As Michael Angelo Batio said, “There is nothing faster than banging on one note.” That makes sense: tremolo represents your theoretical max speed, while real life playing is slightly slower due to string changes and other factors.
So my question is: what is your TRUE, real-world maximum tremolo speed that you can sustain consistently, cleanly, precisely, and in a relaxed way?
Being able to hit 400 BPM for 2 seconds is meaningless if it’s not sustainable. Establishing a realistic baseline seems essential to grow our technique.
It’s not really very important, as I think you’ll find most people aren’t actually playing at the speeds they think they are - it’s very easy to slip with a tremolo. Better to measure a simple synchronized pattern, if you must.
The simple, honest answer is that I don’t really know. I’ve made a conscious effort not to obsess about measuring my own speed anymore. I do know that it’s far faster than I would ever need for any musical purpose.
The more complex answer is that it absolutely depends on the motion and the grip that I use, and I have some ballpark figures on those motions. With the reverse dart-thrower (RDT) based forms that I’ve used for about 20 years, I can comfortably pick continuous accented 16th notes at 210 bpm, and 220-230 bpm for shorter durations.
I discovered the dart-thrower (DT) motion during the pandemic, and it’s faster than RDT for me. In tap tests and spacebar tests, the speed gets up to a steady 10 hits per second for 10 seconds quite reliably, and I can hit instantaneous speeds of 11 hits per second for brief durations. That’s a potential movement speed of 16ths at 300 bpm.
As for how that applies to the guitar, again, I don’t really know. If I use a trailing edge grip, it feels like I can apply my full movement speed, or very close to it. If I use a leading edge grip it’s slower, but still in the range of my RDT based movements.
The fastest movement I can do on a guitar is a combination movement of DT with rotator cuff and elbow movement. It’s use is quite limited so far, I had a severe shoulder injury a few years ago and I’ve tried to be sensible with it. In the last few months or so I’ve been able to get it working with some fretting hand patterns, which was nice.
The problem for me isn’t movement speed, it’s feeling the rhythmic pulse at these tempos. I can’t feel a rhythmic pulse at 300 bpm, so I can’t play 16ths at 300 bpm.
That doesn’t really even matter. There’s very little music I would be interested in playing that would pulse faster than 200 bpm.
I think the pulse rate is of absolutely paramount importance, I don’t accept that 16ths at 300 bpm is equivalent to sextuplets at 200 bpm or 32nds at 150 bpm.
I have zero unmetered tremolo in my playing, absolutely none. I genuinely don’t know how to do it at all. I also can’t do repeating downstrokes only or upstrokes only, I’m hilariously terrible at it.
EDIT:
Thinking more on this, why is it meaningless if a speed can’t be sustained for some arbitrarily determined amount of time? I would imagine that most musically relevant applications of extreme speed would be for shorter duration. Surely this depends on the goals of the performer?
Tom Gilroy: It is true that super fast passages will have a short duration. But again, IMO any virtuoso player of ANY instrument has the ability to make it “look like it is very easy to play”. So killing yourself in tremolo picking (potential picking speed) to go as fast as possbile is meningless if you cannot use it in real life, clean, repeatedly, and controlled.
Back in teh day I downloaded videos of some players I like, including Michael Angelo Batio, when they show tremolo picking. To my surprise, most of the time it wasn’t super fast. Maybe around 205 BPM @ 16th notes. But again, that was a tempo those player could do very clean and relaxed.
