Speed of practice

As a general rule, yes, but for things such as Good Riddance, you'll find you don't need to soon enough. If you play a lot of songs, you know a few rhythms, and you're familiar with the chords it uses, you can generally just play it straight out. It's more a matter of remembering chords and/or fitting vocals to it if you're singing it too. It's like writing - if you know what sound letters make, you can write a new word upon hearing it - you don't need to practice writing it slowly, you just write it.

I find a couple of exceptions though, although this may well be subjective: some very fast things break this rule as the motions the hand makes are different*, and when practicing slowly you need to be careful that you're not making exaggerated movements that become a pain when playing faster**. Even with those, you still have to learn the pattern so that you're not thinking about it too much when you're playing.

* The Chili's Snow, Hey Oh for example. If I practice it slowly I'm picking each string very deliberately in the arpeggiated part, but when playing at speed it's more of a sweep - I don't have time to make a deliberate pick at each string, so learning that part slowly doesn't help me play it fast, it only helps drum in the notes. To practice the sweep, I have to play it at a speed above the threshold where individual notes merge into a sweep, which means fairly close to the speed of the original.

** when I learnt Gn'R's Sweet Child o' Mine, I wasn't really ready for it. I ended up learning to make huge circles with my picking hand to keep the timing even. Now that I play better, I keep it relatively still, and it barely changes in height from the fretboard the whole time. It's no longer a huge, unnecessary effort for my picking hand :)

Having read all that, don't let the exceptions make you forget the first I wrote - as a general rule: yes, practice slowly and build up :mrgreen:

Basically it works like this: you need super slow practice if you cannot immediately play something that you want at the desired tempo, without making mistakes and with consistency. If you are able to do that with a given piece of music, you can move on to something else.

Hope this helps. Take care.

The most common advice I've read is to play slow and with a metronome.

Play as fast as you can play it without making mistakes, speed up over time. If you try to play something fast without knowing it inside and out, it'll just sound like crap, and crap is crap at any speed.

There are two approaches to speed work (on any instrument), and they both have their strengths.

1. Play no faster than you can perform without mistakes
2. Push the tempo to something that's impossible; then back it off to something a bit faster than you've been able to achieve before.

They both work. In fact, method 2 builds speed faster than method 1... but your top speed will end up lower than it could be.

Method 2 builds speed fast because it gets you used to playing fast. If you can only do something at 80bpm, try it once at 160, then try it at 84 or 88. After struggling with high speed, it'll seem sedate by comparison, and your finger movements will be quicker.

But method 1 is essential too - because speed is NOT ABOUT SPEED!!! It's about efficiency. When you practice slowly, the real goal isn't to practice slowly - it's to constantly repeat perfect motions until they're habit. If you lift your fingers too far off the fretboard, or if you under (or over-) rotate your hand on changes, you can solve these problems only by practicing perfect motions.

So if you stick with method 1, you'll make slow but steady gains; if you stick to method 2, you'll get fast...fast, but you won't reach your maximum speed because technique will be a problem. Use both for best results :)