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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