People always ask me “How do you do your scales so fast?” or “What do you suggest for speed development?”
Those are good questions with no simple answers.
First I have to say some thing that may not sound too pleasant but its a fact.
Some people are simply born with more “Fast Twitch Muscle Fibers” than others and there is little one can do about that. Now, just because you were born with a lot of these “Speedy-Gonzalez” Genes, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work on accuracy and tone quality. It is known that flamenco players in Spain, practice scales a lot, and there is no getting around putting in the necessary hours of work.
Starting at an early age is also one of several crucial factors as well. When you do a certain activity at a very early age, your brain creates deeper and deeper neural pathways that are associated with that particular activity. When you do the same thing as an adult, your synapses are already more formed and “set in their ways” and it takes a lot more work to achieve results.
BUT! There is hope. Studies have shown that synapses continue to form in our brain if we continue to push ourselves to learn new things. The combination of focus and repetition create new neural pathways and enable us to improve our abilities.
So, you may ask, does all this relate to scale playing? You bet it does!
If you practice your scales with optimal motion alignment in your fingers, learn to feel how your muscles in you arms, hands and fingers are responding to your attack on the string, learn how to feel the necessary degree of relaxation in your fingers, be aware of the release after you’ve played a note and see how quickly you can reload and prepare your finger for the next note, and be happy doing it, then there is a strong chance that you maximize your potential in relation to your ability. All of this, plus coupled with a regular and disciplined regimen of practice should put you in a good position.
Remember, We are all different but if we work right with patience, love and self- acceptance, we will surprise even ourselves. Good luck and look out for the Piccado Package on New Learning Vision coming soon.
Hasta Luego, Adam del Monte.
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HI ADAM do you remember me i met you at the FRESNO GUITAR convention couple years ago/ how are you doin playing in any gigs if yes let me know ill plug in my show CLASSICAl flamenco IT GOES FOR 2 HOURS JUST LOG ONTO http://www.3zzz.com.au go to links and youll find us, we have had some fab players.some very RARE 1920s albums of PACO AMAYA NINO POSATAs RICARDO when his in the mood? SABICAS in the early days my FAVORITE JOSE MOTOS ( who like you records on 1 TAKE) and heaps more oh one more the no1 DIEGO EL DEL GASTOR. i have some rare FILM 1940 of him and JOSELERO in JUERGA. keep in touch JOHN
Question – is the piccado package still coming along?
It seems to me that a large part of the process of learning to play flamenco is simply logging enough hors of quality practice. that’s where the truly dedicated win through.
here’s how you play fast: learn to play one note on a piano really fast. use a piano with keys that are the normal weight, not the light cheap keyboard ones. turn your hand sideways if you want, so that playing one note with two fingers is easier. on a black key, slam you index finger down while lifting your middle finger up, then slam your middle finger down while lifting your index finger up. At first it will be a skill exercise, trying to alternate your fingers perfectly. Then it will become a strength exercise. After a litle bit of practice you will surpass the ten note per second point, and move into being able to shred.
These are the two keys:
Having your fingers move up and down with each other perfectly, so you hear perfect, clean, even, full notes.
Building up the strength, which translates to speed and endurance.
After you get this down you will be able to trill or tremolo on piano very fast which is super.
The problem is applying this speed to guitar, so here are some tips:
Don’t plant, or prepare; just move from one side of the string to the other ballastically. Like a karate chop.
Use just the most very extreme tip of your finger tip + nail, fingertip, or just nail (depending on how long your nails are).
For those who say to plant, the fingertip nail combination is like a plant, except it doesn’t make you slow. In a split second series of events, the finger swings down, the flesh quiets the strings by lightly stroking it and continuing on its way. No pausing. Then, the tip of the nail comes along and knocks the string back into motion.
You must play with no tension. You are not snagging or plucking the strings. You are stroking or knocking. You use you knuckle or middle joint to swing your finger, and your smallest joint has to be able to flex. Practice picking with a flexed smallest joint slowly, planting first, at first.
You must move through the strings as if they weren’t there. Like air guitar. Fast guitarists play as if they aren’t playing.
Here is a technique which I find to be great for improving speed. It came from a book about playing “speed lead” on the electric guitar with a pick, but it can really be used with any instrument, any style, etc. and I use it quite often. It involves a metronome, a very valuable tool for any musician. Here is what you do. First, you of course need an exercise or riff that you want to practice. In this case, that would probably be a scale. Just pick any scale and memorize it. Then start with the metronome. Start off slow of course. The starting tempo will most likely be painfully slow, but you want a speed where you can play it absolutely perfectly in every single aspect. Then, speed it up by two beats per minute. Play it again. Keep increasing in increments of two bpm until you reach a comfortable speed, one where you can still play it perfectly but does not feel too challenging or too easy. Just the right level for your current ability. Then, push yourself another two bpm. After you play it at that speed, decrease by one bpm. Then up another two, and then down one. Keep alternating increasing by two bpm and then decreasing by one. You may not even be able to tell any noticeable difference between any two subsequent speeds, but soon you will definitely notice a considerable increase in speed. Once you reach the maximum speed that you can go, decrease by about 20 bpm or so and start the process over again. You will find that you will probably be able to greatly surpass your previous limit the next time around. And of course be diligent and practice regularly and often. Now, here is the part that I figured out by myself which will make the exercise even much, much more effective: play in the dark. Well, you do not have to necessarily do it in the dark (although that is how I discovered it), but the point is, you do not want to be able to see the metronome. Place it right behind you on your chair or turn it upside down or do something so that you can readily reach it but cannot see the numeric value for your current tempo. Obviously, then, you will need a metronome which you can easily change the tempo by an exact amount without looking at it, so not every metronome will work for this. The reasoning for doing this is a mental thing: if every time that you change the tempo you can see what tempo you are at, you will become excited and start mentally restricting yourself. First of all, since you can physically see the number, you are more aware of the changes in tempo, almost like a placebo. When you see that you have increased by, say, 20 bpm, that seems like a lot of progress so you tell yourself that you are going much faster than you were and therefore you will subconsciously be making your fingers work harder, whereas if you had increased 20 bpm and not known how many bpm you had increased it may not even feel like you had made much progress yet and therefore would feel very easy. Since you are aware of your speed, you are not 100% focused on the exercise itself, on the nuances of what your fingers are doing. You are focused, at least in part, on simply getting fast rather than whether you are actually playing perfectly anymore or not. Because of this you start to set benchmarks. Let us say that you are at 147 bpm and you feel as if that may be your speed limit. You may tell yourself “OK, let me get to 150 and then I will decrease by 20, just for the sake of reaching an even number.” Well, once you reach 150, you say, “Hey, I thought that I could only do 147 but I did 150, so why not 155?” Then, you go to 160, and so on. Meanwhile, you may have been playing it wrong since 130 or less! Therefore, you are more focused on the metronome itself and its numeric value rather than perfecting your technique and being the best that you can be, and you will start to form bad habits without even realizing it. If you cannot see the metronome, then in time you will become confident that you are indeed making progress even if you cannot feel it, and it simply becomes a clicking that your notes must fit into and that must slow down if your notes will not fit. As a result, you will be a much better player and will find yourself being able to play at the maximum speed of the metronome with ease and feeling amazed that you went through, say, 150 tempo values and barely felt the change. Do an experiment: try learning various riffs and exercises with this method, some while looking at the metronome and some while not, and see which method has the higher average increase in speed. I personally was amazed at some of the things that I could do using this method =] Cheerio, hope this helped! Buena suerte.