Martial Art and Music...

Picture it, a seasoned martial artist. He's training, going through his forms slow and steady, there's silence all around.

You could hear a feather drop it's so quiet in there. He's so focused and in the moment that the entire world melts away and it's just him, and his training.

That's how we picture traditional martial arts masters along with the long grey beard, and the huge bushy eyebrows.

What if I told you, music should be practiced the same way?

You're probably looking at me write now laughing.

"But Josh! You can't shred going slow, it makes no sense!"

True, a quarter note solo at 30 bpm would be painfully boring.

But here's the trick. How do you think Vai, Satriani, Johnson, and everyone else that can play at warp speed got that way?

They train slowly. Just like those old martial arts masters. There's an old saying my Kung Fu teacher kept pounding into my head (literally sometimes lol); "If you can't do it correctly slow, then you can't do it at all."

This is certainly true for music too. I remember when I was a teenager and I had written a slow ballad chord progression. It was really simple, 4/4 time, single key, in E Minor. I shown it to a bass player and drummer I knew from church and they liked it. Granted I wasn't much of a guitar player at the time but it was one of the few things I could play well at the time.

So the bassist found out what chords I was playing and we started working on it. Then something happened, the drummer couldn't drum to it.

I couldn't understand this at the time, because he was a talented drummer and specialized in punk which required the drummers to play blisteringly fast.

Well it turns out he had never practiced anything slowly to a metronome before, so he had no idea how to create drum beats that slow. It's been a long time since I've jammed with that particular musician, and I'm almost certain he could do it now if he's still playing. But that nicely demonstrates my point.

If you start practicing your technique slow and focused, making sure everything sounds perfect at a slow and steady click. You can get it up to warp speed and maintain clarity, articulation, rhythm, timing and all the other fun stuff.

I prescribe getting a metronome app on your phone, turning off distortion all together. Practice your scales, licks, patterns, progressions, all of it at a slow tempo when you're first learning something. Make sure you can play it slowly. Then ramp up the speed over time.

By the time you get up to the tempo you want to get at, you'll be shocked how much better you sound!

And always remember,

"If you can't do it correctly slow, then you can't do it at all."