Fast Downstrokes for Thrash Rhythms

Playing Technique
#116

I can currently hit album speed. As far specific mechanics, there’s not much there for me to share. I’m sorry that I’m unable to provide a video. The way I got there was the old-fashioned way. I’m new here and don’t know all of the terminology, so please excuse me if I don’t explain it well. All of my practice drills for this were time based with less emphasis on speed because that will naturally come (you’ll feel it). I found stamina to be the biggest issue with playing fast downstrokes. My routine was something like this:

  1. Set metronome to 80 BPM
  2. Play straight downstrokes palm-muted on the low E at one specific subdivision for 60 seconds with a 30 second break in between.
  3. The subdivisions were broken down as such: 1/8th notes; 1/8th note triplets; and 16th notes. As stated I played each one for 60 seconds
  4. I’d play a fourth “set” with all three mixed alternating from highest subdivision to lowest every 2 measures, also for 60 seconds.
  5. Once comfortable at the starting tempo, I’d jack it up by 10 BPM’s (I use the Tempo app on my phone. It has a built in timer as well as being an excellent metronome).
  6. I also use Anytune Pro and started to play along to Master of Puppets at half-speed in the beginning to gauge my progress. Over about two to three weeks, I was playing it at album speed using the method above. YMMV, but there’s no more gratifying feeling than the first time you play it at 100% speed.

As you pickup the tempo, you’ll automatically improve the economy with which you move your picking arm/forearm, etc… It’s a natural progression.

Note: You will feel tension and fatigue(not pain. Stop if you’re feeling it, without any exceptions. There should be no pain) in your picking forearm and that’s what you need to work through. With patient, methodic practice, you will get there

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#117

I know this is an older post @Troy, but I thought I’d comment on this because I myself have actually played with James Hetfield’s grip over a period of time, and I’m an early Metallica fanatic. (Let me know if there is a more current thread that would be better for this)

What I’m seeing with the gallops in this video you posted, is that he’s using DWPS/USX with heavy rest strokes on every downstroke (of the gallops). Now look at the path of his upstroke when he hits the second note of the gallop vs. the path of his upstroke after he completes the gallop—the plane for the former is much less vertical. When he completes the gallop and starts the next gallop he is doing back-to-back downstrokes, (because that’s the way to connect the gallops) that upstroke is much more vertical to avoid hitting the string. So it seems between the two-downstrokes (last note of gallop 1, and first note of gallop 2) he is lifting off with a more vertical up-stroke, and with his three finger picking/arm supination this seems to be more of a deviation motion. In contrast I feel an index-finger gripped player (trigger or angle pad), applying the same approach with a light to medium supination/DWPS, would use some extension on the more vertical upstroke between the gallops to avoid hitting the string.

Hetfield DWPS gallops - motion closer to extension and flexion, with some deviation mixed in between downstrokes to avoid string contact.

Index-finger grip DWPS gallops (applying similar approach) - motion closer to deviation, with some extension mixed in between downstrokes to avoid string contact.

So they are in a way reversed for both picking grips mechanically speaking if DWPS is used. Now someone of better knowledge can comment if these are efficient movements, or if I’m possibly seeing all this wrong. You have to get around the string somehow if you’ve got back-to-back downstrokes. I’m not sure if this is a true microcosm for how James does his consecutive downstrokes, that is not certain since this could just be for his gallops, but I think it’s applicable.

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#118

You know what? I found that it’s easier for me to play usng upstrokes ))
Though in that case palm muting becomes not so easy

#119

A bump with a slow-motion clip from James Hetfield at a pretty good angle.

#120

Hey all, sorry for bumping an old thread but I didn’t see the point in starting a new one for the same topic.
I’ve been experimenting with downstrokes, single notes and power chords, for a while now and I’m a little confused, well, actually very confused haha.

So while experimenting, I go by feel, most of the time, it feels wrong, then suddenly it feels right for a short period and I’m trying to see what the difference is but I’m not seeing it.

I wonder is my setup and general understanding of how to do fast or even just medium downstrokes a little off…

Just to give a bit of information.
When practicing it with a single power chord. My arm is either lightly, or medium supinated. I’m using, or at least starting with the angle pad grip and trying to do a wrist only motion with no forearm rotation. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t. I can’t seem to get it to a point where I can do the smooth motion on command. For me, it’s kind of like when experimenting with an alternate picking motion, where it can feel smooth for a few seconds and then I lose it.

When I do single strings, my arm seems to be less supinated. I wouldn’t say pronated, but less than when doing power chords. I also bend the thumb and index finger a little for that extra scratch and also, for some reason, seems to make it easier for me. However, like when doing just a power chord. I won’t get it first try, or second. It takes time and then I get it working smooth for a short burst and lose it again.

