Agreed, some tension is normal. I don’t believe it’s a yes/no situation either. I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to play without any tension at all. But I do believe that it can be an important learning step to realize what that “good amount” of tension feels like, and what happens if you try playing that way instead of forcing technique the way you’ve always done it. Like @Philausopher said:
Exactly this.
I try to give tension and relaxation its fair share of focus in discussion, because I believe it’s easy for some players (ahem, myself) to get used to a lot of excess tension and not be aware of it. Relaxation should be just another tool in the toolbox to check out every now and then.
So I guess I’m no longer stuck at 100 BPM 16th notes…I’m now stuck at 120 BPM 16th notes, which seems like a nicer place to be stuck at
It starts to break down when I push it to 130, I start to feel tense and lose control, but I seem to be able to manage it to 120 BPM with a certain degree of comfort. I’ve been focusing on developing a sensation of control and relaxed playing, instead of trying to force myself to play faster, and it seems to be working. I am convinced that a big part of what was causing me trouble was indeed some sort of mental block and correct muscle coordination.
Still, I do feel like some of my difficulties might be more of a technical nature, and that I’m still having trouble figuring out an efficient picking motion, how to grip the pick so that it doesn’t move around constantly between my fingers and wants to point itself towards the headstock (though I’m not certain if it’s the pick that actually moves between the fingers or just my index finger that slips and moves around), a more adequate pick angle that doesn’t cause it to be stuck on the string sometimes, and whatnot.
I would not even try experimenting with tremolo below 150-160 bpm. I think you could easily do those speeds by using your elbow a bit more, it already looks like it’s part of your motion.
That 120 bpm motion look good, how does it feel? Looks very natural.
My preference would be to stay away from elbow picking at the moment, and keep with a good loose wrist motion, but that could just be me. I used to elbow pick sort of, but not well, and it caused loads of tension. But others may suggest it as a good way forward … whichever you do, I feel that for mid range tempos like 150 should be achievable with little effort, it’s all about coordination, as I believe @Philausopher mentioned earlier.
Then you could also try slow-fast-slow-fast practice, which I think I mentioned in the Hybrid picking Cliffs of Dover thread. I’ve found that really useful.
Re pick grip — honestly that might just work itself out. Give yourself some more time to play around and keep experimenting.
Cheers! Jz
ps - I forgot to say – what a massive achievement this is. Capped for years at 100, and now you’re playing what looks like really good 16ths at 120? That’s a very big difference.
Some more thoughts, of course
You might find it useful to play shorter bursts, e.g. just a few measure’s worth (8-12 beats) and longer sections for quarters. Playing for a long time can cause fatigue and confusion.
Another thing to add to your 16th note practice is accents on each beat – this will organize the notes for your mind, and actually in some ways simplify your playing. When you play a pile of notes with the same feel for several measures, the mind can start to wander. Accenting the first note in every group gives you something to “aim at”, and the extra clarity really, really enhances your playing.
Along with accenting, you can try picking 16ths starting with an upstroke, so that the accents fall on an upstroke. Hitting accents with an upstroke is a different set of muscles, and so is useful.
@gabrielthorn Well, if for years I couldn’t even go beyond 100 bpm 16th notes, it doesn’t make sense to me to just jump to 150-160 bpm. That’s a pretty wide gap. If I could do 150, I wouldn’t be struggling with 100. Now that I’ve gone beyond 100, I feel like it wasn’t just a matter of doing a wrong motion. I think the motions I tried to use were ok, but I wasn’t successfully coordinating the relaxation and activation response between opposite muscles, which caused a build up of tension and hindered my speed. I don’t know if I will have to use another motion for speeds above 150, it’s possible, but right now I think I prefer to refine my current technique at lower speeds, and keep speeding up until a point where that technique no longer works.
@jzohrab It does feel quite smooth. I still feel some tension, but I think I’ve reached a point where I am a lot more aware of that and don’t try to force myself to go faster than I can manage, which I believe was one of the main bad habits that hindered my progress. As I said, some things don’t work out so well yet, but I think those have more to do with the picking technique itself than poor muscle coordination, and that is very satisfying. In fact, this is a type of progress that I’ve been noticing not only on guitar, but on other activities as well. I feel more relaxed in general and with a better mental attitude.
The best way to explain it is that before I used to experience some sort of “fragmentation”. For example, I could be singing a song and instead of singing a natural, smooth line, I. Could. Experience. Singing. Like. This. Where. Each. Bit. Of. Musical. Information. Didn’t. Really. Flow. Into. Each. Other. And I think that had to do with anxiety. I feel different now, and I hope it’s a feeling that sticks around.
