Most Flatpickers Practice Speed Wrong

Today I'm going to be showing you how to build speed in your flatpicking while also keeping your playing clean, smooth, and in time. I don't care if your top tempo is at 50 beats per minute, and I don't care if it's at 150 beats per minute. What you're going to learn today is going to help you develop some amazing speed and chops in your flatpicking. Alright y'all, let's talk about building speed. This is probably the most common question that I get from people because bluegrass is a fast music, and one of the things that draws people to bluegrass is the level of speed and virtuosity with which it's played at. But a lot of people have a really tough time trying to build speed in this style while also keeping their playing clean and in time. So that's what I'm going to be showing you today. I'm going to be showing you some things that you can start implementing into your daily practice system, and if you'll stay consistent with this will help you build speed and chops in your flatpicking. But before I get in and show you the examples, I want to present a couple of really, really important ideas at the top of this video. Number one is this: there are different tempo levels that people are going to find themselves playing at, and these levels are different. The technique feels different, sometimes it looks different for each one of these levels. And so it is important to know where you're at. So I've got a lot of data on this because I've been working with a lot of people over the years, and these These are just different levels that I will commonly see people at in their flatpicking. Okay, and the 5 different tempo levels are this: number 1, 40 to 70 beats per minute; number 2, 70 to 100 beats per minute; number 3, 100 to 130 beats per minute; number 4, 130 beats per minute to 160 beats per minute; and number 5, 160 beats per minute and above. Okay, so that's the first idea, is that there are different tempo levels here. Number 2, and this is so important, is this: you are not going to bypass any of these levels. What do I mean by that? I mean this: if your top tempo— let's say that you can play a tune like, you know, Blackberry Blossom, or, you know, a solo to Nine Pound Hammer— if your top tempo is 70 beats per minute, You are not going to hand position, pick slant, play with less pick exposed, play with more pick exposed, find a shortcut that's gonna shoot you up to 170 beats per minute. It ain't gonna happen. At the same time, I think we're all aware that the old classic, you know, start slow, practice with the metronome, gradually increase the tempo doesn't really work for building speed. So what I recommend students do, 'cause this is just something that I've been practicing for a long time, is that number one, you wanna find your ceiling tempo. That's just the fastest tempo that you can play, you know, a tune or a solo at, and you can play it cleanly and in time. Find your ceiling tempo. And then what you wanna do is shoot for about 10 to 30 beats per minute faster than your ceiling tempo. So again, that's idea number one. Number 2 here is that you're not going to bypass these levels, but what you can do to build speed is shoot for 10 to 30 beats per minute faster than your ceiling tempo. That's the top tempo that you can play a tune or a solo at. So number 3 is this: the best way to build speed while also keeping your playing clean and in time is to take smaller bits of either the tune or the solo or the lick or the passage that you're trying to play shorten the phrase and increase the tempo. Because when I present idea 2 to a lot of people, they're like, Aaron, that's great, but you know, I can play Blackberry Blossom at 70 beats per minute, but if I kick the metronome up to 90 and try to do it, it just falls apart. It's just a bunch of sloppy garbage. So what I recommend that people do is don't try to play all of Blackberry Blossom at 90 beats per minute if 70 beats per minute is your top tempo. Take a little bit of Blackberry Blossom and play it at 90. That you can do, and that will help you build speed while keeping your playing clean and in time. And then number 4 is this: the way to practice this stuff is through a 3-step process. I call it acclimation, repetition, and standardization. Let me say that again: acclimation, repetition, acclimation and standardization. Okay, so what do I mean by that? I know that sounds a little academic there, but it's a useful framework that you can use in your playing. Acclimation— that's why I recommend people shoot for 10 to 30 beats per minute faster than their ceiling tempo. And we do that through the third idea that I presented there, taking smaller bits of either the tune or the solo that you're working on. Okay, and so what that does is it acclimates you. It gets you used to playing at tempos that are faster than you're used to playing at. But when we're taking a smaller musical passage, it's not completely overwhelming and you're not trying to eat the elephant in one bite. So that's what I mean by acclimation. Number 2 is repetition. Now this is another thing that a lot of people don't get with this stuff. In order to really acclimate yourself to these new tempos, take a smaller chunk, increase the tempo, but you have to do a lot of repetition on that. And by that I don't mean 3 or 4 times a day, I mean 30 to 50 times per day. I would really recommend if you're tired of kind of having the same level of chops and speed and technique that you've had for decades and you really want to break out of it, commit to doing this a minimum of 50 times a day. Now, when I throw that number out there, people are like, "Gosh, that just be like so tedious and boring and it would take a long time." Number 1, it actually doesn't. You can probably do that in less than 10 minutes per day. And number 2, I promise you, if you're doing these smaller chunks, 10, 20, 30 beats per minute faster than your ceiling tempo, it's going to be such a challenging thing that your brain has no choice but to stay engaged with it. So it's not boring, it's not tedious, and it doesn't take as much time as you think. Number 3 is standardization. What do I mean by standardization? It just means being consistent. That's all it means. You have to stay consistent with this stuff. And the best way to think about that is this: 60 days to create a habit, 1 year to really see a transformation. 60 days to create a habit, 1 year to make a real transformation. That's idea number 4 there. The way to implement this into your practice sessions is through acclimation, repetition, standardization. You have to get used to playing at tempos that are faster than you're used to playing at. Number 2, you have to do a lot of repetition, and I don't mean 3 or 4 times a day, I mean like 50 times per day. And number 3, standardization. You have to stay consistent with this stuff. And by that, I'm talking like a year to really see a transformation in your playing. Okay, so now what I want to do is show you some bits from some tunes and a couple of other licks and phrases that you can practice for each one of the tempo levels, the 5 tempo levels that I was talking about a minute ago. You can get the tabs for all of these ideas down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. But no matter which of these tempo levels that you're at, you can take these ideas, you can start implementing this in your practice sessions, and really start to build some incredible speed and chops in your flat picking. All right, so let's go into the first tempo level here. Okay, so let's talk about this first tempo level here, 40 to 70 beats per minute. Now, I actually love this level because this is where so many of our important foundations get set. This is where you learn how to play cleanly and in time. And again, this comes from working with a lot of I've gotten to know a lot of people who watch my YouTube channel and are in my online courses. I would say 60 to 65% of my students, and that includes viewers of this YouTube channel, are at this tempo level, and that's great. So what I want to do here is I want to show you a bit from a very common tune that people like to play at this level, and I'm going to show you how you can use it to build speed. So I'm going to take a little passage from Red Haired Boy. Now, I'm not going to show you how to play Red Haired Boy in this particular lesson. I would say most of y'all watching this channel already know that tune. Um, but if you don't, uh, you can check out this lesson right here, and I will link to it down in the video description. Now there's one phrase, uh, that kind of happens in the A part and the B part to the basic melody of this tune. Some people play this slightly different, but the way I teach it is this.

