Decade-long Wall Finally Breaking Me

Technique Critique
#1

I need a guitar teacher. I straight up can’t play certain lines fast - no matter how much I practice them starting slow to fast, memorizing them, changing picking techniques, etc. and it has made guitar not fun at all.

I have walls I have been hitting for over a decade and am finally at the breaking point of not wanting to play because of it.

So, instead of quitting, I want to find somebody to help me break through these walls.

I can do scale runs very fast and accurately, but once I try to do any sort of inside picking I shit the bed hard. Bluegrass rolls are not possible for me.

Here is a link of me playing one of my original tracks from a couple of years back.

I’ve gone through most of the pickslanting primer, and I seem to be a hybrid when I am doing fast comfortable lines, but I can’t seem to slow that down in any meaningful way to work on.

Playing jazz it seems I do downward escape with a lot of entire arm movement, but then metal etc is upward escape. Both fall apart around 120 bpm.

Any leads? I don’t want to quit, but I’m not having fun anymore.

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#2

Sorry if this is not the reply you’re looking for as it’s probably not constructive enough, but your composition is awesome and playing isn’t half bad! Keep it up :slight_smile:

#3

Agree with @Euripides, really tasty phrasing man :slight_smile:

How did you get on with this and the following lesson? And what does your tremolo look like on a single string, any videos?

Tapping on the bridge at 220bpm 16ths and then trying to recreate that on the string has been really helpful for me, trying to let the motion be as big, wild and twitchy as possible. It starts off more like an out of control tiny strum sometimes switching to a single string but if you do it right the randomness helps you produce a motion that is REALLY powerful and fast and feels easy to do

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#4

Just to add - seems you’re a Masters in Mechanics member, so why not do a Technique Critique?

Getting tailored feedback from any of the instructors would probably help you quite a lot.

#5

If this is how A Broken Man plays, I’m scared to think what he could achieve when he’s feeling good! :smiley:

Agree with the others: great composition and phrasing. It’s likely you only need a steer in the right direction for the picking stuff. As @Gravenous points out, a TC on your user platform is the best way to go about this: Technique Critique – Cracking the Code

Also, I officially authorize you to stop doing slow exercises with the metronome :slight_smile: In a few words: improvement comes through problem solving, not repetition.

#6

But the metronome can reproducibly bring people to the threshold of their current problem so they can study and resolve it? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#7

Lol ok I’ll take the bait X-D

Here’s what I wrote in a recent Technique Critique with a student. It’s a fair summary of my thoughts on the matter!

%%%%%
the metronome is not needed for this test. This is because we are not checking if you can have super-precise timing, we are checking that the motions work at realistic speeds. So you have to be fast enough that the motions feel similar to what you do when you do a fast tremolo, but it does not matter if you don’t stick to an exact bpm.

[… some stuff that is irrelevant here …]

A lot of us, when we want to “practice”, instinctively reach out to the metronome. However, Locking to external source (drums, metronome) is not a priority to learn the skills we are developing here. Learning the correct motions is the key initial goal. Moreover, performing the correct motions while varying the speed is a foundational skill. Troy gives a demonstration of this skill here using a classic scalar pattern: Circular Sixes – Cracking the Code

I other words, to play a given phrase at speed, we first have to build the “motor program” that the two hands can follow. After both hands can do the correct motions in sync with each other, locking in with an external beat is a separate skill that you can develop.

The metronome is of course still useful to estimate the speed you are playing at. If I am working on some unfamiliar motions, I typically start “unmetered”, trying to go reasonably fast. If I think I am playing the thing correctly, I may then switch on the metronome for a few seconds to check if I am indeed playing in the speed range I was expecting.

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#8

Perfect way to describe it, if it was just a matter of metronome repetition everyone would be Paul Gilbert.

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