How do you manage exercises routines?

[RGerhart]

'Mistakes' at higher tempi are usually attributable to a flaw in technique that is not readily apparent (but nontheless exists) at slower tempi. At slower tempo the flaw is hidden and seemingly insignificant. The most common flaw that only becomes apparent at higher tempi is synchronisation between left and right hands. Let me illustrate:

Imagine your left hand stopping (fretting) a note and your right hand plucking the string. Imagine that your right hand plucks the note 50ms (0.05s) after the left hand makes the stop, or that you lift off each note to move to the next one 50ms before the start of the next beat. Or both - that's a total of 0.1s of 'dead air'. This type of 'flaw' tends to remain constant no matter what the tempo - it is a practiced habit that is 'baked in'. It may not sound much, but...

• Imagine playing quarter notes at 60 BPM. Each note is 1 second in duration, but your technique means that each note sounds for 0.90s (0.05s for the late start and 0.05s for the early finish).
  
• Now play 1/16 notes at that tempo - each note is nominally 0.25s in duration, but thanks to the late start and early finish your note only sounds for 0.15s. That's 60% sound, 40% silence.
  
• Now double the tempo to 120BPM. Each 1/16th note has a nominal duration of 0.125s. But thanks to your late start and early finish you are actually only making a sound for 0.025s! Each 'note' is now 80% silence!
  
• At 150BPM it becomes 'critical'. The nominal duration of each 1/16th note is 0.1s. But your technique has a 'baked-in' dead time of 0.1s, which means you don't actually have any time to make any sound at all. If you try to make a sound you automatically become late for the next note.

Practicing at slow tempo allows you to detect and become aware of this dead time, and work on reducing it as much as possible. Play super-legato, giving each note as much of the full value as possible. To minimse the late start, aim to stop and pluck at exactly the same time. To reduce the early finish aim to keep the note stopped as long as possible and to lift off as late as possible.

Just a quick caveat - for most people the dead-time is nowhere near 0.1s, I just used these figures to make for simple arithmetic. But even if it was 0.05s total, your 16th at 150BPM would be 50/50 sound/silence, at which point you may as well be playing tuned percussion!!

This is a great, logical explanation, that I've never heard explained this way. Bravo!

 

[Rocket Queen]

We often practice chromatics by going up 1234 and back down 4321 but there are a lot of other ways to organize those 4 notes! For example, playing up the chromatic exercise 2134 and then descending 4312 will shake you out of the comfortable patterns that let you go on auto-pilot. Once you have started exploring, you can mix them up! Try alternating each string between ascending and descending the pattern, or alternate between two different patterns and then reverse them both as you descend.

Every possible permutation:
Ultimate Bass Exercises - Bass Hal Leonard Online

 

[SteveCS]

This is a great, logical explanation, that I've never heard explained this way. Bravo!

Thanks! I'd love to take credit for it but I can't - it is paraphrased from a small section in a book by Clive Harrison (Clive Harrison | Credits | AllMusic) called "Teach Yourself Advanced Bass", first published in Australia in 1983.

 

[micguy]

Playing fast is an overrated skill.

I pretty much agree, but when starting out, a lot of folks can’t play fast enough to play the repertoire they’re working on. There, building speed is important. I had a decode off from wrist issues, and when I started playing again, my index finger on my plucking hand (I had played like Jamerson before the break) was no longer capable of playing at a decent tempo. I had to add a finger and work a lot on speed to get to where I could play well.

So… speed is important if you’re not fast enough , but once you are… it’s no longer all that important (unless you’re gonna make your living as a YouTuber).

 

[DrBnz]

Don't know if its right or not.
After a quick stretch ... I warm up to two octaves scale / up and down / you can't take the same path back as you went up on / play it perfectly CLEAN twice in a row (keep going if you don't). No metronome .... playing it CLEAN is my goal .... and I mean perfectly clean. No squeaks - nice full notes.
THEN ... I use the metronome for no less than 5 minutes of playing anything - non-stop - scales of all sorts - call out the notes as you go if you're feeling froggy. But I go jogging .... I never go running. At whatever tempo I can do it perfectly clean.

 

[themickster]

Hello mates!

