigs ▶ 3:08
Over a few weeks recently I played some gigs and had to learn a lot of songs in a short space of time. The way I did it was to write out little charts: listen through the song, count how many bars there are and where the chords come in.
By the time I'd finished charting a song, I could pretty much play it without thinking, without having even played it yet. That's because the charting was my learning phase. It takes a little while to write them out, so I'm locking in the memory as I go. A lot of those songs were fairly poppy and not too hard to play, so once that was done I could basically just play them.
If I'd tried to play along from the start, I'd have skipped the learning phase entirely. It would have been an uphill battle to lock the parts in while playing along, and I wouldn't have memorised things like the structure. Instead, it was just a case of playing them up to speed and making sure I could follow along. In other words, fast practice.
Why medium speed is a dead zone ▶ 3:55
Medium speed is too fast to properly lock in the muscle memory, because you're still on your toes a bit. So you're not really learning the part. But it's not fast enough to push your ability either. You end up in the middle, not getting the best of either.
When medium speed does make sense ▶ 4:15
The main exception is when you're learning a genuinely unfamiliar technique or style. That might be a different type of bend, a new strumming pattern, or a style of playing that really isn't familiar to you. Here your progress might be more of a steady climb, and you might spend more time in that medium range. Maybe you've got the movement in your hands, but it's still a truly new idea.
But say you're playing a solo where you've done all the techniques before and you just need to put them together. Then you definitely don't want to be messing around at medium speed.
Go and try it
To sum up: practise slowly to learn something, and do it perfectly or near enough. Once you've learnt it, practise it fast, really quite fast, to the point where you're making regular mistakes. You're not trying to train the mistakes in. You're getting used to cruising at higher speeds.
Pick the piece you're working on and decide which phase it's in. If it's still being learnt, set a metronome to talking speed. If it's learnt, push it up until it gets messy, and keep a note of the tempos in a practice log so you can see the jump when it clicks.
