Pushing Boundaries?

[fader198]

Hello everyone at ibreathe. This is my frist post here and I would liek to say this is an excellent site with one of the best guitar forums I've ever seen.

Now for my question. Say you are practicing a certain lick or solo or riff or whatever and you reach the barrier where you can play it cleanly and accurately. Say for instance its 140bpm for example. Once you reach this point how to raise the bar to be able to play it cleanly and accurately at higher bpm's? I hope that made sense. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[The Bash]

Well the obvious: try it at 142, 144 and so on slowly speeding it up

The not so obvious: Start slower at say 100 and work up to 140 say in groups of 8 beats or so. Once you get to 140 try jumping up 16 beats to 156 and staying there NO Matter What or How Bad for 30secs or 1 min. Then jump back down to 144-148 and try it. It may or may not work right away it dose sometimes.
Point is play it at your clean tempo 140 try it a quite a bit faster 16-20bmp or so. Then drop it back to your goal tempo say 144 and try it there and keep it up everday till you can say 144 is my new clean tempo.
And I suggest working up to 140 from somewhere slower like 100 to prac getting cordinated.

The how can that be approach: When u wanna go faster, you need tp prac going faster but you need to also prac going slower.
You might notice somrthing keeping you from your new goal (like fingers flying away from fingerboard, or too much tension) that u didn't noticed before or wasn't a problem before or didn't notice before cause it didn't cause u any problems
If thats the case try moving the met down till u find the exact spot things start to go astray and prac it there for a bit trying to keep whatever your fixing, fixed as u speed back up.
Also sometimes as your trying to go faster say 140 to 144 u get sloppier. This is natural at first. But you may find when u go back to 140 u can't plasy that either now. That's cause your outta synch. Try dropiing off to something real slow a get back in the groove then have another go.
Also prac something very slow helps improve the synch so prac what we wanna play faster slower helps.

Small burst: try just a few notes of the lick with a rest inbetween and play them over and over.

Ex. if I were playing say chromatic 4-3-2-1 ex. as 16th notes I'd
Play 4-3-2-1 on first click rest a click play 4-3-2-1 on 3rd click rest a click etc.
usually I myself play 4-3-2-1 on first click and 4 on first 16th note of beat 2 rest on the 2nd,3rd and 4th 16th notes and repeat the proicess for beats 3 and 4.
At faster tempos this helps me locate the beat better by giving me something to shoot at.

Hopefully that last part made sense

[fader198]

Yeah, last part made sense. Thanks for the halp man!