Thank you. I don’t know if it’s a case of overnight success, I think it’s more like, all the little pieces that I’ve been collecting the last couple of years, suddenly something clicked and I could find a way to fit them together neatly I really hope to find smoother seas to sail from now on, eheh
Those are some nice ideas there, I’ll try them out, thanks.
GThorn’s idea is actually quite good, you know! A jump of 30 bpm is not huge – though it may seem like it – and may present you with some new stuff to try out, and maybe even a breakthrough of some sort.
“when I push it to 130, I start to feel tense and lose control” - I get it. So, one thing that’s interesting about speed when you’re first experiencing it, is that you kind of need to lose control, at least at first. Honestly, when picking fast, you are not consciously in control. All of your tests with releasing tension etc are good, and when you go for that kind of speed, you simply cannot push, you actually have to let go more, to allow for fast and easy muscle firing and releasing. In other words, you don’t force, make a consistent gentle demand and see what happens.
Again looking at your video, I see you’re holding that 16th note picking for several beats (starting at 0:11 and going to … well, I stopped watching at 0:34). Thats a very very long time to do that, especially during technique development, in my opinion. Sure, you need to be able to hold it for a while, but when you’re still searching for the right motions and feel, something much shorter should suffice.
Picking for long stretches has a few challenges: obvious fatigue issues, but also mental fatigue. As you pick forever, your brain gets confused, especially if you’re not really accenting beats, and that can cause sync issues.
Based on what I see, you might want to reconsider @gabrielthorn’s suggestion – you went from 100 to 120, I don’t see why you can’t go further. That’s what testing the waters is all about. I’d say go for it!
Cheers! z
ps - That page I linked to in my initial post way back when has a link to a video (Relaxing your picking hand and arm) which helped me tremolo pick 200+ bpm, and gave some graduated exercises to hit that speed. It’s a different kind of control than you have at 120 bpm. Cheers! z
pps - all the above is, of course, my opinion only
I understand it may seem like a big jump, but until you get into the ~160bpm territory, you are NOT using your fast picking motion. And we are only talking about tremolo picking here, nothing complicated for the fretting hand should distract you. I can see you are already using your elbow at this speed and despite I’ve been told I should never ever ever use my elbow in the past, thank you I’m happy for my caveman technique, so is Rusty Cooley, Jason Richardson (don’t ever tell him he’s using his elbow ), etc. You need to find what works for you naturally and fast NOW, unless you are happy to spend months/years learning an other motion.
Anyways, push yourself more, do not get discouraged if 130, 140, 150 will feel very difficult and hard/impossible to control at first. It will just click once you are using your default fast motion.
A lot of this thread was tldr but I’m pretty convinced your issues are mostly psychological. I would suggest next time you try going for speed to allow yourself to tense up and observe your emotional reactions to it. I would pay attention to any feelings of fear or anxiety you might feeling when trying to play fast. Are you afraid of sounding bad? Playing sloppily? Are you attaching any degree of self worth to your ability to be able to play fast? Don’t try to fight the tension just observe it and your feelings.
I know this sounds really woo-woo, but the body does some pretty strange things to process these types of anxieties with some people. I would read up on something called Mind Body Syndrome. Here’s an article from psychologytoday.com
I use this approach to treat my own left hand issues, and it really helps me to manage them, especially to recognize why I might have bad days sometimes and ease tension. So I can vouch for this.
I’m only suggesting this because based on the evidence troy’s presented in his videos, as well as my own experiences and working with students as young as 8 and as old as 50-60, there’s no good reason why you can’t find a decently smooth and tension-free tremolo at speeds exceeding 150-160 bpm 16h notes with some experimenting over the course of a few weeks unless you’re being inhibited psychologically somehow (or have a physical abnormality or injury, which it doesn’t sound like you do).
Hey all! I hope you don’t mind me updating this thread since it’s been a while I posted it. One year, actually.
I notice a massive improvement in my technique since I made this thread, which is amazing, since I spent so many years feeling like I would never reach an actually satisfactory level of technique and would have to “fake it” forever. I don’t really have any videos to show yet, and I still have a lot of work to do, but the difference, frankly, gives me so much hope.
I’d like to share with you what I did, as it might help others. First and foremost, @BlackInMind was absolutely right to say that there was a psychological issue at hand. I do not wish to go into great detail into this, but I believe anxiety, and other psychological conditions, were the main culprit. Anxiety was a major, major thing. I don’t know if I should call it anxiety, really. But nevertheless, there was (still is, but at a much lesser degree) this mental block that absolutely sabotaged my practice and playing. I believe much of this had to do with expectations.