I wanna share what I do in one of my routines just to see if I am aiming right.

Every time I do fretting exercises, I do it of course with metronome, from slow, about 60bpm, and as I get it right I increase tempo until I reach the point in which I can't perform well. At that point I stop and I insist OR, I go back a little and stay there for a while before keep increasing tempo.

One of my exercises are Arpegios. I won't explain what I do exactly but is basically playing around the 5th circle.
I understand the foundation of the exercise, that is, is not only shapes what I learn but what notes I am playing. But of course I got to a point where even sometimes when I get distracted, my hands go to the right place almost without thinking. You know what happens when you play a song you know very well...

I do it right until 110 bpm always and just from that point I start making mistakes.
Should I keep dedicating time to slower tempos ? Or just concentrate in the ones I know that I dont handle right?

And my question is also because I dedicate 30 min to this exercise and If I always start from lower tempos, I can't dedicate long enough to master high tempos.

Thanks!!!

Do whatever works for you. I make practice tracks of guitar and drums at my band's full speed of 180bpm and play once a day until I can play the bassline and sing the lead at the same time without a mistake.

Do something else as soon as you feel frustrated. Go back to it later.

 

[TOOL460002]

the reason why I make mistakes in higher tempos is that I might not reach the note, or get lost caused by the speed which doesn't let me think where to continue. My physical condition is okay on those tempos. My limit about 135 in quarter notes. My finger won't move faster

Oh! Another thought. When I was trying to learn a sort of sweep picking without a pick, I would constantly listen to really fast guitar like Dragonforce or Yngwie Malmsteen, because I literally could not hear the notes well enough to play them. I had to wrap my brain around it through a ton of listening before playing was even possible (I'm still not great at the method). I only used guitar examples because there just is not as much on bass that blasts 1/128th notes back and forth for a 5min solo. Not saying this is you, but it's one roadblock I recall running into.

 

[BlueTalon]

Playing fast is an overrated skill.

Only if you never play fast songs.

 

[Leigh Semmens]

Since you also feel that you have mastered to slower tempi, what about starting a little faster at the beginning, instead of 60, start at 80 or 100, that will then give you more time at the faster speeds to which you aspire.

 

[10emmanuel]

After 30 years of exercising my fingers just to stay ready to play if I ever get another band, it’s worth having good finger dexterity at least. I don’t focus on theory, but then again I can only read and write tab. That being said, my technique and muscle memory consistently land me in elite circles of musicians(who already have bands) who have good advice for me as well for my continued growth. The only musicians I ever meet that care so much about theory are orchestra and session player types due to the amount of players they need to interact with. I say if your technique is good then why worry about theory or bpm when practicing? Perfect practice? Only with technique I say. Just my $.02

quarter notes at 130 bpm is not so much anyways. There as sons or sections that go faster. Ex fill in one of the last bass of Look around but red hot chili peppers. Is the first that comes to my mind.

 

[bfields]

Learning something by starting slow and then gradually bumping the metronome can be a useful trick, but I think it's way oversold.

Sometimes the technique for playing at a faster speed is just fundamentally *different* somehow from what works at a lower speed. Or sometimes (like in the example @SteveCS gives), you've got a problem at lower speed too but it's hard to hear the problem until you get to higher speeds.

I used to do that gradual ratcheting-up, but these days I bounce around more: try a passage once or twice at the target tempo, try to isolate the problem somehow, come up with an alternate approach (different hand position, fingering, whatever), drop back to a lower tempo to practice it, then test again at the higher tempo to see if it's helping, etc.

Sometimes it might be worth trying at a tempo *faster* than the target--maybe exaggerating the problem helps identify it, or forces a different technique that turns out to help.

Another thing to try is breaking up a passage into smaller pieces--e.g., if you've got a bar of continuous 16 notes, try splitting them up into overlapping groups of 4, practicing each one individually, then gradually piecing them back together.

In general I think in the past I've relied too much on repetition and not enough on curiosity and trial and error.

This recent interview Robert Duke: On the Value of Errors, and How Learning Really Works has some more interesting stuff on that theme.

(Disclaimer: I'm just a random internet user. If you've got an actual expert sitting in a room with you watching you play--that's the ideal situation--listen to them, not me.)