Okay, all right, so And then on the beat.

Okay, so it happens a lot in Red Haired Boy, but this little passage, it's a great little speed building idea. So here's what I want to show you. We're gonna take that passage right there, okay, and then we're gonna shorten it just a little bit. Okay, and then we're gonna shorten it even more. Okay, so one more time, the full passage. First shortened version. Second shortened version. Okay, so let's say that this is where you're at as a player, and let's say your top tempo for Red Haired Boy is 50 beats per minute. You can play the whole thing at 50 beats per minute. Again, I work with a lot of students on this channel, and that is where a lot of people are at. That's great, you're building your foundations, that's a great place to be at. But let's say you want to start working on building speed. So we're gonna use that passage and the shortened versions of it to build speed. So what I'm gonna to do right here is I'm going to play this full passage at 60 beats per minute. I'm going to play the first shortened version at 70 beats per minute, and the third shortened version— excuse me, the second shortened version— at 80 beats per minute. And that will sound like this. So this is a great thing to practice for a lot of people who are at this level. Again, I would say 60 to 65% of my students are at this level, but you can take those little passages there and you can acclimate yourself to playing at faster tempos. You can acclimate yourself to playing at 60, 70, and 80 beats per minute. And if you will do a bunch of repetition on those, like, you know, 50 times a day— 30, 50, 100 if you're really feeling ambitious— um, what's going to happen is you're going to start to get used to playing at these tempos, and it's going to become easier and easier and easier. And if you'll stick to this over time, you're really going to build some speed in your playing. So that's a great thing to practice if you're at this tempo level in your playing. So let's go ahead and go into the next level here. So 70 to 100 beats per minute here. I love this level because you've already set your foundations in the 40 to 70 BPM range, and now you're ready to take it up a notch. So one of the tunes that people, you know, practice at this level— it's a great tune for people at this level, it's a great tune for people at any level though— is Blackberry Blossom. Again, like I was saying with Red Haired Boy, I'm not going to teach you how to play Blackberry Blossom, um, in this lesson. I would say most of y'all already know that. If not, you can check out a couple of these videos right here that I've done on this channel, and I'll link to it down in the video description. But here's a couple of passages we can use to build speed in Blackberry Blossom. Number 1 is this. It's kind of like a quarter of the A part.

