Essays, ideas, and observations on guitar practice, technique, and long-term musical development.
Building a skill is expensive. Keeping one is cheap. Here's why busy guitarists who practice a little bit of everything stop improving, and the focus ratio that fixes it.
Most slow practice doesn't work because players slow down their movements along with the tempo. Transition time flips that. You hold each note for its full value at a slow tempo, but the movement between notes stays as fast as if you were playing flat out. Pair it with finger choreography, where you prepare the next finger while the current note is still ringing, and your slow practice stops being a different activity from your fast playing. It becomes the same activity, stretched out.
Classical violinists and pianists have used dotted rhythms for centuries to get difficult passages up to speed. It works just as well on guitar, but most guitarists either haven't heard of it or give up before it clicks. Here's how to actually use it: the two versions, the common mistake that wastes the whole exercise, and a one-week routine to try it on a phrase that's been giving you trouble.
The alternate picking mistakes that cost me years: chasing speed instead of accuracy, copying my heroes' technique instead of finding my own, hiding weaknesses inside familiar licks, panicking every time I hit a plateau, comparing myself to famous players, blaming my picking hand when my fretting hand was the real problem, and underestimating how long this stuff actually takes.
Four reasons you're putting in the work and not getting better, and what to do about each one.