I’ll explain: we all had certain expectations when we practice. Expectations of how practice should be, of how should a certain technique feel or be done, how long it should take until we reach a certain level, etc. I think that maybe expectations are the source of motivation and demotivation. If I believe that I’m practicing correctly and I’m not making progress or making really slow progress, I might come to the conclusion that I’m not talented enough. If I believe that is how practice really is, I might feel more motivated and confident and keep doing what I do. However, it might be that I still don’t make much progress, and then it might be a good idea to review what I’m doing and what my expectations are.
I’ve spent a LOT of time trying to force my way through things, creating tension when I needed to relax. I also did the opposite: trying to relax and creating a weird mix between being too tense to play and also too limp. Now, the fact is, when you look at really great musicians, they appear to play in such an effortless manner that it should really make you question whether you’re doing it right if you struggle when practicing. So I created a goal in my mind: practice should be the process of making playing as effortless and natural as possible. That means I’ve spent a LOT, an absolute TON of time just doing really basic things like: changing between two chords and find the more efficient way to do it, stopping to FEEL and to memorize how it feels when I play a chord, how the guitar vibrates. That means becoming hypersensitive and aware of every little sensation I feel when I play. I’m not really playing exercises, most of the time I’m not even playing songs, though I might play a section of a song. I’m just really trying to interiorize how it feels to play and how to make it easier.
I’ve heard a lot, I think in this thread too, that to pick fast you should start by trying to pick as fast as possible and see which movement you come up with. I think someone told me to attempt to pick a lot faster than I was doing, but that was just impossible to me. I was just creating a lot of tension. So I really have to dispute that idea. I don’t believe that is always or even often the best idea, especially for people who already tend to tense up a lot. When I practice picking, I’m not worried about picking fast, nor do I go in the opposite direction and try to pick really slow. The same goes to other techniques. I just play how it makes me feel comfortable and at ease and build from that. If I have to spend one hour just doing rest strokes with my pick, just ever so slightly changing how I do it with each attempt and experience with it, you can be damn sure I will spend one hour doing that. I have spent a LOT of time just doing stuff like that. I can now tremolo pick at 150 BPM with relative ease.
I’ve heard, I don’t know if it was Troy or some of his interviewees who said it, that it doesn’t really matter repeating the same thing a lot, what it matters is that you try to figure out different, more efficient ways to do it, and in the process you are “repeating” the same thing but not really. I find that to be absolutely true. I’ve had teachers giving me pages with exercises and telling me to rep a number of times with the metronome and whatnot. Nope. Not in my case. Mindless repeating doesn’t work. Plus, the metronome was a hindrance to me. I was focusing more on staying on the beat than on the physical sensations. I believe timing problems can be traced back to technique, and it never pays off to sacrifice technique for timing. When I play live, I rush. But it was never about having a bad sense of tempo, I was simply not comfortable technically.
I think one of the main things was just believing that I could do it. Because I don’t think I really believed that before. Also believing that I would be able to be in control of what I do, and not simply cross my fingers and hope for the best, and achieve random results when I play. To turn guitar-playing into second nature. And the other thing was striving to be more intuitive rather than analytical. It’s always a feel thing. You don’t walk around thinking how you’re going to position your left leg after your right leg (sometimes, I did), so why should you do the same with guitar? Playing an instrument isn’t this thing where someone lays out a method for you or tells you how it’s supposed to be and you follow it to the letter and that’s that. No. It’s a process of self discovery, and learning to trust your gut. Every teacher has their own methods, but they teach what works for them or what they were taught works. But everyone is different. The psychological factor is real. People talk about technique but they don’t really talk how anxiety messes you up. It’s certainly easier to explain technique. You can film someone doing a USX motion 16th notes at 200 BPM, but you cannot film what goes on inside their head when they do it, or how their body feels. You can tell someone to put the pick between the fingers in a certain way or move in a certain motion, but it’s much harder to figure out which mental blocks are pulling them back. If you’re practicing in a more intuitive manner, you aren’t really going to need to have a very deep analytical understanding of how that technique goes. I say this not to undervalue Troy’s work in any way, as I find that knowledge to be very useful, but at the same time, Troy himself has went over and over how the pros usually don’t even know what they’re doing and what kind of motions they make, they go through an intuitive process and come up with such motions. What you need if you take a more intuitive approach, however, is to take down the mental blocks that are laid between yourself and your goal. And so I would suggest that it would be of great importance for the discussion on guitar playing technique to shift more into the psychological aspects of it, as well as the expectations of what practice is and how good playing feels like. I truly believe this to be one of the major reasons people don’t achieve their full potential in guitar. Not a lack of talent. It’s NEVER a lack of talent. Nor a simple technical understanding of how fingers and picks are supposed to move.
