Everyone's ultimate goal?

Playing Technique
#1

Hi, I’m just curious what, after getting into CtC and understanding the concepts, is your goal by putting those concepts into practice. Is it to try to understand more about your instinctive picking style and further develop it to the point of mastery (a la Yngwie with DWPS or Vinnie Moore with UWPS)? Or is it to become proficient at both UWPS and DWPS, and then eventually 2WPS? Something else?

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#2

My goal is to have the tools to write music that I like and also play songs of my heroes like Yngwie, Paul Gilbert, Kiko Loureiro, etc.

I see technique as a tool, same as theory. You can get very far with USX or DSX, you just have to be strategic in your fingerings, right hand motions and pick strokes. Being able to switch between the two is a very powerful tool indeed, but it’s not the end of the world if you can’t do it.

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#3

That pretty much sums it up.

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#4

To be honest I’m a bedroom player, albeit a dedicated one. I want to eventually be able to play and sound like my heroes - Bonamassa, Clapton, Beck etc. but with my own little spin on things.

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#5

My goals are far less grandiose. I am just starting to learn Guitar. I have been watching YouTube instructional videos on the subject for years but never decided how I wanted to play. Finger-picking looked amazing but too hard to start, I hate Country Music so strumming was out, everybody else seamed to focus on the fretting hand, and to be honest I couldn’t care less about that to begin with. I felt the most important aspect I need to master before moving forward learning cords or anything was having both hands in sync with each other. I looked for a couple years for this particular instruction with no avail. I found CtC and bingo, exactly what I was looking for. Once I master my picking hand in sync and perfect rhythm with my fretting hand without having to look and concentrate, and can play a variety of scales, only then will I move on to learning the basic cords and learn to play my first song. It’s been a couple of weeks now that I found this place and have been daily practicing the Six-Note Pattern (Masters in Mechanics: Volcano) I am VERY happy with the progress I am seeing and hope to have that done in about another months time.
That probably sounds funny to a lot of you but it’s just the way I like to learn things and I am in no hurry to get there. I only will play for my Wife and myself to enjoy on the back porch when I get to the point I can play my first song.

I am confident that when I have a question that this group here will have good advise for me to follow, you can’t ask for much more than that. :wink:

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#6

I always wanted the skills to approximate JM’s playing on Shakti.

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#7

My dream was always to play as the great master Steve Vai!
Compose legendary songs and play some licks to summon Ktulu

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#8

  • I want to be able to play effortless and clean economy picking at 220 BPM.

  • I want to be able to sweep in triplets at the same speed

  • I want to write a song which i would like to listen to

  • recently added a new one: I want to play the bass in my friend’s band (with StYle), atm practicing their songs.

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#9

I can do that… With 8th notes :smiley:

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#10

I have actually many goals:

  1. To play advanced repertoire for classical guitar: To be able to artfully play pieces beyond level 9 in the Suzuki method for example

  2. To be able to improvise in classical style and in modern styles like jazz, blues or rock

  3. To improve my musicianship: first-sight reading, aural recognition

  4. To be able to create my own arrangements of melodies I like and compositions in general

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#11

I didn’t know strumming was limited to country music? :slightly_smiling_face:

This seems a bit backwards to me. Why not do it all at once?

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#12

Like @Johannes, I’m also worried that this can be a dangerous rabbit hole - I’m sure most teachers would recommend building a repertoire as early as possible, in parallel with the purely technical work. Makes learning the instrument more fun as well :slight_smile:

In fact, the two things have become the same for me now - nowadays I don’t practice anything that I’m not going to use in a song/solo etc.

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#13

My main goal is around is 16ths at 140bpm or so. If I can get there, cleanly, I’ll be happy!

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#14

My goal is to be able to play as effortlessly melodically and fast as my shred guitar heroes. Chris Poland, Marty Friedman, Luca Turilli, Buckethead, Paul Gilbert, Michael Romeo, Jason Becker, Yngwie Malmsteen, Criss Oliva, Eric Johnson, Richie Blackmore.

  1. I need to get better at legato, wider sweeps (5 and 6 string, maybe even 7 one day)
  2. I want to improve my melodic control for fast lead playing including multi step bends and more variation of vibrato as well as incorporating more major and whole tone scales in my lead runs.
  3. I’d like to start incorporating some of the country picking techniques into my playing more, namely hybrid picking similar to Brent Mason or Brad Paisley.
  4. I’d like to get actual instruction on classical guitar, I’m currently self taught and I’d like to get a proper teacher because the fingerings for both hands mess me up and tremolo is baffling.
  5. I’d like to get better at playing keyboards since I really like synthesizers.
  6. I’d like to start playing pedal steel because it’s a beautiful sounding instrument and I feel my lead guitar style is far too metal/rock oriented to ever work in a country context :laughing:
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#15

I do agree with your point of view Tommy, I have formal training as classical guitarist and my focus was always on developing the techniques I’d use in my repertoire, we also have etudes that are musical pieces with focus on specific techniques.

My process for building practicing technique, more or less is:

  1. Scales (I always practice my scales in all tonalities, distributed along the week)

  2. Find a musical piece I like

  3. Listen to it

  4. Analyse it from a technical point of view

  5. Play it slow (I sight read it to get a general impression of the techniques I would need)and find passages that would need extra attention

  6. Extract exercises from those passages mentioned on point 5

Of course, a guitar player needs a base technique from where to begin but this can also be learnt by choosing carefully musical pieces (or simplified pieces) according to our skill level.

There’s music for every level of skill you could imagine.

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