learn a song, step one: 100% (am I the only one?) | Forums

[Typhoon7M]

Every time I start a new song, I go into riff repeater select everything, turn up the mastery 100%.
I love the fact that I do this and not learn to play the song a dozen incremental ways.
Anyone else finding this useful?

[derrickhenry1]

Every time I start a new song, I go into riff repeater select everything, turn up the mastery 100%.
I love the fact that I do this and not learn to play the song a dozen incremental ways.
Anyone else finding this useful?

Yes for songs I can play, unfortunately I won't do this for Satch Boogie and Cemetary Gates and a few other songs that having some hardcore tapping on it.

[Typhoon7M]

Yes for songs I can play, unfortunately I won't do this for Satch Boogie and Cemetary Gates and a few other songs that having some hardcore tapping on it.

Indeed, sometimes it's too much, and I too leveled sections back down, but I still like knowing what the final product looks like, hand/finger placement strategies, etc.

[Gold_Jim]

Typhoon7M, I do this for every single song that I learn. Currently work on 25 or 6 to 4. I slow the section down until I can play it flawlessly, even if that's at 33%. Once I do that, I increase the speed until I have THAT speed flawless. Not just one lucky pass at 0 notes missed, but at least 3 in a row. Then I speed up more. These increments are usually 5 to 10%, depending on the complexity. You might wonder why I'm so OCD about every single pass, and it's that I am paying attention to tone, speed, precision of notes, clarity, and economy of motion. I find that if I get the economy of motion down by the time I'm at 75-80%, when I hit 100%, there's no question that I'm doing the solo like second nature.

I had an instructor have me slow down passages I thought I was doing well with, and we were able to tear my playing apart. He had me play passages over and over at 1/2 speed until I couldn't mess them up and then wait a day and speed them up. After a while, I got the idea, and I was able to move the speed more quickly, but there are times and passages that have to sit and stew in the brain and the muscles over night before truly hitting them dead on. I'm not really a shredder. Dave Gilmour is more my speed. But just like sprinting is not for everyone, shredding was never really want I wanted to accomplish before. Now, I'm looking to do some new things.

[GarethNelson]

Typhoon7M, I do this for every single song that I learn. Currently work on 25 or 6 to 4. I slow the section down until I can play it flawlessly, even if that's at 33%. Once I do that, I increase the speed until I have THAT speed flawless. Not just one lucky pass at 0 notes missed, but at least 3 in a row. Then I speed up more. These increments are usually 5 to 10%, depending on the complexity. You might wonder why I'm so OCD about every single pass, and it's that I am paying attention to tone, speed, precision of notes, clarity, and economy of motion. I find that if I get the economy of motion down by the time I'm at 75-80%, when I hit 100%, there's no question that I'm doing the solo like second nature.

I had an instructor have me slow down passages I thought I was doing well with, and we were able to tear my playing apart. He had me play passages over and over at 1/2 speed until I couldn't mess them up and then wait a day and speed them up. After a while, I got the idea, and I was able to move the speed more quickly, but there are times and passages that have to sit and stew in the brain and the muscles over night before truly hitting them dead on. I'm not really a shredder. Dave Gilmour is more my speed. But just like sprinting is not for everyone, shredding was never really want I wanted to accomplish before. Now, I'm looking to do some new things.

The absolute best strategy is this:
Put it on 1% speed, 100% difficulty, play through it until you can do it perfectly 4 times in a row, increase to 2%, repeat

Yes it's not as quick, but you'll learn the right way and sound cleaner when you get up to tempo

[TedJackson]

The absolute best strategy is this:
Put it on 1% speed, 100% difficulty, play through it until you can do it perfectly 4 times in a row, increase to 2%, repeat

Yes it's not as quick, but you'll learn the right way and sound cleaner when you get up to tempo

If you really want to learn a song "note-for-note" as quickly and efficiently as possible then this is the best method to use. The only thing amendment I would make to is to not be so aggressive with the speed reduction - try starting at 50% and run through the whole song three times and if you're above the 70% mark continue at 50% until you nail it otherwise repeat the process at 40% and, if necessary reduce speed by 10% again until you achieve the 70% then maintain that speed until you can nail it 3 times on the trot then raise the speed by 10% and repeat the process until you've mastered the song.

It's very important to get a sense of where you are in a song and bit learning (just learning a section) means you have to learn that separately whereas with the method described you're learning the flow of the song from the very beginning.

Sorry if this is a bot wordy but I'm in a rush so just wanted to get this out there!


Ted

[Dillerin]

Yep, I think a lot more people are raising the difficulty to have a final look at what's really being played. I just hate having to re-learn the patterns with the added notes after every time you level up a section. I know chords and chord shapes enough to be able to go full difficulty, turn down the tempo and watch what's expected of me before I even leave the pause menu.
But, just because I can see all the notes, chords, slides, bends, etc, doesn't mean I'll be able to play it... though I can at least sit there when the game is turned off and fiddle around practicing those particular chords.

[Reesrevo]

Depends on the song, what I do is start the song, hit RR mode and ramp it up to where it looks like I can handle it... Then use LAS mode to sort the auto levelling out and repeat there, this usually my warm up before hitting score attack where I find the level near or lower than where my LAS level is, and hammer it on that.
My theory, if my level in LAS mode is above the one I'm playing in SA I'll be topping the charts in SA mode. Hammering SA mode means the landscape doesn't change under me and I'm learning a fixed arrangement.

[Klopzi]

I always use the leveler myself unless I already know the song (from RS1) or the riff I'm looking at doesn't look too hard. But even the intro to R U Mine is so far above my skill level that bumping it straight up to 100% would have frustrated me.

[MAng0r3]

Only thing missing imho would be the possibility to raise tempo up to 110-120% in order to be completely relaxed when playing the song at 100% tempo. This is something that should be easy to implement.