6 note pattern problem

Hi.
I have been practising the yngwie 6 note pattern exercises for a while but cant seem to get past 160bpm without it sounding messy. I think the problem might be that when I’ve played the fourth note with my pinky my first fing jumps into the air until I’ve played the fifth note with my second finger. Should I try and train my hand to keep the first finger on the fretboard throughout the six notes or is it ok to let it come off the fretboard midway through the lick?

Hope this makes sense

My recommendation for that particular pattern would be to play the pattern with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd fingers, leaving all lower fingers in fretted position until it is necessary to lift them.

Thanks for the reply.
I have tried this but still get an involuntary urge to lift the first finger midway through the lick. I have watched Troy’s example and can see that his first finger is firmly in place throughout.

I have an exercise in a magazine article from 1996 in which Paul Gilbert talks about this six note pattern, which is tabbed out as 8, 5, 7, 8, 7, 5 on the high E string and repeated in his case at sextuplets at 144bpm.

He then starts the same six note repeated pattern on the high e string at 20, 17, 19, 20, 19, 17 and then takes it down one note at a time through the c major scale, so next would be 19, 15, 17, 19, 17, 15 and so on until he finishes at 10, 7, 8, 10, 8, 7.

What you will find if you try this second pattern through the position changes is that you will need to keep your first finger on the lowest note of each pattern, which is the case also of the simpler six note in one place pattern.

Thanks NTC.
I have tried this and seem to be making headway. What with training my first finger to stay down and accentuating the first and last pick stroke, I can play it a lot cleaner.
Still not very consistent though, which I think is because of syncing issues with right and left hand.
I will continue to practise.

Also having my thumb position lower on the neck seems to help.

To check for the above post I tried this longer Paul Gilbert pattern today after leaving it for a couple a months, and it was terrible for the first few tries until it came back to me. I use first, second and third fingers all the way up the neck. It’s a tricky one but useful to know. Leave it for a while and come back to it when it gets frustrating!

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I actually looked at this not too long ago, and it turns out this isn’t entirely true. When I do this, my index finger actually pulses a little — like it’s trying to lift off when it’s not needed. Some repeititions it actually does lift off a little. Others it doesn’t lift entirely off but still pulses, i.e. reduces the fretting pressure. If I try to press down enough to keep the index finger consistently fretting that first note all the time, that actually feels a little tiring, like I’m working more than I have to. It’s more comfortable for me to let it pulse.

Re: fingerings, if I’m doing this pattern on the first three notes of the minor scale, 134 feels comfortable to me. This is especially true on the lower frets where the distances are bigger. I don’t have long arms or fingers so I don’t have huge reach. So whenever I can use the pinky to reduce the distance I have to reach, I have noticed that I have a tendency to do that. This includes things like doing power chords with the index and pinky, for example. Reaching longer distances feels more relaxed that way because I’m not spreading my hand as far.

Edit: I just checked the fingering I use in the platform examples, and it appears to be pinky all the time:

I wasn’t thinking about fingering at all when we filmed this stuff, and wasn’t trying to make any point about what other people should use. I was just doing whatever I normally do. This is probably a reasonable reading of whatever I found comfortable / automatic at the time, and that’s probably still mostly the case.

Thanks for the reply Troy. After spending most of today practising and close scrutiny of YouTube videos, I have decided not to fight the lifting of my index finger, as you say it seems to require more pressure and feels tiresome. I think the problem might be to do with hand synchronisation or lack of it.
I’ll continue to work on this.

RE: accents, I only accent the first note. I wouldn’t even know how to accent the first and last notes, at least not when playing quickly. The purpose of the accent is just to let you know where the start of the pattern is, so you can start to think of the whole thing as a single unit. Eventually, the whole sequence becomes stored as a single motor program, so you can’t even control individual notes directly any more. Exactly why the accent works for this, I don’t know — I’ll leave that question to the motor learning experts.

When you say 160bpm, do you mean sixteenths or sextuplets? Because this is really a sextuplets kind of pattern. 160 sextuplets is super fast.

I was accenting the first and last note as it gave it more of a rythmic feel so I could sync with the metronome. You are right though at higher ‘chunking’ speed only the first accent is possible.
I am playing it at 160bpm with triplets at the moment, so 2 beats to each chunk. My hands aren’t synced enough yet to go faster.