so if I start alt picking arpeggios, how do I know im not just re-grooving the stringhopping that I worked so hard to get rid of???
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It’s all about how it feels. Troy’s general response to crosspicking questions seems to be that if your movement feels fast and sloppy but also easy and smooth then keep working on it. If you don’t already use a crosspicking motion, like dwps, then you may have to learn a new one (9 to 2 o clock) to avoid string hopping.
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I have a different philosophy than some others here. But I would recommend not even attempting arpeggios, until you are already sure that you have a smooth, double-escaped form. And even then… I would still test it out on 3nps and 2nps stuff before going to the 1nps runs.
If you just go straight to the 1NPS stuff… you risk habitually going back to hopping.
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That is indeed my response. And it’s not really just for this particular motion - it’s for any motion. The best way to learn a motion is to first attempt to do it at a realistic speed, not a super robot-slow speed. If it feels smooth and the shape of the motion looks in the ballpark to a correct reference, then you’re on to something. You can then work on trying to clean it up. But if you go super slow and try to get all the notes “correct”, there is no guarantee that the motion itself is actually correct. And there is no way to tell because the “does it feel smooth” test fails at slow speed - everything feels kind of smooth slowly.
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This, together with the significance of “escaped versus trapped” pickstrokes (and swiping), is what you need to send back in the DeLorean. 
Slow practice without a “speed-friendly” motion serves only to burn the “defective” motion more deeply into your brain/CNS.
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If we don’t have enough flux in the capacitor can we at least send it back to 2014? Because I didn’t “know” it then either, even if I was sort of doing it.
in the end we see why the greats got to be great…even without instruction. They went by the classic rule “if it works, it works”
The “slow practice vs fast practice” thing aint going away anytime soon though. for one thing, once you “know” the proper fast motions, you can spend some time going thru those same motions at slow speed to clean it up or even just to more fully understand the motions
I dont even see a way to try some of this stuff at a fast speed. How does one try to alt pick a 5 string arpeggio at a fast speed without at least going thru it numerous times at slow speed??? Id love to see that on camera.
I understand the concept…some things cant really be practiced slowly. For instance you cant high jump or dunk a basketball slowly lol. But some things can be worked out slowly
I have a feeling our perceptions are skewed by continually looking at the best players in the world and players with a minimum of 10 years playing. id love to see someone go get their neighbor who never played and show them a simple lick and tell them “just wail it out real fast!!”
You can absolutely do this, and you can see the results of doing so in our Steve Morse YouTube feature. There is some practice footage in there where I was suddenly able to do the arpeggio thing:
I had my phone on me at home and was able to capture the first few minutes of being able to do this. You’ll note that it’s not slow at all, it’s fast and smooth but a little bit off kilter looking because I hadn’t completely figured out what I was doing yet. The key here is that it looks markedly different from the stringhopping-ish footage we also include in that feature for comparison.
Then, for the studio-shot clips you see in the feature, with the Les Paul, I switch to a trailing edge grip:
I haven’t played that way since I was 15. But from just screwing around in studio, with the cameras rolling, trying to play the arpeggios fast, I just started doing it. It was another a-ha type of thing that just suddenly happened. Fast and super sloppy at first. And then I was able to clean that up just enough over the course of the half hour or so I was in there. The trailing edge motion looked even more symmetrical and smooth than the practice footage, so I continued to use that for the remainder of the slow motion examples in that feature.
The key here, again, is that “attempting” things at a realistic speed is the only way you’re ever going to get a new motion down. You can slow it down slightly afterward to become more conscious of the motion. But you cannot originate an efficient motion at slow speed because the feeling of smoothness is the only way you can know for sure that a motion is efficient. And that feeling can only be felt while playing a realistic (choose your preferred term) playing speed.
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I hear ya, but its kind of making my point for me. YOU can attempt “new” things at decent speeds. But YOU arent a typical player though are you? You are one who is intricately aware of most of the motions that are possible.
How many years ago did you perfect standard sweep picking? 15-20 years ago at least? So you are quite comfy shifting positions quickly etc etc
Have we forgotten?..not everyone is lol
So if we are using Troy, Steve Morse, Yngwie, Paul G etc as our standard, then yeah, we can whip off most anything within about 10 minutes of trying.
Im not exactly a newb myself but if I posted me trying alt picked arps, it would bring to mind a saying about a monkey and a football
Im sure its just me though, everyone else here is at Martin Millers level
Edit: I’ll add to this that knowing what I know now, the “stringhopping” footage in that clip is not stringhopping:
It’s more or less the right motion, just a little too vertical, which is why I’m able to do it at the speeds you’re seeing there but not quite the Tumeni tempo speeds. That’s a mistake in our analysis - and there are lots of them in that feature so I wouldn’t take what I’m saying completely at face value. The “success” attempt we’re spotlighting there is a flatter motion, and you can see that in the clip. It’s more efficient because the hand is not being asked to make drastic changes in mid-ari, and more like the type of smoothness you’re looking for to know that you’ve got it.
And this again is why slow and sometimes even medium-speed practice doesn’t work. If you can do the Tumeni pattern at 145bpm sixteenths equivalent, you might reasonably think, hey I’ve got this! And if it feels a little tensiony at those speeds, you might also reasonably think, well that only makes sense, because it’s “one note per string” - as if saying that in itself is an explanation. But it’s not.
