How To Play Fast: Chunking
Photo by Simon Weisser on Unsplash
A huge barrier to being able to play fast lines is that there are simply too many notes for our brain to process in real time and at high speeds. We might often start a fast phrase correctly but as the phrase progresses and more notes are involved, the entire phrase starts to fall apart. Either our brain gets confused or fingers don’t know what to do, or both! This can be terribly frustrating for guitar players since we all strive to move between fast and slow phrases with ease and confidence.
What is chunking?
Chunking is a memorisation technique that can be used to remember large pieces of information, in our case, a large number of notes. When dealing with large amounts of information, focusing on each individual note is a huge task for the brain. Therefore, by “chunking” these notes into smaller groups of notes, our brain perceives each group of notes as one piece of information, even when they contain multiple notes. As a result, less mental power is required to process a large number of notes since they are grouped together.
How to apply chunking to fast phrases.
Here’s how to apply chunking to a long and fast line. Let's take the following sequence as an example:
This is a 24 note sequence that can be played as 16th note triplets (6 notes per beat). Now, viewing this entire passage note for note is a huge task for the brain. Therefore it would require less brain power if you were to chunk these notes in groups of 6.
See the following example:
By chunking the sequence this way, your brain now perceives the entire passage as four pieces of information instead of 24 pieces of information.
When working in this, use a metronome and focus on synching the very first of every 6 notes to the click. As long as that first note is in sync with the click, making sure the rest of the notes are equally spaced will keep you in time. You can choose to accent every 6 notes by picking that note harder than all the other notes.
How to create your own exercises using chunking.
Now that you have an understanding of this concept, here is how you can apply it to your own practice. The cool thing about this is that you can apply it to absolutely any long and fast passage or scale sequence. The first thing you need to do is to identify what note division the sequence is meant to be, and then chunk them accordingly. For example, if it is a 16th note sequence, you may chunk the notes in groups of 4 or 8 notes per click. If it is a 8th note triplet sequence, you may chunk them in groups of 3 or 6 notes per click.
This approach massively reduces the burden on your brain when playing long and fast passages or sequences. Use this method and make fast playing feel easy!!!
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