Content At Last

Playing Technique
#1

After almost 34 years of playing I have finally mastered alternate, economy, and sweep picking! I realize different people have different ideas about the level of ability one has to have to claim he’s “mastered” picking or any other aspect of playing guitar so I’ll put it this way: I have FINALLY reached the level of picking ability where as far as lead playing goes, I can play anything I want to play and that’s a damn good feeling!

Now I realize I’ll still need to practice to maintain the abilities I’ve developed, but practicing to maintain techniques requires considerably less time than practicing to develop entirely new abilities does. This means that I’ll truly have plenty of time to devote to my to priority now and that’s writing more songs so that I’ll finally have enough songs to record an album! Right now I have 5 songs that are roughly half done - and in some cases a little more than half done. I do have a few complete songs but they’re pretty old for the most part and I don’t know if they’re up to my current standards or not. I’ll have to go over those songs which I haven’t played in a long time and see how well they still hold up.

This is pretty exciting and the feeling not of just contentment but of achieving a goal that I set out for myself roughly 32 years ago and having had the drive, the tenacity and perseverance to see the dream through to its culmination in the form of having reached mastery of all the lead techniques that I’ve ever wanted to have so that I’d be able to play whatever I could imagine with no technical constraints including speed constraints on my playing has resulted in a sense of efficacy and mastery that just feels absolutely incredible!

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#2

Congratulations man ! We all dream of that I guess…Anyway, did it “clicked” somehow and all of a sudden you were able to play whatever you wanted as a reward for all those years of dedication, or after a while did you realised you’ve reached a certain level of understanding and skills you’re happy with ? Don’t hesitate to share with us all the little tips & tricks that helped you. And again congrats !!!

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#3

Thank you very much, Bart!

It was definitely not “all of a sudden.” The reward for all the years of work came very gradually, although I would say that perhaps the two time periods where I made my fastest progress where in my first two years of playing, and believe it or not, the past two or three years of playing and practice.

The reason for quick progress in my first 2 years of playing is obvious - it’s the time when I had the most to learn so practically anything I did with my practice time made me a better player. On top of that, I was taking lessons from a pretty decent player back then and since I wasn’t an adult yet - I was 15 years old when I got my first guitar - an acoustic on which I made such quick progress that I was actually trying to play the guitar solo to Judas Priest’s “Freewheel Burning” on it after maybe 3 or 4 months of practicing and taking lessons. My transcription to the solo was not note for note accurate by any means and I only played a few of the really fast licks of the solo on my cheap acoustic with the high action, but still, it was excellent progress by just about anyone’s standards and I think the passion I had to practice about 3 hours every day along with only being 15 years old helped a lot because they say that when we are still children, our brains learn new skills faster than when we are adults.

As for my progress over the last two or three years being so fast, I think a lot of that has to do with the cumulative effects of having been playing for so many years. I finally had a breakthrough of sorts regarding looking at my practice sessions logically and rationally. I used my practice sessions more efficiently than ever before. One “secret” I can share is I used a technique that I discovered while listening to a Shawn Lane interview on YouTube regarding developing speed. he said that instead of using a metronome to just gradually get faster, what he liked to do was once he had practiced a movement slow at first so that he could learn it properly, then instead of gradually playing it slightly faster and faster, he would play it just as fast as he possibly could and then he would work on cleaning it up so that it was fast and also sounded good and was accurate and clean. I used the same approach to see if it worked for me and it did!

My last “secret” that helped me progress so much over the past 2 or 3 years was joining Masters Of mechanics and studying Troy’s findings regarding picking technique! It was about time that someone came along and developed a scientific approach to learning how to play guitar, especially learning the highly advanced alternate picking techniques from specially made recordings of the picking movements of the guitar masters themselves!

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#4

And what about intermediate speeds ? I agree with you about practicing slow and then as fast as possible once we have the motion right, but still I find it hard to keep it consistent when playing at say 150-180 BPM.

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#5

@Acecrusher congrats! Got any clips to share with the community? It would be interesting to see your approach to these different techniques.

#6

My cell phone is old and was the entry level model so it doesn’t record video. I am planning to get a much better phone sometime this year, probably long before the end of the year, so maybe when I get the new phone I can do something like that. Thanks for the interest in seeing me play! :slight_smile:

#7

In all the years before I adopted that Shawn Lane approach, I used a more traditional method of gradually increasing my speed as long as it was still clean, so in 34 years I’ve done plenty of practicing at slow, fast, and medium speeds too.

#8

Awesome! This seems like a great tip and similar to the process Andy Wood describes in the clip we recently posted, kind of decomposing and then recomposing a lick trying out different approaches until one starts to work:

#9

Specifically, the biggest “secret” tp achieving my goal was having the passion to persevere in what I was doing and to never give up. I’'ve been through different stages in my guitar playing. I think I may have gone from 1994-1996 without ever practicing technique. All I did was write songs and practice playing the songs I wrote ( which had no guitar solos, at the time anyway). That was when I finally start getting good at writing songs - 10 years after starting learning how to play. Now I encourage students to try to write songs starting very soon after first learning the basics of how to play guitar.

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#10

@Acecrusher it’s great when you make a breakthrough on something in your playing, it gives you an incentive to continue to learn new things and new songs that you may have never considered in the past.

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