Changing gears w right hand

[curvy]

I’m wondering if this topic had been discussed anywhere in all the info available here. It probably has…if so, can someone point me to it? Lots of material here…lol. Anyway, it seems like for me, and I’m guessing for other people, that there’s a tempo range where you sort have to ‘change gears’ with your right hand and adjust your technique.

I’m naturally an UWPS guy, with downstroke escape.

My ‘first gear’ is more like Troy describes as the hopping sort of motion, which feels right at lower tempos but becomes tense and unusable at higher tempos

My ‘second gear’ is more of a higher vibrational movement, almost on the neighbourhood of being a relaxed ‘shivering’ movement if that make sense. But it’s tough to do at slow tempos solidly.

For me, somewhere around 16ths at 90-100 starts to get sort of tense for my ‘first gear’ right hand technique and I can’t sustain playing at that tempo in any kind of relaxed way. Ends up seizing .

And there’s a point around 16ths at 110 or 115 that my ‘second gear’ right hand technique starts to feel easy and cruisy. But that changeover area, from around 16ths at 95-110 is tricky cuz it’s too fast for my first gear but almost too slow for my second gear. To play it in second gear I have to get really Zen and super relaxed.

I feel like this isn’t addressed in traditional technique instruction cuz they just say, you know, increase the metronome a beat or two every couple days or weeks and go higher and higher. But it feels to me like for years I’ve had an upper limit (in first gear) at about 16ths at 95 and no matter how much I practice, that threshold isn’t going to change much without shifting gears.

Anyway, I’m dealing with this and trying to conquer it and am just wondering if it’s the same for other people.

Cheers. Love the resources here.

[Thegent]

I hear you about the ‘gears’. I’ve been slowly but surely shedding the more inefficient first gear mechanic at slower speeds (even though it works). That is, the mechanic for 16ths at 100bpm is very similar to the second gear (I’ll ballpark this at 16ths at 140bpm). The hard part is not speeding up when you know you can just ‘slip into it’. It just feels effortless which is good for endurance (i.e. playing through a gig with minimal fatigue)

[J.P.Amboss]

Thanks for talking about this, because it frequently freaks me out. I experience it much more in rythm playing than in lead. Two examples:

I can play thrashy/deathy riffs pretty reliably at 200 BPM. Wanted to play a groovy thing at 160 recently (Inside the wire, Bolt thrower) and it took me an hour to find something which kinda worked. When i tried t oswitch back again to my other material, i couldnt find back into how i normally do things, so i put the guitar down for the day… This is especially weird because i used to play this with a band of mine years ago without problems…

I also recently failed playing Slayer’s Tormentor, which actually reallyreally bruised my ego… The first fast lick after the intro ( at 0:30 ), which should in theory should be more difficult (i picked the whole thing instead of legato) causes me zero problems, i play this one tight almost every time. But the super standart-metal mainriff afterwards for some reason feels so weird to me, even though its just 16th notes 140Bpm with some powerchords thrown in between. I mean, i can play it, but i occasionally fuck up the timing of a chord and i feel like i should be able to play this in my sleep after playing metal for 15 years. I can play the same lick on the bass easily, to make things weirder.

[garybryan]

I was wanting to post a thread like this because I’ve been noticing exactly the same thing as I try to speed up! Up to around 80bpm feels easy in “first gear” where the up and down movements are more separate and distinct, and then at 110 and over it’s a very different feeling, more of a constant up and down motion. I can go much faster with this, but because of the more constant nature of the motion it’s harder to keep in time and keep the left hand in sync. I’ve been practising the timing and syncing and now I can maybe do a one-string lick at up to 115-120 and tremolo pick one note up to 135 or so before it falls apart.

I’ve also noticed that my “first gear” movement is mostly forearm rotation rather than wrist deviation, which feels more precise at slower speeds but just won’t go fast. Second gear is mostly wrist deviation and as I say is faster but takes more practice to get precise.

One thing I’ve found helpful recently for the “in-between” area at around 90-120 is tremolo picking much faster than the tempo (to ensure that I’m using the second gear motion) and then slowing it down to tempo but trying to maintain the same mechanic. If I just start picking at the correct tempo I’m more inclined to use first gear and struggle to keep up. After doing this for a few weeks, it’s becoming more natural and accurate to use second gear in this area.

No idea if I’m doing it right of course, and this is just my own observations so don’t take it as advice. I’ll wait for others to weigh in, and I’m hoping to post a technique critique video in the next few days so it’s clearer what I’m actually doing.