Oh my god!
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@Troy I slowed it down and that first part is all alternate picking. So it is an Ab triad (guitar tuned half step down) with a stringskip in 16th triplets at blistering speed. Doing it on adjacent strings is already hard, as we all know, but with a stringskip, at that speed…DAMN! No way for me…
Can’t wait till you sit down with him!
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Textbook crosspicking.
Note than he goes DDU when slowing down at the end of the arp. section. Which kind of makes sense to me from a ‘feel’ (and tone) point of view.
Play it in slow mo and you will see it is realy alternate in the beginning.
Look from about 25 sec where he starts to slow down there you clearly see the alternate motion.
DDU at that speed with a string skip is even more impossible.
I will post a vid in slow mo in just a moment
Yes, of course he alt picks. It’s a forward roll pattern (with a string skip). Very similar to what e.g. Molly Tuttle would do.
Just that at the end, when he’s really slowing down he does consecutive downstrokes instead.
In slow mo it looks like it is a different motion then what Molly does. And the speed is about 3 times as fast, and that with a string skip!
I have never seen anyone do thiswith alternate picking at this speed.
I can do it barely with fingerpicking.
3 times ??? That would be VERY fast… It’s actually similar speed to when Molly does ‘White Freightliner Blues’, or fast tunes by David Grier etc…
Ok not 3 times of course. It is faster, but the big difference is the string skip and that it are 16th notes triplets instead of 16th notes.
The Molly Turtle role i can do, but this is much more difficult and impossible to do for me at that speed.
It’s pretty similar in speed. Not exactly for sure, but not significantly dissimilar. And is in the same ballpark as far as technical challenge is concerned.
Actually I find that Molly Tuttle’s rendition of ‘White Freightliner Blues’ is more challenging (plus that she sings along her playing). YMMV. But if you can do what Molly does, you can’t say that what Anton is doing here is impossible.
Ok, then please show me a vid where you play this first part of the Anton vid. I will eat my … if you can do it.
it is more difficult then the roll motion that Molly does, and that string skipping makes it even more difficult.
I play the guitar for about 40 years now, graduated from music highschool and am a pro musician for the most part of my life . I was always focused on alternate picking with Al di Meola and John Mc Laughlin as my first great examples. What Anton is doing is here is soemrthing i have never seen anybody do with alternate picking. I can more or less do it with Fingerpicking or hybrid picking, The left hand part is also very difficult.
Did you try it?
i agree that singing along with what Molly does is very difficult. I can’t give a good opinion on that however because i don’t sing.
Just wanted to throw this out there for @Troy and everybody here. In case you didn’t know, Anton Oparin speaks perfect English. And he has been to NAMM in the past, and might still attend. So US travel isn’t an issue.
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I don’t see how more difficult it is to what Molly does. Molly does not just fwd/bwd rolls when she plays. She does more complex patterns as well, on 3, 4, 5 strings. It’s not just Molly btw, pretty much all elite bluegrass players do these things. Again, it’s not about me or you being able or not to do that. Rather it is about acknowledging that what Anton does her is not far off what Bluegrass players (and other players well versed in crosspicking) do for decades.That doesn’t diminish Anton’s value either.
I’m pretty sure I can pull it off. Probably sloppier than he does unless I put the time on it. I’ll try when I can.
Ok man, i am very curious at your findings.
I think you will come to the same conclusion as me, that this pattern Anton plays at that speed is realy something else.
You have to jump from the high E right back to the D string and this switches between D U and U D in 16th note triplets at blistering speed.
GOOD LUCK!
Yeah, I know what he does. Otherwise I wouldn’t say I’m confident I can do it. He doesn’t do that 3-strings-roll-with-string-skip all the time though. Some of the arps he plays are on 3 consecutive strings (DGB)
This is what can do as clean as possiblein triplets without any string skip.
Borrowed this little part from The etude Troy wrote.
Far away from Anton’s speed with that stringskip.
I will never be able to do it that fast…
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I mean, it’s clearly not impossible, if he’s doing it… 
I think his dynamic control here is actually the part of this that impresses me the most. What’s the intro of this? Very Beatles-esq…
Sorry for the noodling as it is roughly edited, and also I wanted to try different things with the same idea of string skip. So I’m doing some of these in the video below, including at some point the pattern in the OP clip.
Definitely not as clean, nor it is up to speed as Oparin. I would need to woodshed it more. But it’s doable - as with anything.
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