As
some of you are aware, this year I'm studying for my LLCM diploma in
teaching, and as part of the written element of the course,
applicants are required to analyse the styles of three prominent
electric guitarists. I've chosen Zakk Wylde amongst others, as he's
long been a hero of mine due to his brutal, take-no-prisoners playing
style – no fancy tapping or sweeping, no poncy exotic scales, just
minor pentatonic, furious alternate picking and vibrato performed
with the kind of ferocity that could choke a tiger.
Now
Zakk's other big passion in life is weightlifting, and it occurs to
me as I researched a little deeper that the the one can influence the
other. Lifters take a variety of approaches to reach peak strength
just as guitar players do to reach and improve peak speed and
accuracy. Lifting coaches (yes, I've read up on this) talk about
three types of strength – maximum strength, endurance
strength and explosive strength, and we can relate this to
speed when playing guitar (for convenience's sake, when I talk about
speed, I include accuracy as a given – speed without accuracy is
just noise, lots of wrong notes played fast is worth far less than
one single right note played slowly).
So
- Maximum strength for lifters = maximum speed for guitar players.
This
can be developed by focusing on two separate paths. Explosive
or burst speed and endurance speed. Let's use the
spider exercise as a simple example. Suppose your maximum “safe”
speed – i.e. with no wrong notes, no notes fluffed and hands
perfectly synchronised – is sixteenth notes at 120bpm. If 120 bpm
is the fastest you can do it, it will stay the fastest you can
do it until you've learned to think and play more quickly. Sitting on
120bpm for multiple repetitions will build solid endurance
technique, helping you to get better playing the exercise at that
speed – no amount of repetition alone will help you get quicker.
For that, we'll need to push the boundaries.
Play
the exercise for thirty seconds or so continuously at your maximum
safe speed. Then crank the tempo up by 5-10 bpm and just for a few
repetitions play absolutely flat out, keeping the speedup even if you
fluff some of the notes. This is explosive or burst
speed.Then, before exhaustion or cramps set in, return the metronome,
this time to 121bpm – just 1 bpm higher than your original safe
endurance speed. Having trained your fingers briefly to push
past their natural maximum, it's now easier to play at this new
maximum speed.
This
type of practicing builds speed very quickly – for example, play
the same exercise every day for a week, and theoretically you will
gain an extra 7bpm maximum speed. Within a month you could be looking
at a gain of 30bpm! In practice, gains will likely be smaller as the
faster you get, the more difficult it becomes to add speed (the law of diminishing returns), but it is
a great way of significantly improving your maximum speed and
accuracy. Practice using small scale fragments and patterns to begin
with before branching out into longer ideas, and always remember to
respect your fingers - “no pain, no gain” does NOT work with
guitar playing!
