So, this isn’t really the person we’re talking about. This is an ideal situation, where the person obviously has a very specific issue, in fact fortuitously the exact issue the curriculum is geared towards, is conscious that it resides in the picking hand, but is experienced enough that they have decent synchronization, and the general motor skills to pull it off - the other challenges involved are fairly ironed out. To get the most out of it, there’s an experience level that kind of already has to be in place, and a very specific issue to address. What I’ve noticed though lately, is really a divergence from this, and a general lack of the development necessary to get the absolute most out of it.
Now if I were to critique a little on the current ideas and form: I believe @joebegly were discussing this in another thread. The focus seems to be more on the joints and appendage movements as a pure visual reference, and maybe not so much on the particular muscles needed to make those movements happen the way they are described. To elaborate a little more, while you hear often that shredding shouldn’t be tense, playing guitar in general isn’t tension free. Muscles have to move and operate to make these movements possible, and maybe a bit of focus on what exactly these motions should feel like and the particular muscles involved that activate. I think we used a weight lifting analogy in the discussion. Someone can give you a barbell and tell you to move your elbow joint but with out knowing where you should feel that pump, or what muscle your expected to work, your kind of just guessing and hoping for the best. Someone on the other hand gives you a dumbell, tells you to move it towards your chest while utilizing a good form, and that you should feel the tension in the long head of the bicep, well now you have a clearer picture of what to look for.
The total beginner is rare here, but there have been a few. And I don’t think the curriculum is really geared towards them. In my opinion, theres a certain threshold of development that really needs to happen before you should even worry about some of this stuff. If your goal from the start is “yeah I wanna shred” than by all means at least play with the picking hand thing so you don’t have to back track later, but from there the focus should really be on developing your rhythm chops, playing songs, and coordination. I’ve seen more people recently in the in between category, who don’t quite have the sync there yet for some of the lessons to be the most useful. They have found how they pick the fastest, but now don’t know how to really apply it, or realize they don’t really have the coordination down to really do much with it or utilize it. I feel like I’ve had to break the news to a few here that now comes the hard part, and that there’s no getting out of that 10,000hrs to mastery, and that “yeah, you unfortunately really have to do all that tedious boring stuff everyone else from the dawn of guitar playing time has told you to do”
) . We hear the suggestion of doing licks on one string and progression to crossing strings but maybe there is more to the hand sync (on every note, not just the first note of the pattern) for some players. Troy mentioned on his journey and discovery of applying “chunking” that if he aligned his pick on the first note of the pattern he was good to go. Maybe it’s not that straightforward for everyone.
On some level that was probably a defense mechanism though and truth be told, I think any random fast run wouldn’t have really moved the needle one way or the other, but if I could go back in time and play myself a full song I’d write a couple decades down the road, I think my taste hasn’t shifted SO far (and in many ways my writing is drifting a little bit more back to my roots) that I probably would have wanted to hear more, as a kid.