DOES PRACTICE REALLY MAKE PERFECT?
When it comes to practicing technique, unstructured and imprecise practice can actually hurt your technique. We practice to improve muscle memory and coordination between our fingers and our brain, but if youre not practicing the right way, you might be learning bad technique.
When I was a practicing student, I was impatient to show improvement in my technique, and this often led to practicing patterns and string transitions at a pace far greater than good practice warranted.
It went like this. Id pick an interesting 4-note pattern, set my metronome as high as I could, play the pattern a few times, and then stop, with almost no regard for how I was trying to improve. Hey, if I could play a pattern super fast 2 or 3 times without making a mistake, that was progress, right?
Wrong. What I didnt realize was that I was practicing mistakes, and I might have set myself back simply by being impatient and not practicing correctly.
The Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer is a tool I designed to help students improve their picking technique by slowing down and practicing correctly. Finding optimal metronome settings for complex string transitions forces students to practice at that optimal pace.
Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer comes with loads of 3-note-per-string transition patterns in addition to some sweep-picking examples, and you can add as many new ones as you like.
So what are "transition patterns," anyway? Unlike arbitrary melodic patterns, transition patterns arent melodic. Theyre meant to be played bottom to top, top to bottom, over and over (and over) again, in order to get picking sequences under your fingers. What often trips up budding shredders is coordinating finger placement and picking stroke. The only way to improve these string transitions is to isolate them and play them hundreds of times until you develop proper muscle memory. The biggest single mistake players make is not practicing these transitions properly--either playing them too fast and too infrequently or playing them with too many mistakes.
THERE ARE TWO WAYS PRACTICING STRING TRANSITIONS WITH ULTIMATE GUITAR SPEED TRAINER:
1. FINDING AN OPTIMAL BPM SETTING FOR A PATTERN YOU WANT TO LEARN
+ You select a transition pattern you want to practice, or create your own. Using Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainers random pattern moving feature will make sure youre always practicing on a different area of the fretboard.
+ Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer will ask you to find a metronome setting at which you can play the pattern comfortably, with no mistakes.
+ The software will gradually increase the metronome. When you make a mistake, youll tap a button to tell Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer.
+ Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer will back off the metronome and make you practice the pattern for a pre-determined number of loops at this optimal practice speed.
2. PRACTICING PATTERNS YOURE ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH
Fire up Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer and select a transition pattern you want to practice. Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer remembers where you left off, so you can practice again at that speed, slow it down, or try to improve on it. Either way, youll know youre within a few beats per minute of your optimal practicing zone.
ITS UP TO YOU
Almost everything is configurable, from the number of pattern loops to how fast and how much the metronome should increase when in "Find BPM" mode.
The best part is, Ultimate Guitar Speed Trainer remembers everything you do, so every time you launch it, it starts where you left off.
