Anton Oparin about learning technique in slow vs fast tempos

Playing Technique
#11

I understand you’re just guessing at what Anton may be saying. But most of these guesses are not really what we see when we work with students.

Playing at normal speed does not lead to “a lot” of swiping, even for beginners. Many beginners can look surprisingly good almost immediately, even in slow motion, depending on the technique. And playing at realistic playing speeds does not automatically lead to hand sychronization problems. Nor is playing slowly a good way to learn hand synchronization. And so on.

Yes. Sorry for the confusion. I’m not saying picking motions must always have a continuous escape, like a Gypsy player. I’m saying the pattern of escape motion is what defines one technique as separate from another. This is how you can still be doing it “right” (more quotes), even if there are mistakes.

A technique is “correct” (quotes again) when you attempt it at a normal range of speed, and you see escape motions that we would expect for the picking style you’re trying to learn. A Gypsy player needs to look a certain way. A reverse dart wrist DBX player needs to look a certain way. A reverse dart USX player needs to look a certain way. Etc. These can look very different compared to each other, but within each style there are similarities. This is what we look for. If we don’t see that, then it’s not “right” even if all the notes are correct.

The reverse is also true. It can be right even if all the pitches are not all perfect. By definition, beginners can’t do this. That’s why they’re beginners, and why practice is necessary. But if we can see that the signature motions for the style are actually happening as we expect, that’s important. It’s how we know the difference between someone who is doing the technique, just with errors because they’re new, and someone who is not doing it at all.

Thanks for watching our stuff! But any time I hear that people are repeatedly watching certain lessons, and trying to parse details of what pundits are saying, I get concerned about information overload. I also don’t like when these fears are to some degree weaponized in internet lessons where people are like, oh no, you’ll have swiping or some other horrible thing if you don’t do things the right way.

I didn’t create terms like escape motion and pickslanting to give people more stuff to worry about. It was to make technique more accessible for more people. You’ll notice I also have no secrets. Like, almost zero. I don’t think anyone gives away more actionable, tested information than we do, right here on our forum and web site. This is how we combat the FUD, whether it’s intentional or accidental.

If the reason you’re watching these videos on repeat and asking these pretty “inside baseball” questions about technique is because you’re working on your own playing, my best advice is to focus on the top-down approach. Certain styles have a certain form. They look a certain way. Establish this first. From there, they move a certain way using certain joints. Get that happening. Escape can help tell you if the motions are the “right” ones (damn quotes again!), so filming can clarify this. Don’t proceed further until you see this.

Once you do, it’s it’s ok to be sloppy because, if the technique is really “correct” (quotes!!) it will either be more accurate than you think sooner than you think, or clean up rapidly without having to exhaust yourself mentally trying to focus on getting the notes right. These techniques all exist because they are, at some level, easy. Try to find that easyness.

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#12

It seems to me that a swipe is necessary at every speed if the pick is trapped and one wants to pluck two strings away. This is one reason why I believe that slow practice is useful, in the sense that one must embrace the swipe where they need it.

I grasp that there is accidental string contact, but this seems very different from a swipe, an intentional movement.

Am I misinterpreting?

#13

I think from Antons’s perspective the slow practice ethos is because he does not swipe. Not sure if that’s relevant but I don’t see swiping as a necessity especially for the majority of single escape-based players (i.e most)

#14

Say you’re DSX and the pick is trapped between E and A strings, and you want to hit the D string. Don’t you have to go through the A string with a swipe in order to hit the D?

#15

If the note on the E or A string is a downstroke then no, as it will escape the strings and the note on the D string would be an upstroke. I know what you’re getting at through, as it’s dependant on your escape motion (assuming single escape)

From my understanding people like Anton are highly developed DBX players, and the difference between there USX and DSX is nominal as the pick slant is neutral.

#16

I’m no expert, i’m still confused about pickslanting lol, but if you are using DSX or the other one, aren’t you supposed to arrange the lines/picking so your last pick stroke is the escape so it is free to strike other strings? If you are ending trapped between e an a and need to go to d then this is poor planning and you are doing it wrong?

#17

Sorry, I did a bad job explaining. Let’s pretend somebody is DSX, and the pick is free. They need to hit one note on the A, and then one note on the D. So, it would go like this:

  1. Upstroke to hit A, then trapped between E and A.
  2. Downstroke swipes through A, hits D, and becomes free.

Is there a way to avoid the swipe except for not doing things like this? Note that problems like this often times result from one note per string scenarios.

But is it wrong, in the sense that some people swipe very effectively and listeners just can’t hear it in practice? I suspect the problem starts when one is getting into situations with one note per string, and this frequently will result in irregular things like sweeping, swiping, and more.

#18

You could hit the note on the A string and then get yourself free.
I’m just guessing though.