When done flat-ly enough, “one note per string” has no feeling of tension, only smoothness. So this is why you need to go for it until you get something resembling the right motions. Instructions help too, of course, and we have some good ones now in the crosspicking lessons. So you’re “going for it”, but in an informed way. Then you’re filming yourself to see if the motion looks correct. And if so, you’re slowing it down slightly and trying to become more aware of the motions by feel, so you can do them more cleanly.
Rinse, repeat.
No, I wasn’t! We made numerous errors in that feature - see my next post for more details. At every step of the way, no matter my level of “knowledge”, the breakthroughs were always accidental first and only “understood” after the fact. And in lots of cases, they weren’t understood at all until a few more years worth of work, as in the case of the Morse lesson. I was doing these things long before I knew what I was doing.
My response to this is that alt-picked 5 string arpeggios aren’t the first challenge you should tackle. Figure out the “fast and smooth motion” dimension of playing on simpler licks first. Then apply what you’ve learned to more complex licks.
I agree there can be a place for slow practice, but only when it’s done with awareness of what the motion should look/feel like at high speed. And I’m ignoring the kind of rudimentary “where do my hands even go” type of beginner stage that we all have to go through in the first few months of starting guitar from scratch. And of course there may be some slow techniques that are artistically useful in their own right, but won’t have a viable “high speed version”.
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Honestly, I don’t see why not. What’s a “simpler” arpeggio? A roll pattern because it’s only three strings? That’s a whole different animal. I would say they don’t really feel similar. I could do the more linear six-string kind long before I could do the roll. I don’t like to say that certain things are “hard” or other things are “easy” because I have yet to really find a way to quantify what hard or easy is. But if you were to test these ideas on a batch of learners and they all got one pattern before the other, and they were able to then get the next pattern, then I’d say, ok, that’s an argument for sequencing them.
In reality I think the best way will turn out to the “basket of variety” way. Where you attempt all sorts of stuff until one of them clicks, or clicks partially. Not only can we not really predict which thing will click first, but evidence suggests that attempting lots of things gives you the feedback you need to start to learn what correctness is like. Kind of like mashing all the buttons on an arcade machine to figure out what best moves / sequences really are.
my point exactly. I mean come on, ya gotta be somewhere within reach of a thing before you think you’re gonna just whip it off
The things which once seemed impossible become relatively easy and gradually that threshold is raised and new “impossible” licks come into view.
I was thinking more about basic competence in making consistent, fast pickstrokes of any variety. A 5 string arpeggio throws a bunch of variables at you, and it might be too overwhelming/frustrating to solve by trial and error without some prior insight. Tackling problems with fewer variables may help someone zero in on some intuitive solutions more quickly, as well as giving the psychological boost of feeling like you’re “making progress”. Even if the motion learning doesn’t directly transfer to the more complex problem, the practical experience of “feeling your way through the problem” with something simpler might provide benefit when someone attacks something more complex.
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Massive overstatement IMO. too many great players have proven otherwise. Maybe context is everything
Does it really have to be an “either/or” thing?
In any case, ive spoken my peace about it lol
cheers, JJ
In reach of what? I think we have to be careful about imposing our arbitrary notions of what is “hard” before we actually go for it and try. We only think a five-string arpeggio is hard because we never had any idea how to do it. You can choose a “simpler” pattern, but how do we know that it’s really simpler? As an example, I never learned any of these arpeggio playing motions by playing a single note on a single string. It just was never intuitive for me. And yet we might say that’s the simplest thing you could play, right?
For me, winging it on the linear arpeggio patterns was how this started. It was the simplest because it felt like it was “easier” to move in a straight line across strings rather than jumping back and forth between strings on smaller patterns like a roll pattern. Again, I hate to use easy and hard but there you go, that was my impression at the time.
It may very well turn out that there is an ideal sequence to learning certain things but I don’t see how we can know that without actually testing on a group of people. And I still think that if we test this, we’re going to find that the “basket” approach works best, because it offers a variety of “feels” for the motion.
I don’t disagree with this. But I think omitting simple licks during this phase would be a mistake.
Oh absolutely. I just think we have years and years of baggage of deciding somewhat arbitrarily what simple is, because lesson book after lesson book had things numbered and ordered. Beyond very broad categories, there are honestly lots of examples where I would not know how to categorize which lick is easier than another one. And even then I might turn out to be wrong. Some newbie out there will figure out something first that I didn’t get until years later, and vice versa.
Not to throw a monkey-wrench into all of this, but as important as it is to learn to do 1NPS alt-picking, and learning a nice double-escaped mechanic… I don’t want people here to think that its a perfect substitute for sweeping arps.
If I have 4 or more notes in a row (1nps), and I need to play them fast and at a constant tempo, I still will usually sweep them. It’s very tough to get the precise consistency of a sweep once you get up to around 170ish bpm using alt-picking.
It’s weird that I say that, in spite of the fact that I’ve pretty much abandon economy picking in every other aspect of guitar playing… but good ol straight fast 1nps arps, I still revert to good ol fashion sweeps.