Guitar practice week 1
It’s been about two years since I practiced my scales and exercises on guitar to a metronome. I’ve been writing a fair bit of progressive and neo-baroque rock recently and I wrote a solo at 260bpm quavers, which I can’t play cleanly, so I need to get up to speed. Last time I checked (two odd years ago), the fastest I could play the diatonic scales cleanly was about 85 bpm semi-quavers. I’ve played for around an hour to an hour and a half each day for five days this last week, so it will be an interesting experiment to find out how quickly I can improve.
I have two targets.
1. 130bpm semi-quavers in diatonic scales
then
2. 160bpm semi-quavers in diatonic scales.
The first figure is so that I can cleanly play the solo I wrote, and the second is just an arbitrary figure that would make me feel like a shredder.
Here’s my improvement over this last week, first figure start of week and the last figure the end of the week. All tempos are playing semi-quavers.
Diatonic scales and modes, Ionian to Ionian
80bpm / 100bpm
Chromatic exercises
90bpm / 100bpm
Alternating string arpeggios (1, 3, 2, 4, 3, 5, 4, 6, 6, 4, 5, 3, 4, 2, 3, 1)
55bpm / 70bpm
Non-scalar string skipping alternate picking (1, 3, 4, 6, 6, 4, 3, 1)
?? / 70bpm
Non-scalar sweep picking exercises
?? / 70bpm
I didn’t take a close note of the speeds at the beginning of this week, so there are some holes in data. I can play up to around 140bpm for the chromatic exercises, but it is pretty messy. All figures are for relatively clean playing.
A lot of the improvement this week would have been getting back to my old speed, so I think each week from now will have less increases.
Exercises, Guitar Practice, Metronome, Music