haha cool. just wanted to say that in the off chance this thread made you feel any negative emotions, no matter how small or fleeting
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I thought I’d add a few more thoughts, as somebody who basically abandoned the entire canon of “shred” vocabulary and came back to it later in life.
There were definitely people playing ascending and descending sixes before Paul Gilbert.
As @Drew mentioned, this particular pattern is essentially a perfect confluence of picking hand and fretting hand efficiency. It’s likely to be among the few things that most guitarists can play quickly, and so when they’re trying to play fast for effect, this pattern is one the few patterns at their disposal. Used sparingly, it can still be effective for that purpose to the average listener.
Also, there is a particular aesthetic that comes from playing faster than fast. Woobledy-bloop nonsense fast. Helicopters blades appearing to spin slowly in the opposite direction fast. The notes don’t really matter at those speeds, the speed is textural.
As for stacking in 4ths, I can see that having uses too. Starting each repetition on a chord tone strengthens places chord tones on strong beats and solidifies the connection between the melody and harmony. That’s great if that’s what you want, but it may not be. Stacking in fourths breaks that connection, making the relationship to the harmony more ambiguous and creates a different aesthetic. Breaking that connection allows you to bring it all together again when a chord changes, which can be very effective.
Obviously, if you do this too much or don’t address the harmony, it can sound like what you’re playing really has nothing at all to do with the rest of the music, but the ambiguity and disconnection is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Fourths are almost ideal for this, just think of how ambiguous quartal harmony is.
Again, this is an interesting example because it’s an example of a pattern which is highly efficient for both the picking hand and fretting hand.
Truth being told I was never the biggest fan of extended sweep arpeggio sections in “shred” music, and I never bothered with sweeping as a teenager. I preferred the Gilbert approach of sequencing arpeggios with string skipping rather than playing the inversions straight up and down with sweeping. I didn’t really begin incorporating any sweeping in my playing until I was in my mid-twenties for more Gambale-esque purposes.
That said, sweeping at higher speeds has a defocusing effect, which can be an interesting aesthetic. In moderation, when done with consideration, it can be an interesting way to present harmonic movement. Rachmaninoff’s concertos absolutely get this aesthetic in parts, as does some of Coltrane’s arpeggio based improvisations.
I feel like some of Jason Becker’s playing really has this effect. Actually, I think the big climax in this tribute to Becker is a good example too:
I like fourths, they have an interesting “angular” sound. I like outside sounds and I like non-functional harmonic movements. So does Frank Gambale and so did Holdsworth.
A fretting pattern can be used to imply a chord and moving that pattern across strings can imply chord movement. There’s definitely ways of doing this and making it interesting. It’s pretty much everywhere in Holdsworth’s playing.
Then again, I’m one of those weirdos that thinks Webern and Berg composed beautiful music…
Repeating sequences and patterns can definitely be fatiguing and predictable. However, patterns can be useful musically, not just mechanically. A repeating structure gives the listener something they can follow. When the relationship between the melody and the harmony or rhythm is not obvious, patterning can be valuable, and that’s not just limited to guitar playing either.
There’s a lot of stuff that sounds good fast and doesn’t sound good slow. There’s a lot of stuff that sounds good slow and doesn’t sound good fast.
It would seem that the great difficulty is in developing enough patterns which will be amenable to being played at speed, and knowing how to transition between them.
Totally agree, rhythmic displacement is super cool.
I think the same applies to a lot of Shawn Lane’s playing too.
This reminds me of a particular pattern Shawn Lane plays on Hey Tee Bone. The entire solo is full of “WTF?” licks, but the lick I’m thinking of starts at about 4:04. You can’t understand what you’re hearing when it hits and while you’re trying to make sense of it it’s already changing.
Entire tune here, worth listening to all the way through if you haven’t heard it before. Brett Garsed’s solo is first (and it’s awesome!), Shawn’s is second.
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love your response. definitely made me think differently about some takes, and also made me realize that i did agree with you and could’ve voiced my opinion better. But more importantly the former.
I definitely share your opinion, at least mostly but if not 100%, on each of your breakdowns.
and damn! garsed and lane on the same track. never heard this, quite awesome. Garsed is a player I’ve only recently learned of, phenomenal playing
Brett’s a monster and one of my absolute favourites. Check out his solo albums and his work with T.J. Helmerich!
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Will do!
ok, i just got through the full track. this is some of the best playing i’ve ever heard in my life. ty for sharing
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Me neither. There were several moments where I laughed out loud in amazement.
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dang dude cool tune, how do I get more Brett Garsed-y with my playing ? haha
This wouldn’t be a bad starting place:
just tried looking on spotify for the TJ Helmerich stuff, are there any particular albums or is it mostly just live youtube vids
The first two albums are called Quid Pro Quo and Exempt. I think most of the tracks are on YouTube if you look for them.
Honestly, from the interviews we’ve done with great improvisers, and the various ways we’ve prodded them about what they “see” on the fretboard, it seems like all of it is done by shape. So it’s pretty much always the shape that determines the notes.
But of course, you get to choose the shape, and you get to choose how many different shapes you learn, and how much work you spend memorizing different connections between them on the fly. That’s where the rubber really hits the road I think in improvisation.
