Hilarious!!! In thumb we trust
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To me, EVH was a cake, composed (as most cakes are) of frosting + sponge (the cake body). The frosting is the tapping, whammy bar theatrics, and tremolo picking, and it is so delicious! But the real genius is in the sponge, as he was rhythmic, musical, and so far ahead of his time regarding tone, that, when VH came out in 1978, there was just nothing like it. Today, even some talented little kids can play Eruption, and that’s awesome, but they, like the other 99.999…% of the population, are unable to take guitar in hand and create pop music masterpieces like he could. And we didn’t mention that he was a gifted inventor (starting with the Super Strat, possibly).
Now, turning to his thumb: Did he really need that bend? My guess is, “no,” and he’d be all good even with a normal (not double-jointed) thumb, as the underlying sponge of the cake would be every bit as tasty as it was.
This introduction, Intruder, has a lot of frosting, and Pretty Woman is the cake.
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I’ll simply say that I don’t believe that Edward had any physical advantage over anyone else and that I believe that all of his playing is repeatable by anyone.
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The thing we can see in hundreds of technique critiques is that finger shape does affect the possible “pick orientations” (pickslanting, edge picking etc.) that you get with different pick grips. That in turn affects what picking motions will glide smoothly over the string for a given arm position, and so on.
This is not to say that one finger / hand shape is superior to another — it’s more like you can’t expect to copy 100% both the appearance and functionality of - say - EVH’s technique unless your limbs look identical to Eddie’s!
But we definitely think you can achieve the same functionality, the appearance will just be different!
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Is it fair to use an extreme example to argue a point? There are always examples that go against the basic idea. My main concept was related to Ed and his timing and skill/speed, I really do believe certain hands can do certain things, His mind was ofcourse a huge impact, and his upbringing, friends, family, environment etc, But his hands had no doubt a huge impact on his playing, take the tapping for example, if you don’t have the hands to do it, you can’t do this, at all.
@10:21
Talking about the mind, experience etc is kind of going against CTC, This is a forum to talk about mostly the physical attributes of mechanical motion. Right?
I disagree, guitar just like olympic sports have physical properties you can not replicate, if you’re not physically inclined.
I can’t do that, but I’m going to keep trying.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Br7oQmMKmnE
I think this is a decent attempt at run, but it is still far off from the original.
There is a snap that is missing, and I think comes from the way Ed held his pick.
The original has got to have some production on it, but you can’t fake that attack. The original is boosted. The track has to be edited in some way. The notes have a body to them that you wouldn’t get from an aucoustic recording, it has to be be electrically amplified?
You can check out what Troy discovered is going on with that run.
EDIT: not sure if that’s linking correctly, but it’s post #26 from April 2018.
It’s this, with a bit of youth added
I’m pretty damn sure he has done the same thing since he was young, just raking over it with his own feel and not thinking about it.
It is outside picking
And have a look at his thumb after that run.
Marty doesn’t use a flat angle, its generally 45 with a freedom of flatter angles on the down stroke. Him being a usx player.
I think the flat attack is an illusion.
You can flat attack the string if you are usx and downstroking, or dsx and upstroking. But its only one stroke, down or up, the reverse stroke needs an angle on it. Or at least needs an angle to be smooth relative to your forarm rotation.
Look at the video and you’ll see him pulling in the pick towards his hand, his thumb lifting up. Thats changing the angle of his upstroke.
Thats not true, you can be very efficant and fast, with little control.
Control is not linked to speed. Mechanical speed isn’t linked to control.
I think the flubs or loose hits are from his pick grip and from the fact he had such a solid grip that he could loosen off a lot, allowing a lot of control with a light and loose movement across the strings.
The thumb he had helped with his picking, without a doubt.
I think there’s a lot of doubt whether it helped or not.
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So if you can play a sequence at 140bpm sextuplets, you won’t have more control over it at 120bpm sextuplets?
It’s one of those things where I don’t know how applicable experience off the guitar is to experience on the guitar.
But, I’m one of those sick nutjobs who really likes riding road bikes up mountains as fast as he can. And, what goes up must come down, so somewhere along the way I got pretty good at descending them too. And then - I don’t want to jinx myself here - but then I got really good at it.
And it makes me think of an old boss ofg mine, where part of his schpeil during due diligence meetings “of course, speed is nothing without control,” as his segue from how many calculations a second our system could do, to talking about our controls making sure the data and calculaltions were good (as an aside, he wasn’t much of a salesman).
And, on the subject of ripping a descent on a road bike, one day, coming out of the zen-like place you get deep into carrying real speed on a road bike, as the world around you starts to collapse to a single point directly in front of you, it occured to me - he had it backwards. Speed isn’t only meaningful with control; rather, control IS speed, and the more you could proactively adjust your approach to maximize your control over the bike, well… speed follows directly from that. Stuff like line selection, outside-inside-outside through the apex of a corner to smooth out the angle of the turn, braking before the corner and not during to ensure all your available grip was keeping you on the road and not also fighting to decelerate the bike… how you shift your center of gravity and your balance on the bike to keep your weight planted on the contact patch… all this stuff was what allowed speed to occur.
I don’t really know how far you should take sport metaphors to technical guitar playing, and in some ways this all superficially seems opposed to the CtC “starting with speed” thing… but I’m also not sure it really is. The idea on the guitar is to make sure you’re moving fast enough that some of the problems that only become apparent at speed are really manifesting, and… well, at 15mph, line selection or when you break and when you don’t, where you’re holding your weight, all of that stuff… it’s pretty irrelevant. Now, come into a stretch of hairpins at 45mph, and, well, the parking lot “speed bump” metaphor still holds I guess, except here it’s the difference between overcooking a corner and turning the pavement into a giant cheese grater as you skid off the edge of the road and into the trees, vs holding your line, holding contact, carrying speed, and then setting up the next turn.
I’m bored at work. It probably shows. But maybe there are parallels… but, cycling has taught me control IS speed.
If you’re also bored, I’ll close my borderline off-topic tangent with this link, to an article containing video of WorldTour pro rider Tom Pidcock absolutely ripping a descent in California.
He’s a wee bit faster than me. 
But watch his line selection, and to the degree to which you can see it, his balance.
Not by default no, the original concept of the post is hands and how they are constructed means a lot in terms of speed and control, but they are not linked, you could play better at a higher tempo than you can at a slower one, and vice versa.
Take gears for example, there are very distinct shapes that work well in different speeds.
You can say, well we all have hands and we all can do the same things, but that ignores the different hands we all have, you can also say as you mentioned, if you can play at a high speed you can play at a slow just as well, that’s not true, take the gear example.
You can take running as an example too, the one I’ve learnt most from, some people can run for days, some only for seconds, it really depends on your body, not your training, your body has a limit, you can train your whole life and not be as fast as usain bolt, it’s not because you didn’t train as hard, or take the peds he did, it’s because you have a totally different body construction to him. You physically can not do what he did because you do not have his body. And this is in my opinion why most can’t get close to EVH, You need the position he was in, in his life, his friends, family, but you also need the physical attributes he had. And Perhaps the peds he used.
Not necessarily, I think most people find efficiency in specific speed ranges, and over / under that can feel more challenging.
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“Spanish Fly” was recorded using the Ovation Country Artist nylon string hybrid classical. It is an electric-acoustic guitar, but it was not recorded electrically…it was simply the acoustic sound of the guitar mic’ed with a little compression.