right, so 200bpm at quarter notes means only 200 notes per minute?
is that right?
sorry for sounding a bit confused, but that seems a little slow to me for a technical excercise like playing a scale?
"I like to play that guitar. I have to stare at it while I'm playing it because I'm not very good at playing it."
Noel Gallagher (who took the words right out of my mouth)
200 quarter notes a minute is a very fast tempo. Most metronomes will only go up to 250 BPM.
Play it in eighth notes, and you'd have 400 notes/minute. That's zipping right along.
"A cheerful heart is good medicine."
I can play 1258th notes at 1bpm. :roll:
The trouble with all this obsession with speed though, is that the first thing to suffer at speed is the emotional impact.
As an example, Hermann Li (Dragonforce) can play at a gazillion bpm and 200 notes per click but his solos don't move me. Sure, it's impressive that he can play that fast but I find his music sounds like the Eurovision Song Contest.
A :-)
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i agree Alan - i just get a little confused with the terminology - but then there is also the aspect that "sometimes" a flurry of fast picked notes really adds to the musical effect.
i just would like to understand how fast i can play if needs be- and this thread has got me curious about how i can figure that out.
"I like to play that guitar. I have to stare at it while I'm playing it because I'm not very good at playing it."
Noel Gallagher (who took the words right out of my mouth)
I like rhythmic variation, and find the faster the playing gets, the closer it gets to being straight 8ths throughout the whole solo, generally speaking. Plus, the faster the music, the less 'space between the beats' (for want of a better term, so the less opportunity for nuance of phrasingIn other words, it's harder to play "just behind the beat" when the next beat is just behind the beat.
Playing scales for speed is fine for a warmup... I do that too. But it has really limited application.
When I do my metronome work, which makes up maybe 5-7% of my practice time (at best), I'm doing patterns - thirds, patterns like 1-2-3-2-3-4, and string skipping drills. Depending on the exercise, and the key, and the scale fingering I'm using, my maximum tempo will vary a lot. My metronome drills today ranged from 168-200 bpm. But that's a mix of eighth notes, triplets, and sixteens, and a mix of keys and fingerings. I practice that way because solos are made up of a vocabulary of licks, and just running scales make for very boring solos.
In something "easy" - a straight scale run in a fingering that uses 2nd finger/6th string or 4th finger/5th string root, I'm pretty comfortable in bursts of about 800 notes per minute. But that doesn't mean anything, for two reasons:
1. Scales aren't solos. So what if you can rip up and down the do-re-mi? In a real life situation, you want to say something. And that's not measured by a metronome.
2. Even if it was, when you're playing, your metronome is the band! If the band is at 168, and you can do 400 notes per minute, you aren't doing that - you're doing 336 notes per minute max. The band is playing too fast for you to do triplets, and too slow for you to strut all your chops on eighths. And that's one problem I have listening to some of the speed shredders - their solos don't "fit" with the band. If you play a septuplet against a beat because it expresses your musical idea, that's great, and I can dig it. But if you play a septuplet because you're not capable of doing 32nd notes, and you think that triplet 16ths doesn't show your true speed, I'm not impressed. I'm willing to be patient for great music. It's not a race. Put substance over style.
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i don't have too much trouble squeezing a major scale in between clicks at 110 bpm, which correlates to 880 notes per minute, or just under 15 notes per second. i'm guessing my peak speed would be around 130 bpm, although that's just a guess. i rarely ever use a metronome. i wouldn't even own one if it didn't double as a tuner.
I'd never thought to try playing a one octave scale between clicks. So I just set my metronome to 110 and gave it a whirl. Just like with pattern drills, some fingerings work easier than others, but I was able to squeeze one out consistently with several different fingerings after about a dozen tries.
I could get it up to about 125pbm before the last note started falling just past the next click, so I guess my maximum is somewhere around 1000 notes per minute, not quite 17 per second. But that's measured in a burst that's less than 1/2 of a second. And I don't find anything particularly useful about the exercise - so I'll stick with my pattern drills :)
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That's approaching the point where the frequency of changing notes becomes audible.
"A cheerful heart is good medicine."