Added: Again I don’t really know much, but you can hear swiping though sometimes right? You could hear it with PG when he did it in certain postions. The note sounds extra exaggerated or emphasized. Didn’t Anton claim he could hear it at anytime and even pick touches? Didn’t he demostrate the different sound between them. In that one video he mentioned when people’s pick would touch and when they were “out of sync” and he could just hear it all. Personally, I don’t like the idea of it. Seems to be cheating lol. But I guess if you can make it sound good and if it is the only way then that’s what you gotta do. I think though with some people they didn’t know they were doing it. In addition to other aspects of their technique.

#19

Yes, that might work in many cases, depending on where your hand has to be for the upcoming notes.

Yeah, I’d call it an “escape hatch.” :grinning:

#20

The other thing is though, if you are upward pickslanting or DSX, when you go to downstroke the A string being stuck between A and E after an upstroke with the intention of swiping right through A to play the D string, aren’t you going to clear miss the D since the normal trajectory of DSX will take you over it since it is escaping. You’ll have to change something there and kind of sweep them in a down direction I guess. But if you kept going in that down direction turning your wrist a little could that take you out of the plane of the A string like a two way pick slanting thing and then just head over to D string. Maybe I’m remembering wrong or my physics are wack.

#21

Ah, the old sports analogy.

I’ll tell you what that actually means:

  1. You can’t rack a snatch slowly.
  2. The turn around of a heavy squat always begins with the hips, even if your football coach tells you “look up to go up!”
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#22

I think he flubbed a note there in that slow part. Might be a sync issue.

I disagree with his assessment of PG’s skills … Anton says PG accidently became number one technical guitar player in the world history in the context of it didn’t happen with him just fooling around or trying to play fast. PG has always struck me as a pattern player… it sounds like he is playing exercises that he developed his technique with as music sometimes in his solos. Of course he points out PG swipes. I think Yngwie sounds a lot more impresssive and musical and he plays more difficult things with a lot more finesse. Maybe I’m biased and ignorant lol.

I think you do need to practice things slow… “pickslanting” or whatever. To make it comfortable and where you know confidently where your hand and pick is in relation to the strings and can relax in that context and you are playing in time. I’ve noticed watching various guitar videos that sometimes these technical guys will play very clean high velocity guitar and then mess up on the simplest things. I’m not referring to Anton.

I remember there was this fast classical guitarist and he was very impressive but I recall him messing up notes on very basic things. That shouldn’t happen. I also had a friend who played nylon string fingerstyle guitar in a kind of paco da lucia style and he could rip and it sounded decent but then when he slowed down his playing got uncertain time wise and sounded strained. He sounded tense. Meanwhile another friend who played a very basic samba/bossa nova Brazilian style (he seem to know every chord) and rarely even played single notes other than in passing could play those same slower parts absolutely perfectly and very musically… inviting what the grateful dead called the extra band member… father time to join in on the sound.

While the paco da lucia guy had a lot of knowledge and some passionate fast chops, if you ask me who was the better guitar player… i would say the basic guy with great time and feel no contest. His technique by the way was very free (basic guy)… no anchoring often with thumb free strokes with a classical hand posture but with the wrist somewhat straigher than the classical guys.

It seems Anton likes to call out guys like Guthrie, TG etc by name and show how their technique or ideas are wrong or lacking in his opinion.

I think what TG is showing is an observatiion about how players fast picking works or is possible and if he put anton under the video there would be things noticed. I don’t know if this knowledge about how fast picking works always translates into improved playing if one practices the way many play fast with certain angles/orientation allowing escape to switch strings. But I don’t know a lot of things…

To be fair, with the exception of Shawn Lane, I don’t know many early influential technical guitarists who claimed to have developed their speed from fast playing. To play fast and later clean it up. MAB insists on playing slow for sychronization and just one after another states you must start out slow and build it up. Yngwie built it up wiith his different speed recorder. He started on single strings and played only one string for months when he was young or so i recall reading. He said you don’t stand up in a rocky boat or something like that. And “play wiith your ears”.

I think most people will instinctively try out their current clean and comfortable chops level with higher speeds. You want to see if you can hear it .

Sometimes I wonder if there is another aspect to playing well that has less to do with pick motions that will greatly facilitate the important string switching necessity and more to do with proper muscle functioning (as in firing correctly in a relatively relaxed state) in the context of the state of the nervous system in general and the way your muscles are working together throughout your individual body.

#23

If you try to play this pattern with DSX, you will get swiping, of course.

This is a double escape or 2wps lick. Either of those approaches will work fine. We covered this subject in Antigravity 10 years ago. In that lesson, we also addresed why the scenario you’re describing, inside picking, is less ideal for swiping. Players who use swiping in a more systematic way tend to mainly do it on outside picking for this reason, to get a less obvious sound.

