How do you learn the hard parts?

The Kernel

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When there is a solo/lick that is juuuuuuuuuuuust beyond your capabilities, how do you practice it? I mean apart from just playing it a hundred times, are there any secrets to learning something quickly?
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

If its a new technique you havent aproach yet i think you should start with easier excercises of that technique, lets say you want to play some difficult tapping lick that skips strings and you dont know tapping, you should practice with something like eruption first and then you go to try the other lick
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

I have learned my hardest licks (including Texas Flood, one long ass lick :)) by sitting and listening to the song and playing along over and over, literally 100+ times in one sitting sometimes. Then, after a while, I get it!
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

In a lot of songs, you can see the licks flow with chord shapes, like Little Wing by Hendrix, all the licks are structured off barre chords so forming the chords and expanding from there makes it a bit easier.
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

When there is a solo/lick that is juuuuuuuuuuuust beyond your capabilities, how do you practice it? I mean apart from just playing it a hundred times, are there any secrets to learning something quickly?

Get a metronome and work very very slowly to increase your speed to really nail a lick. That's the only secret that I can think of . . .
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

ill second the question...
i mean ive learned a few solos and licks with only muscle memory, playing it till it bleeds, and im not sure its the right thing to do

maybe you stumble once and miss a beat and then you are doomed, like frozen, not knowing where to go next. and you got to start all over again.

there must be a different approach, like learning it from the inside
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

i use
1)Training my muscles on the current movements of the lick
2)Training the timing of the lick
3)Learning the feeling of the lick
4)and playing it half-speed
and then evrytime %10 faster
that works for me
ofcourse there are stuff that i can't never play!Since my fingers and my brain "work" different...but that's not common
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

When there is a solo/lick that is juuuuuuuuuuuust beyond your capabilities, how do you practice it? I mean apart from just playing it a hundred times, are there any secrets to learning something quickly?

Sit and play scale contours in different paterns in time with your metronome, moving up 8bpm every time you're comfortable.

Sky is the limit. Build your technical ability until playing the lick is possible.

Then sit down with a tab and figure out what they're doing and memorize it. Then listen to the lick in the song for awhile and try and dial your playing in to match it. If it takes playing it 1000 times to get it, then that's what you'll have to do.


There's no secrets to being able to play everything perfectly until your technique is nearly perfect from 10+ years of hard practice every day.
 
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Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

Just go a few notes at a time.

Seriously.

Everyone will tell you to play it slow and gradually pick up speed, so that in three or four months you can play whatever solo at almost the recorded speed, or whatever :), but it's been my experience that practicing things slow all the time just teaches you how to play stuff slow.

Just pick out the first bit, like the first four notes, and practice that. When you can play it up to speed and sounding good, add another couple of notes, and keep doing that until you can play the whole thing.
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

ill second the question...
i mean ive learned a few solos and licks with only muscle memory, playing it till it bleeds, and im not sure its the right thing to do

maybe you stumble once and miss a beat and then you are doomed, like frozen, not knowing where to go next. and you got to start all over again.

there must be a different approach, like learning it from the inside

The other thing that I do besides working my way up to speed slowly is to analyze what the person's playing during the solo. That way when I play things back at full speed I can be like: OK, now I'm in A minor pentatonic, ok, now I've switched to D minor with a b6, ok, now I've switched to E major. Then if I ever forget the exact phrase that I'm playing, I can just grab a note from the scale and flub my way through until I remember my part.
 
Re: How do you learn the hard parts?

Just go a few notes at a time.

Seriously.

Everyone will tell you to play it slow and gradually pick up speed, so that in three or four months you can play whatever solo at almost the recorded speed, or whatever :), but it's been my experience that practicing things slow all the time just teaches you how to play stuff slow.

Just pick out the first bit, like the first four notes, and practice that. When you can play it up to speed and sounding good, add another couple of notes, and keep doing that until you can play the whole thing.


:werd: That's generally how I like to do it for the most part. Now if it's more a matter of the lick being ridiculously fast, then I learn it at a slower speed then keep working on it until I can play full speed. But as everyone knows, there's really no substitute for practice, practice and more practice.
 
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