So at the end of the day, if you just don’t like the sound of scales played in a straight line, that’s totally fine. But it’s not the use of shapes that’s doing it. It’s the lack of shapes in the vocabulary, and the lack of time spent navigating them all, that’s doing it.
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Yeah I suppose what I should’ve said, was “sticking with the original shape”
And i appreciate the insight on my take in shapes in general. I suppose I have indeed seen the fretboard this way, and it’s just the aspect of not changing the shapes at all where I have issue. That’s when I consider the shape to be the determining factor of note choice- learning/discovering a shape, and simply not altering it to play the notes you might really want to hear
You know, @Tom_Gilroy, because I’m such an interesting person at cocktail parties and whatnot (sarcasm), while waiting in the office waiting room before my annual physical yesterday I started thinking about thay Yngwie 6s pattern - I’m not a primary USX player so it’s nothing I’ve thought about in depth before, but it occured to me it really is a lick that can be played with almost entirely, for lack of a better word, sequential fingering, aside from that initial 1-3 or 1-4 movement, which is still about as efficient as a finger movement can make.
You’ve made a point similar to this to me before but it bears repeating - if you lay your hand flat on a surface (I was using my leg but a tabletop is better) and try to tap, alternating as fast as possible between two fingers, then 1-4, index pinkie, is awfully fast. 1-4 and 1-3, index-ring, seem pretty comparable, maybe sliught preferecne for 1-4, and 1-2, index-middle, is pretty good too. 2-3 and 3-4, however, are awful… uless you’re doing it as part of a 1-2-3-4 or 4-3-2-1, in which case they move smoothly and very quickly.
I guess I’m mostly just saying that it surprises me that 1-4 is as efficient a motion as it is, though really that shouldn’t surprise me at all.
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There’s a huge thread on “digital efficiency” you should totally check out that dives deep into this! I’ll find the link, one sec
I get you. Yeah at some point this all becomes semantic. You’re just saying you’re tired of hearing people play the same stuff all time, which is completely fair. It’s not really the “shape’s fault”, per se, it’s just the choice (or lazy non-choices) that players are making.
However I think what I’m getting at from a practical perspective is that one reason you hear people playing the same things a lot is because they don’t know how to play different stuff. All we were taught back in the day is memorizing the seven scale shapes. Which really doesn’t teach you anything about improvisation at all.
If more people had a plan for learning how to fly effortlessly over weird / interesting chord changes playing non-typical stuff, more people would be doing it. It’s easier said than done. Thanks to the intertubes and the proliferation of smart teaching, there is a lot more and better stuff available now on improvisation and how it actually works, than there was back in the day though.
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absolutely. well put
Yeah, I’m DEEPLY familiar with that thread. 
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You seeem like exactly the kind of person I’d like ot talk to at parties!
Yes, agreed. It’s not an EDC based pattern, but it’s very efficient situationally. You can always leave the lower fingers fretting while the higher fingers are fretting, and simply lift the higher finger to reveal the note fretted by the lower finger. The pattern has less general application than the EDC stuff, but on a single string it works really well.
Yes, I think this is an important observation. (1 2), (1 3) and (1 4) are all comfortable fast and easy. On the other hand, (2 3) and (3 4) are slow and difficult, and they feel terrible.
I think (1 4), for all of it’s benefits, isn’t exactly ideal for guitar purposes. Typically guitarists use (1 3) for pentatonic fingerings. For fast pentatonic passages (1 4) works great too, maybe even better in certain contexts. However, it would be difficult and awkward to use make this your primary fingering for pentatonic phrases, as it would be difficult to comfortably transition to bends and vibrato. So (1 4) has become overlooked, even though it’s extremely valuable in certain contexts.
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Malmsteen sometimes does a weird thing; that I was doing too quite unknowingly, 1-4 with the 3 right on the 4 for vibrato.
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Hey, I, too, would be all for that conversation, but we would 100% be the two nerds in the corner talking about guitar while everyone else is going on about football, US or UK, or something.
You’ve definitely gone through a few other finger independence exercises to make this point, but this was just one more that occured to me. I guess maybe better would be using your picking hand forearm as a “fretboard” and tapping on that, but either way it makes it pretty clear that there are some biological differences in finger independence that we can’t get around.
With 1-4, I tend to play pentatonics 1-4 for three-fret stretches and 1-3 for two, more or less by necessity lower down on the neck, and out of habit higher up. I do what I think Twangsta is talking about for bends and vibrato, where I’ll reinforce my pinkie with my ring for bending notes with my pinkie - say, if I’m fretting the 12th position pentatonic box and bending the 15th fret (with apologies to whoever flagged this as an eye roller above!) with my pinkie while also fretting the 14th fret, and applying most of the force with the 14th. For something like a quarter step bend it’s not critical, but much beyond that it’s really helpful. Then again, for blues playing, you’re rarely worried about this sort of optimized speed, and I’m not sure some inefficiency isn’t a bad thing for that sort of raw/ragged playing.
As far as 1-4, a buddy of mine who’s had a pretty successful solo career, Angel Vivaldi, does a number of runs like that, though often as more of a compositional thing. Killer player, blistering technique but over the last couple albums I think his phrasing has really come into its own.
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