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#24

Mr. Oparin is clearly a great player and I’ve heard that he is an effective teacher. However, as with many, many greats in any field, I think he believes in a mythologised version of what he is really doing and is selling himself to people through the example of his superior playing (and it is superior to 99.99% of players). I can’t tell just by looking at people what they are doing, but I really don’t believe his is a demigod who can play all licks with pure alternate picking and no swiping. If he goes under a slow motion camera to prove that he can, I will change my mind. But to my knowledge he hasn’t and seems to have no intention to, presumably so “guard his secret” behind a paywall.

He does the “polarising” tactic well, though, I can respect that from a business POV. The idea being you present yourself as bold and potentially abrasive, sacrificing wider appeal but cementing very strong appeal to a core demographic. The fact that every video he makes gets a thread posted here is a testament to that.

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#25

Agreed. Similar in approach to another amazing (and polarising guitarist) Marshall Harrison.
From what I can tell, Anton is a highly developed RDT based player, with excellent DBX capabilities.

What I found interesting is that his technique is not as ‘consistent’ or as regimented when he played that spiro dussias riff. Mind you, it was at 300bpm equivalent but still, extreme edge picking, elbow movement etc. His technique clearly changes depending on the tempo and style.

#26

Anton sounds to me like those super fit influencers that want to sell you the one secret method to lose weight and get shredded. Of course they have the body to back it up (just like Anton’s mind-blowing skills) but absolutely nothing they can share with you is as ground-breaking and obscure as they pretend.

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#27

Yeah and he’ll have these mysterious videos where children are gathered having been told something that is not true and yet they still believe it and then he reveals the mind blowing and revolutionary idea that using classical fret hand positioning on the electric guitar with the guitar seated on the right leg playing perhaps blues or rock is not necessarily ideal.

I think what Anton should do, imo, is similar to what Troy does and that is he should reveal his right hand approach and all the techniques free in entertaining and hype and pretension -free videos, all without needing to talk about other guitarists by name and their lack of certain skills or accuracy. No need to even clarify that he is not doing it to put them down per se but just to compare the technique. No need to call MAB slow. Or critique other’s methods.

Then, after revealling your sports based guitar technique and the principles and concepts behind it, offer paid lessons and maybe paid memberships to graded exercises and perhaps video chat lessons that can help one develop this. Certainly even with free explicit instruction it takes work to improve and especially to improve fast and sometimes particular concepts introduced need to be clarified and that’s where paid membership can fit.

But to me it just feels sometimes like he is bragging or thinks he is the best guitarist in the world (since he is better than who he thinks is the best) and has the secret.

He is incredible, no doubt, but I don’t know, when he plays Trilogy Suite it sounds kinda lifeless to me. Anyway, just some thoughts.

#28

Where did Anton claim that what he’s teaching is ground-breaking and obscure? What he claims is that his method is based on scientific knowledge of the human body, and he developed it together with his father who was a professional sportsman. Pretty straightforward approach to base your developments on scientific knowledge, I would say, nowadays used among many fields.

Troy takes a similar approach. Years of research to understand how things work, leading to simple advice that anyone can apply.

“Because of the non-obviousness of all of this, it took us years of interviews, experimentation, and testing with students, to develop and refine the relatively simple advice that we’re presenting in this lesson.”

#29

Well he did provide logical arguments backed up with medical knowledge about how our hands are built, to explain his position. His arguments did not seem to make any assumptions on where you seat the guitar or what kind of guitar you use or what you play – they were based on how your (left hand) hand is built and how your muscles work, independent of choices such as guitar position.

In fact we had @Tom_Gilroy here giving similar arguments, comparing the “pinch grip” with the “power grip”:

So do you have evidence to support the stance that the classical/pinch grip is somehow better?

If your claim is that for classical guitar in the classical position, the classical grip is better – what are the arguments supporting that claim?

The video with children was to make a simple point (nothing mysterious here really) – just because everyone else was doing something in a certain way (pinch grip) for a long time, it does not mean that it’s the optimal way of doing it.

#30

It’s kinda known already Is what I’m saying. It’s like duh. Almost every rock and blues player does not play with a classical left hand posture. Yngwie doesn’t. Classical guitar and some pieces may require that positioning to reach the frets and to keep the hand quick with position changes that involve sometimes 4 to 5 fingers on the left hand. You may be able to didle didle with the pick with your single note lines but it aint happening with serious use of the left hand. Also the position of the guitar may require it. Anyway, I find the guy annoying dissing other players and people. Maybe he should improve his own playing and make it sound more musical.

He doesn’t seem to be hugging the fretboard here.

And he’s not even holding the guitar like michael

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