[hakunin]

I like to say that you can either learn to be fast at doing low quality work, or learn to be fast at doing high quality work. It’s your choice really. But the only way to learn the latter is to start by prioritizing quality over speed.

[acituan]

Funny how this exactly applies to instrument playing. Unearned speed only begets sloppiness. The only way to go past a certain velocity is to do meticulous metronome work from a perfectly manageable pace and build up with intention and synchrony. And even then it is not a linear increase, you will need to slow back down to integrate every now and then. (Stetina's "Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar"; 8 bpm up, 4 bpm down)

[fleebee]

I don't think this is true at all.

At slow, manageable tempos, you can afford to use motions that don't scale to fast tempos. If you only ever play "what you can manage" with meticulous, tiny BPM increments, you'll never have to take the leap of faith and most likely will hit a wall, never getting past like 120-130 BPM 16ths comfortably. Don't ask how I know this.

What got me past that point was short bursts at BPMs way past my comfort zone and building synchrony _after_ I stumbled upon more efficient motions that scaled. IIRC, this is what Shawn Lane advocated as well.

I recommend checking out Troy Grady's (Cracking The Code) videos on YouTube if you're interested in guitar speed picking. Troy's content has cleared up many myths with an evidence-based approach and helped me get past the invisible wall. He recently uploaded a video pertaining to this very topic[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=craA3CLqvkM

[james_marks]

This was how my daughter’s virtuoso violin instructor taught, after a lifetime of teaching.

His method was to play alongside the student at 100x their skill level, pushing against their idea that it was too difficult.

But they’d play it, at tempo, horribly, from beginning to end. And then zoom in to a section and begin improving a few phrases at a time.

It was wild to watch, because after months of this, my 11yo could do something that seemed impossible.

[zahlman]

It's hard for me to imagine that most 11yos would be willing to put up with that.

[james_marks]

He was incredibly kind and supportive. Grandfatherly. Key elements, I’m sure.

[acituan]

> What got me past that point was short bursts at BPMs way past my comfort zone and building synchrony _after_ I stumbled upon more efficient motions that scaled.

This is actually pretty close to what Stetina says. I just probably didn’t do a good job expressing it.

You’re oscillating above and below the comfort zone and that iteration like you say affords insights from both sides, and eventually the threshold grows.

Great suggestion of a video, I’ll check it out.

[willseth]

Depends on the instrument. For wind instruments, the motions basically don’t change, and your focus is on synchronizing your mouth with your hands. Tonguing technique is different at high speed but you would typically practice with the same technique at low speed when learning a fast piece.

[ses1984]

But the motions do change, at very slow tempos you can move basically one finger at a time, at faster tempos you have simultaneously overlapping motions.

[willseth]

On a trumpet? A clarinet? No, the motions don't simultaneously overlap. The fingering mechanics are slightly different at speed, but you would still start slow while using the higher speed mechanics and tonguing technique, not jump into high speed practice first.

[ses1984]

No one is saying not to practice slow first. This advice is specifically for intermediate or advanced students who are putting a focus on developing speed specifically. Practice slow first, increase tempo slowly next, but when you hit a plateau, you need to add some repetitions that are well outside your comfort zone. You need to feel what it feels like to play fast, then clean it up.

It seems like this is a far more time efficient methodology to build speed on guitar, I do not know why it wouldn’t apply to other instruments like trumpet.

[popopo73]

Same applies for martial arts, weightlifting, motorsports, even target shooting..

[dontlaugh]

Touch typing too.

[alsetmusic]

When I was in high school, a friend who played drums in a band would try to pull off these super complicated fast fills. He couldn't pull them off and I always thought, "why doesn't he play something he can get right?" Well, after months of practice, he was able to pull them off. He was a great drummer, but he worked at incredibly hard to get there. It's a little tangential to what you said, but it feels appropriately related.

I guess I'm agreeing while also saying that you can get there by failing a lot at full speed first. Maybe he practiced at half-speed when he was alone and I never saw that part.

[meander_water]

One could argue that learned speed has the hours of practice "baked in" so it's actually much slower. And that's not a bad thing IMO.

I think this post only covers one side of the coin. Sure, getting things done fast achieves the outcome, but in the long run you retain and learn less. Learning new stuff takes time and effort.

[fmbb]

I don’t thinking applies at all.

When you practice your instrument you get better att doing the exact same things the sloppy player is doing, but you do it in time and in tune.

When you get faster at building software by (ostensibly) focusing on quality you do not do the same thing as someone that focuses on quick results.

[makeitdouble]

> the exact same things the sloppy player is doing, but you do it in time and in tune.

It depends on the level we look at it, but I think there is fundamental difference in what excellent (professional grade?)players are doing compared to "sloppy" ones.

It is not just done with more precision and care, they will usually have a different mental model of what they're doing, and the means to achieve the better result is also not linear. Good form will give good results, but it won't lead to a professional level result. You'll need to reinvent how you apply the theory to your exact body, the exact instrument in your hand, what you can do and can't and adjust from there.

That's where veteran players are still stellar while you'd assume they don't have the muscle and precision a younger player obviously has.

PS: I left aside the obvious: playing in time and in tune is one thing, conveying an emotion is another. It is considerably hard to move from the former to the latter.

[AlotOfReading]

I'm not sure that the analogy strictly holds either (though that wasn't the point), but this isn't a great rebuttal either.

After a certain, moderate level of skill, all musicians hit the notes. That's not what differentiates them, and they're not playing the same way.

[GuinansEyebrows]

as they say: "slow is smooth; smooth is fast."

[marcosdumay]

I think Demming never put this between his famous phrases, but if Lean carries any lesson is that high-quality work tends to be faster than fast work.

[trueismywork]

Slow is steady, steady os smooth, smooth is fast

[rkeene2]

Fast is cheap, and cheap is good.

[chairmansteve]

I like to break a big task into small tasks, then do each small task fast. I don't worry about how long the big task takes. I'll get there in the end.

[nottorp]

If you do that you basically reduce cognitive load and you may end up doing it faster indeed :)

[QuercusMax]

Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times I've been starting at a project that I basically know how to do, but it's got a bunch of moving parts that I need to account for. I'll just stare at the screen, drink more coffee, read HN, basically do anything besides actually work on it, because it's too big and unactionable. Some of this is actually useful brain-organization time, but some is just time wasting.

Eventually I'll get the bright idea to make a notes doc listing all the things that are bothering me. Just writing them down gets them out of my nebulous headspace into a permanent record, which inevitably makes it less scary - and before you know it's I'm either halfway to a runbook or technical design, and it turns out this project actually will only take a day or two once I have all the prep work done.

[kaizenb]

Same here.