Even though I’ve been a MiM subscriber since the beginning, I hadn’t actually tried to work through the Eric Johnson material before, but am now dipping my toe in it.
I’m satisfied with my progress so far, but what jumped out at me was how awkward the ascending pentatonic fives patterns feels at first. Descending fives feel perfectly “natural”, but ascending I really had to slow things down to figure out how to get my fretting hand to feel “smooth” (particularly fretting a ring-finger bar or roll for the consecutive up on D-string 14th fret and down on A-string 14th fret).
Another factor is fingering for the EJ stuff. While Troy doesn’t mention it much (apart from Eric’s predominant use of index-ring fingerings), I notice @Troy doing some interesting “intuitive” swapping of the middle finger for the ring finger at certain places in the fives pattern. Right now I’m choosing to play in a more pedantic positional way, using index-ring-pinky, though I know EJ and Yngwie use index-middle-ring fingerings similar to Troy to “save” the pinky for wider stretches.
Part of the reason is that in my early days of guitar, I underutilized the pinky, and I now try to work it into licks I know could be played without it, sort of in a mission to avoid having it figuratively “atrophy” from disuse.
This made me think more broadly about three-note-per-string diatonic patterns, and the fingering of the “whole step, half step” spread. There are some situations where for string change reasons it is more ergonomic to fret that spread in a strict “positional” way: index-ring-pinky, and other situations where it is more ergonomic to fret that spread as index-middle-ring. On some level, this seems less efficient than having a fixed set of repeatable fingerings that get applied in every situation, but my non-scientific observation is that it seems like most high-profile “shred” players use a “swap in whatever fingering fits the situation” approach that becomes automatic for each lick through repetition over time.