Okay, okay.

And then we can shorten that just a little bit and play this. I'll play that again. Okay, and then we can shorten it even more and do this again. Okay, so 3 chunks of Blackberry Blossom that we can use to practice building speed. Okay, first shortened version. Second shortened version. Okay, so let's say your top tempo for playing Blackberry Blossom is 70 beats per minute. Okay, so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to play that first passage at 80 beats per minute. I'm going to play the second passage at 90 beats per minute and the third passage at 100 beats per minute. And that's going to sound like this. That is a great thing to practice if that's the tempo level that you're at, because in practicing these passages you're playing smaller chunks, so you don't have the, you know, pressure on you to try to play the whole tune at 20 or 30 beats per minute faster than your top tempo. You can take a smaller passage and play it at faster tempos. And when you get to that third little passage there, you're playing at 30 beats per minute faster than your top tempo for the whole tune. If you practice that and stay consistent with that and do the kind of repetition that I was talking about, you're going to build speed. It's going to happen. Okay, let's go into the third tempo level here. Okay, so 100 to 130 beats per minute. I love this tempo level because for a lot of people, this is where these tunes really start to sound like bluegrass. Because a lot of this music, a lot of these fiddle tunes, a lot of these bluegrass vocal classics sound great at 120 to 130 beats per minute, or even a little slower, in between 100 and 110. A lot of this music sounds good at these tempos. It takes some time to get up to this level, but once you do, I really hope that you start getting excited, that, uh, you know, you start getting a whole lot more confident as a player. So what I want to do is just kind of show you, um, you know, what I was showing you in the previous levels here— some passages, some chunks that you can play from a common tune that people like to practice at this level. And the tune is Big Mon. Now again, remember, with these tunes, you know, a lot of them sound good at all of these tempo levels. Big Mon is one that I I think sounds good at 70 beats per minute and it sounds good at 170 beats per minute. But a lot of times when people are at this tempo level, Big Mon is a tune that they're working on. So again, what I want to do is I want to show you 3 different passages you can take from Big Mon to help you practice building speed. The first one is this, okay? So again, it's like a quarter of the A part. Okay, and then we're gonna shorten that a little bit. So the first shortened version will be this. Let's do that again. All right, and then the third shortened version will be this. Let's do that again. Okay, again, first passage. Second passage. Third passage. Okay, so let's say your top tempo for Big Mon is 100 beats per minute. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play the first passage at 110, I'm going to play the second one at 120, and the third at 130, and that's going to sound like this. Great thing to practice there, because if you'll practice these, do a bunch of repetition on them and increase the tempo, you're going to be getting used to playing at 30 beats per minute faster than your top tempo. And again, staying consistent with this, you're going to build speed. All right, let's go into the next tempo level.

All right.