I think I missed a lot of things that I wanted to say, so forgive me if this didn’t turn out to be very informative. I can tell you that the secrets are out there, but often they are right in front of us and we can’t see it. If we know what’s really important and what’s secundary, we can make a lot of progress. You can type “how to improve my technique” on google or youtube and the results will tell you nothing. Most people will only show exercises, or tell frankly meaningless and useless advice that’s repeated over and over again and people won’t even question it. It’s when you begin to question things that you might arrive at new insights. I think the most important insight to reach is that you can do it. I couldn’t do it and I still have trouble doing it, but I’ve improved a lot. So what’s stopping me from getting to where I want to be? What’s stopping you?
EDIT: just want to add that this was one of the most insightful posts I’ve seen on this forum. The main takeaways I took from it were these two claims of the OP:
I’ve just come across this post. It’s really interesting and thanks to everyone. I have been trying to develop the reverse dart thrower motion in the last 3-4 weeks having seen those posts. I have another downstroke escape motion but for various reasons it is limited and I’d like to see if I could develop this with an upstroke escape. I can pick tremolo from the wrist (I think) at fast speeds. I try to use the same motion at slower speeds, and can do it reasonably nicely and relaxed at and up to 100bpm but when I then try and increase to 110 bpm my wrist/arm becomes very tense and a little string hopping comes into it. Do I keep trying at 100-110 bpm and work at trying to keep everything as relaxed as possible? I have tried to use this motion going full throttle (eg 160 plus plus) and trying to slow that down, to see if I can meet in the middle? Surely there are many others that have had this issue? I feel that I wouldn’t be far away with this if I could get over this hurdle. One of the things I use is a video by Guitar Playalongs (Toni) has anyone seen his brilliant videos (also brilliant for the left hand)… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPWHrkwKDaM&t=335s
Would need to see a video but sounds like exactly the same problem I had. What I realised is that my motion was inefficient so I had to do different things and experiment until I found a new motion capable of the speeds I wanted to play
Thanks very much for your reply. I have just had time to have a quick look at your thread. Your technique looks brilliant. I have been looking to try and develop a nice wrist technique, and I seem to be able to tremolo pick in a relaxed way which seems to be wrist based. I will try and post a video. I was playing there and I suspect the slower technique I am using to try and get to 110 bpm from 100bpm isn’t quite the same motion. I might spend some time with the faster tremolo motion and see if I can get it controlled and relaxed at lower tempos…?
I wouldn’t worry about lower tempos yet, get comfortable at fast tempos on one string (one string keeps it nice and simple) and then slowly expand onto other strings over time. The sweet spot for me has been at and above 115bpm sextuplets, I learnt both motions at this speed, anything less then this I’d worry I was doing something inefficient
For example when I eventually get around to attempting a trailing edge grip to access Shawn Lane (and now Troy Grady) levels of speed there is not much point in me practicing it any slower then 150bpm sextuplets because I’ll almost definitely be doing something incorrectly. Hope that makes sense!
That is very interesting. I suppose some of the things I’ve been practising to try and keep the left hand going were at those kind of tempos. I suppose I am chasing the kind of satisfaction you might expect or like being able to play a lick and build it up through the tempos. I’ll give you another example: I once purchased a Danny Gill alternate picking video via Lick Library, and the initial etude is at 90bpm…
I must admit that playing at a fast kind of tremolo speed using the motion I am working with, changing strings does not really feel comfortable. The other issue is initiating the fast tremolo motion. I take it it is worth practising that? Look at, for example Ben Eller playing the riff to We Rock by Dio, something I haven’t made a lot of progress with due to having a technique with a downstroke escape. When he moves from playing diads to the faster sixteenth notes on the A string, his movements look relaxed, and very practiced; is that what muscle memory looks like.
What speed are you going here? Can you maintain it for at least 30 seconds? Does it feel easy/tension free to do? A lot of people fall into the trap of doing the same thing they were doing before but just trying harder when instead you need to be trying out different hand positions and pick grips until you get something that feels speedy, easy and different to what you were doing before
I don’t want to hijack this thread so maybe consider opening up a TC on the website and get proper instruction from Troy and the team as well!
Thank you Jack - how do I open up another TC? This feels very relaxed, as though I could do it all day. It is easier to do it or initiate it on the higher strings. Initiating the movement is harder on the lower strings. I practised just tremolo picking for quite a while yesterday, to the bemusement of my wife. That time spent reinforced to me that getting an efficient tremolo motion and then slowing it down for intermediate speed runs would work, rather than going from a motion that feels great at 100 bpm but tense and difficult at 110 bpm. I felt I could tell if it was the same efficient motion as I slowed - it was dead easy just to speed it up again. I’m never going to be able to get anything meaningful going with it with the left hand at 180 odd bpm.
), etc. You need to find what works for you naturally and fast NOW, unless you are happy to spend months/years learning an other motion.
