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I am looking for right and left hand speed exercise
- Thread starter icarus88
- Start date
I really like this one from Adam Nitti. It helped me a lot.
Also, always remember that speed is a byproduct of accuracy.
Otherwise, just pick a really fast song you want to play, and use ASD to build it up to 100% over time. Kuru is great for that IMO
Also, always remember that speed is a byproduct of accuracy.
Otherwise, just pick a really fast song you want to play, and use ASD to build it up to 100% over time. Kuru is great for that IMO
Not actually a speed exercise but try playing The Tears Of A Clown by English Beat with precise note lengths and timings where some notes are on the beat and some are before the beat. It's pretty fast as recorded and is a good hand workout plus timing workout that covers three strings. Especially if the band fires it off faster than that. Lol, ask me how I know.
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Or practice some at half then one third speed. It may test your patience, and will improve coordination.
What you’re really looking for is a SHORTCUT to speed. There isn’t one. Greatness - in any field- takes time. When we hope to find the magic bullet we discount (and disrespect) the enormous amount of work the greats have done to get great. As a previous poster said, focus on getting accurate … EVERYTHING else flows from that.
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In bass playing, as in combat, slow is smooth. And smooth is fast.
I find that usually for speed improvements you can get a lot of benefits from low-complexity drills, which belong to what I call the "fundamentals" (exercises). These are exercises where the complexity is reduced as much as possible in order to focus on one skill, and as such they are always very short and repetitive. Here are some examples, but you can literally make up hundreds of variations on your own!
1) Single note, alternate picking
Choose any one note anywhere on the fretboard, and play 8ths by alternating index and middle finger on the right hand.
The left hand is doing nothing else than keeping down the same note all the time, so 100% focus is on the right hand, to speed up your alternate picking.
2) Single string three-note patterns
Choose a three-note pattern on any single string, such as 1-2-4 (these numbers indicate the left hand fingers i.e. index-middle-pinky), choose a fret location that is comfortable for you (not much stretching needed, but also fingers not too cramped, for example at frets 5-6-8) and play triplets on that pattern. Right hand doesn't matter, it can be one finger, two fingers, three fingers, pick... choose whatever is more comfortable/natural for you at this stage, so that it doesn't detract focus from the left hand, which is the purpose of this exercise.
3) Adjacent-string six note patterns
Choose a three-note pattern on a single string like in exercise 2) but this time add a fourth note on an adjacent string. For example, you could play frets 5-6-8 with index-middle-pinky, then add the note on fret 5 of the next (higher) string to be played with index, and play the pattern up and down, like this:
-------5-----------5--------5-6-8---8-6-5-6-8---8-6-5-...This exercise makes you practice the right hand movement across adjacent strings, by having a single note outside the starting string. You want to practice a similar pattern also moving on the next lower string, like this:
-8-6-5---5-6-8-6-5---5-6-8-...-------8-----------8-------EDIT: this is actually already more complex it needs to be... you could even just play 2 notes, for example play fret 5 with index on one string and fret 7 with ring finger on the next higher string, so that the left hand effort is minimized, then play three times the first note and once the note on the next string.
[General notes about how to practice these exercises]
The key idea is that to play faster you need to increase your relaxation more and more. You can do that by working around the limit of your comfort zone, where your fingers (of either hand) start tensing up therefore limiting the speed itself. You want to variate your speed a bit up and down around that limit, for instance (on a given day) start well below the limit to make sure you're relaxed, then increase the speed to the point when your fingers are tensing up: here you try to consciously relax more while staying at that speed for a while, then slow down again, and continue up and down with speed for a few minutes.
When your focus is entirely on sheer speed (i.e. relaxation, really), forget about other skills at first. Don't think yet about tone, dynamics or even precise timing. Don't use a metronome yet, or it will tense you up. If you need to develop timing precision, you do that separately (and then of course you DO use the metronome for that purpose). If you need to develop volume consistency, do it below your comfort zone limit where relaxation is guaranteed. All this idea is based on "divide and conquer" principle, separate challenges to give each of them as much focus as possible. Putting challenges together is outside the scope of "fundamentals" exercises, so you will do that in another chunk of your practice time with progressively higher complexity exercises. I try to be clear that I am not suggesting to only ever practice low-complexity exercises. There's a huge range of complexity, from fundamentals to full songs, it is of course good to practice the whole range, but when you're working at low-complexity just don't worry about high-complexity or vice versa.
Choose how much time you want to dedicate on this type of practice. You don't need to spend hours on these, 5-10 minutes for each low-complexity exercise is enough to give you benefits as long as your mind is focused and not doing them on autopilot (hint: don't ever practice anything in front of a TV, if you want to watch TV then watch TV and practice another time) and then decide how many of them you want to do before moving on to higher complexity exercises, improvisation, songs or whatever else. Rather than doing a lot of them on a given day, it is more useful to spread the practice over consecutive days. You also don't need to spend months on the same exercises... I would say that a couple of weeks is already enough to see improvements, then you can continue if you enjoy the practice, or dedicate the next weeks to something else.
Finally, these exercises are meant to be varied. Certainly you want to practice different patterns, at different fretboard positions (makes a huge difference on your left hand) and most importantly you want to cover all strings because the physical feedback on your fingers is different across strings of different size and tension (especially right hand in this case). But you don't need to practice many patterns on many fretboard positions on all strings every single day, otherwise it would take many hours. You can just vary on different days, or rotate the combinations a bit. For example you can decide to spend 30 minutes per day, 10 per exercise, and do 2-4 variants within those 10 minutes.
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Thanks for your advice, an exercise that comes to my mind is to increase the speed of the right hand between the strings.
-0-0- -0-0-
-8- -8-
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"SLOWLY SLOWLY CATCHY MONKEY"
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Synchronisation between the hands is the key to speed - https://www.talkbass.com/threads/how-do-you-manage-exercises-routines.1599481/#post-27302573
learning to play slowly and accurately enables faster playing. so start slow, then speed up bit by bit as you are able. you need to be able to hear fast too. i recommend playing your exercises at all note subdivisions, starting with slow tempos on a metronome. play it in whole notes, then half notes, then quarter notes, then eighth notes, then triplets, then sixteenth notes. start with the metronome at a slow tempo like 50 BPM, playing all those note subdivisions cleanly, and work up from there.
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