All right, so this one is also a lot of fun. This is where we start dipping our toes into fast grass territory here, okay? A lot of this music sounds really good at these tempos. Um, you know, um, I think it was last week I posted a video on a solo that Billy Strings plays on, you know, the bluegrass classic Long Journey Home. And I think the version that he records is at about 140, and just a lot of this music sounds good at that tempo. Long Journey Home sounds great at that tempo. Rolling My Sweet Baby's Arms sounds great at that tempo. How Mountain Girls Can Love sounds great at that tempo. So this is where the music starts to get faster, and while we're not going full-on like 180 BPM, like Jake Workman insanity, it starts to feel like fast grass here. So what I want to do here is I want to actually show you, um, a lick that I've shown on this channel, uh, many times. It's one I picked up from David Greer. Uh, the tune is called Big 'Dirt Clod.' That's the actual name of the tune. It's from his Lone Soldier album. He plays it on the second solo on there, and it's just this little, little, you know, slippery, slidey position shifting run. Goes like this. Okay, so I wanted to share this passage here with you because it's infinitely usable. It's just like a 2-bar bluegrass lick. You can use it in a ton of different tunes here, and it sounds good at this tempo. I'll play the whole thing slow for you. Okay, so that's the full passage there. But now we want to do what we were doing in the other tempo levels here, and I want to give you a shortened version of it. That's gonna go like this. We'll do that again. Okay, and then we want to shorten it one more time, and that's going to go like this. Let's do that again. Okay, so the full lick here is going to go like this. First shortened version will go like this. And the second shortened version will go like this. Okay, all right, so let's take that lick at 3 different tempos here. So I'm going to play the full lick at 135, I'm going to play the first shortened version at 145, and the second shortened version at 155, and that's going to sound like this. So that's a great thing to practice because as we dip into this tempo level, things start to feel like fast grass. So we want to acclimate ourselves to playing, um, at this tempo. But at the same time, you don't want to just destroy yourself by biting off more than you can chew. But playing these smaller passages at these tempos, doing a bunch of repetition and staying consistent with this stuff is really going to help you build speed. All right, let's go into the next level. All right, 160 and a above. So this is fast freaking grass. This is where the tempos are just cooking. And, um, you know, for, for me, my entry point to bluegrass, uh, bluegrass guitar and bluegrass music really was Brian Sutton. So, you know, I started listening to all those Skaggs records, and I thought this was just like required. This is just, you know, if you wanted to be a flat picker, you had to play like this. What I didn't realize at the time was that, you know, kind of when Brian came along playing with Ricky, he kind of raised the bar for the whole thing because you really didn't hear a whole lot of guitar players consistently playing lead guitar breaks at these tempos before Brian came along. Now that's not to say that there weren't players that could do this. David Greer could do this. There's old recordings of Clarence White playing with the Kentucky Colonels where, I mean, it sounds like Cody Kilby. I mean, he just burns it up at the But it was really when Brian came along that this kind of became like a standard part of bluegrass lead guitar. To be honest here, and again, this is— this comes from working with a lot of students, most people are not at this level. But I did want to show you some things that I like to practice and that you can practice too, whether you're wanting to get up into this level or you want to take some of these ideas and practice them at some of the slower tempos here. So now this is something I've shared in many speed building lessons on this channel, but I want to share it with you here. It's this kind of Cody Kilby sort of jake work Markman-sounding passage that goes like this. Let's do that again. All right, and then we're gonna shorten it just a little bit by doing this. Let's do that again. I'm gonna shorten it even more by doing this. Okay, so full passage. First shortened version. Second shortened version. Okay, so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to play the full passage at 160. I'll play the first shortened version at 170 and the second shortened version at 180. And yes, to all of my guitar playing dude bros out there that haven't left their mom's basement since 2020, I'm well aware that some of these passages are not perfectly clean. Or maybe I get a little ahead of the metronome or a little in time. I know you love to slither around and point out minor flaws in people's playing, but my point with this is not to show you a flawless performance. It's just to show you something that you can practice to build speed at this level. Okay, so why do I like to practice those licks that way? Number one, even if it's just a small passage like this, doing that a bunch at 180 is valuable for me because now when I go back down and let's say I want to play a tune like Roanoke at 160, That feels a lot more doable. I like to use the passages with all picked notes. That way, when I go and play tunes or solos that have a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs in them, it makes the whole thing a whole lot more doable. So here's a little pass that I did on White House Blues at 170 beats per minute. I think I did 2 passes on this. I'm not saying it's a completely flawless performance, but I do use a bunch of hammer-ons and pull-offs, and practicing these little passages with all pick notes makes that a lot more doable.

And that'll sound like this.

Okay, so there you go. There is something that you can practice for all 5 of these tempo levels, and I just want to go back and reiterate the 4 really important points at the end of the video that I talked about at the beginning of the video. Number 1, there are tempo levels here, and you need to know which one of these levels that you're at. Going through and playing tunes at these levels feels different. 120 feels a lot different than 80. 80 feels a lot different than 60. Number 2 though, you're not going to bypass these levels. You're not going to come across a secret trick that will take you from 70 to 170. Beats per minute. And so the way to build speed here is to shoot for 10 to 30 beats per minute faster than your ceiling tempo. Number 3, the way to practice building speed while keeping your playing clean and in time is by taking smaller musical passages from the tunes or solos that you're working on, increase the tempo on those, and practice them over and over and over again. Number 4, the way to implement this into your practice session is 3 steps. Acclimation, repetition, standardization. Acclimation, repetition, standardization. You have to acclimate yourself to playing at tempos that are faster than you're used to playing them at. You have to do a lot of repetition, and when I say a lot of repetition, think like 50 times a day. And then standardization— you just have to make it a standard part of your practice, and you have to stick with this over time to let progress compound. Remember though too, you can do this in 10 minutes a day. You really can. You really can. 10 minutes a day of practicing this kind of stuff, if you will stick to it every single day for a year, you're going to build some amazing speed in your playing. That doesn't mean we're all going to become, you know, Jake Workman in a year. Most of us are never going to be able to do that ever. But you can take the tempo level that you're at right now and you can increase it and build some incredible speed and incredible chops in your playing. Remember, you can get the tabs for these lessons down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. As always, I want to thank you for hanging out, and I'll see you next time.