Interview from several years ago during the tour for his Beatles tribute album. Check out the second video at around 6 minutes. The interviewer practically get’s murdered by Al for suggesting that he’s “sweeping,” confusing his D-D-U arpeggio playing and swiping for “economy picking.”
An interesting nugget, if anything.
I watched it, Al actually seems a little more chill here than past interviews. He always seems a bit uptight or conceded; I love his playing btw. I think that he is clearly very proud of his playing, and he should be, but what difference does it make if he economy picks occasionally or is swiping (I say this to him).
He’s an old fashioned dude. He probably considers it “cheating”. Love Al too!
Why are most of my favorite players (Malmsteen, Di Meola, John Sykes) jerks? LOL!
Define jerk. Yeah, they’re not the huggable type like Paul Gilbert for example, but I admire their courage to say whatever they want without filtering it in case they lose a couple of fans.
They have the right to be less approachable, I’m sure it’s a bit tiring to talk about the same things and answer the same questions for 40 years.
It seems like you were offended by this. That was not my intention; I didn’t mean to put anyone on the defensive. I meant it in a joking manner, hence the “LOL!” at the end.
No worries, no offence taken. I just see these comments a lot and I can’t understand them to be honest. Yngwie indeed has a lot of controversial moments, but Al just seems like a dude that doesn’t want to be bothered much. 
They have reputations for being standoffish or aloof. Are they like that all the time? I don’t know. I’ve never met any of them and, frankly, don’t want to. I know them through their recordings and that is good enough for me. I interact with them in the way that’s most meaningful to me: music. Are they actually jerks? I’ll never know, but they sure as hell make me want to play a lot and be better. That has a lot of value in my eyes
Really good writeup and I agree. I will say that I feel he is economy picking in the most literal sense of the word because D-D is the shortest distance (hence, economic) between two notes on adjacent strings. Not admitting it may be a pride thing because he feels it’s “cheating” or just like you said, he doesn’t realize it. Tomato/tomahto. He’s great at what he does and that’s good enough for me.
I haven’t watched the video. Any idea what Al does think sweep picking is? Does he think the interviewer means “raking”?
My guess is that before CtC people didn’t actually think about two consecutive downstrokes as ‘sweeping’, since for most of us sweeping is a wide motion over 3 or more strings used for arpeggios and stuff
“No, unless you had a broom” I laughed out loud at that one. I think he’s having fun with the interview.
Al was a huge influence on me wanting to learn to play faster. If I could go back in time though, I never would have bought his REH video…or maybe better yet, still bought it, but just learned from what he showed and not paid much attention to the ‘absolutes’ he preaches. IMO he’s awesome, but plenty of equally awesome players do the very specific things he says are ‘wrong’.
Just for the f*** of it, I’m gonna throw this in here:
While he’s saying “it’s important to concentrate more on the wrist action” he is actually demonstrating forearm rotation (ok, away from the guitar, and he clearly IS a wrist player, but still…)
And then he says alternate picking is prefereable, unless you are playing musical phrases that don’t allow it. Then he demonstrates a 3 string roll, and how it would be impossible to play this with alternate picking, to then go on and tell you to use U-U-D for this pattern, which is something he doesn’t do, according to that interview.
Yeah. There is a lot I’ve learned from Troy and CtC, but a really big thing is that these awesome players aren’t always the best at explaining exactly what they’re doing. It’s just so inherently part of the technique they’ve developed organically.
Again, he’s a beast. And what’s more, his contribution to shred guitar (and guitar playing in general) is staggering. A lot of what he ‘says’ though is best taken with a grain of salt. Right around 39:00 in this video he says some other nonsense about there only being 1 way to play the arpeggio he’s doing and that any other way is quote “impossible”. Has he never seen Steve Morse maybe? Not long before that we hear about elbow mechanic being wrong and how no one can play with fluidity with an elbow mechanic. I guess Rusty Cooley, Vinnie Moore and MAB are wrong and not fluid because they play from the elbow (sarcasm obviously). I could go on all day. Not trying to dog him or anything. I just like the throw some words of caution for anyone who thinks that just because he’s the amazing player that he is, we should therefor do everything he says. Listen, learn and marvel but please keep an open mind. No one is right about everything. Except Troy haha! Gotta throw in my own biases lol
He pushed the envelope with respect to alternate picking…inherently the lingo and degree of dissection on technique wasn’t available to anyone then. He is a pioneer in many ways so it’s reasonable to suppose his views on what he is doing exactly from a mechanical perspective is primitive by today’s standards.
He is such a monster musician. It’s understandable if one hangs on every word he would say in their youth.
With regards to Steve Morse - I understand he actually opened for them for a length of the ‘Friday night in San Francisco’ tour. SM apparently came out for the encore’s and played with them. God I would love to hear a recording of that.
That would be ME lol! Probably showing my hand a little that I’m slightly bitter hahaha
Like I said I do not fault him, I should have been more diplomatic when I was younger I guess. But yeah hearing someone play like him back when I was in my mid teens…I was like “OMG!!! Whatever he says MUST be true, just listen to him play!!!”
The benefit of hindsight and all that.
Wow, that would have been amazing to see/hear.
I thought this post of Troy’s was really interesting, talking about the ‘blend’ Al uses