I’ve read all the replies and watched all the videos in this thread. I’ve also watched the Brendon Smalls interview and tried to see what he is doing that maybe I’m not.

Are there specific things that help, similar to the wrist setup checklist in the primer that can help all downstrokes?

So just to recap again on what I THINK I’m doing.
Lightly or medium supinated arm position.
Approach angle is probably a little less than when alternate picking, I am not certain about that.
Angle pad grip (which may morph into something else once the motion feels smooth briefly), wrist only. Now I don’t FEEL the circular movement when I get it to feel smooth briefly. It feels more like deviation, but I know there has to be extension in there or I’d hit the string on the way back (which I do sometimes)
Is there something obvious that I’m just not seeing here? Or is it a similar case when learning a new alternate picking motion practicing it fast and sometimes you get it, briefly, then lose it, and in time, the hit rate of getting it smooth increases?

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

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#121

Short answer: text descriptions aren’t super useful for giving you advice on your technique. The best course of action is always to post a link to a video clip. I really don’t think it’s wise to speculate as to what anyone is doing, or to provide advice, until you can actually see the technique in question.

Second answer: I think the best way to learn fast downstrokes is by tapping rapidly on the guitar. When you get it right the motion feels light and springy, and goes very fast. You can see some closeup shots of my results in this thread here:

For further questions on this approach, post them in that thread. For more questions about your technique specifically, post a thread in “Technique Critique” and include a link to a video.

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#122

I wanted to post a video here in regards to MoP and downpicking that I thought was interesting, plus some conjecture around it.

John Browne is well known for his downpicking technique and insane accuracy. I’ve seen him mentioned in this thread a few times, and I find this video pretty interesting to dissect since it’s specifically around MoP as a downpicking benchmark.

I may be wrong on this, but when I slow down the video to .75 or .5, it almost looks like he is using different muscle groups for each pick (or close to it). The first two picks look to either be elbow and then wrist, or wrist and then wrist. The note on the A string appears to be played by a forearm motion that kinda “throws” the pick into the A string.

Even if I’m wrong here in my analysis of the video, I’ve been wondering if splitting the downpicking workload like this across multiple muscle groups might be something to try out. I feel like most people can burst downpicking with the same motion at tempo, but their stamina quickly depletes. Maybe this could be solved by switching between these different muscle groups? Kinda like tapping triplets on a table with one finger versus tapping them with three fingers, it’s going to be easier when the workload it split.

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#123

@verst I’m not totally seeing different muscle groups, any particular timestamp? Looks like mostly wrist.

#124

@Pepepicks66 thanks for replying! I’m mainly seeing it during the spider riff at 0:37 - if you look at his arm, there seems to be some movement other than wrist when he hits the higher string that involves the entire arm moving. Too bad the video doesn’t really have a magnet-esque view as I’m sure that would help a ton!

Even if I am analyzing the technique in the video wrong, I am still wondering if splitting downpicks into different muscle groups may be of value.

#125

@verst I’m pretty sure that’s just his palm clearing the bridge for the unmuted strings (I do the same thing and it looks similar) so he needs to pull most of his forearm up.

I’m not sure which muscles you’d split them to, but you could experiment. I mainly play with a ton of downpicking and I ust stick to the same technique for long periods of time (upwards of an hour or 2).

#126

Ok thanks for that.
I will have a look at your table tapping thread and experiment a little and see if I can get it going.
If not, I’ll post a video in the technique critique section.

#127

@Pepepicks66 I think it would look something like this -

I normally play the track up to speed using my wrist, but I won’t lie in that it’s always felt athletic and I struggle to maintain the required fitness needed for thrashy riffs when I have so little time for practice nowadays.

Working on this as an experiment felt pretty good in terms of muscle utilization, but it feels like it will be tricky to level out the picking dynamics. Forearm motion is also completely new to me, so it will probably take some time to get this smooth and close to tempo. Lastly, it will probably also be a trick to think of this as one continuous motion, rather than thinking about each individual motion per pick.

I’ll try grinding it in my free time and report back - if I could get back to being able to play 200+ BPM thrashy riffs without an hour or two of warm up beforehand, that would be a huge win!

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#128

@Verst I think the elbow motion for an accent makes sense, I -think- I do that:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDExWp9HKrk/?igshid=17wt43qqld66m

https://www.instagram.com/p/CK6zgTXgA2o/?igshid=180z0dh1i6ncn

As far as warming up, I feel like it takes me forever anyways lol.

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#129

With enough practice you will probably get it going but I suspect the attack will be inconsistent. Essentially this will be sort of a different alternate picking (which is again using different muscle groups for consecutive notes). And the reason we want to play such riffs with all downstrokes is (mainly) for the consistent attack.

#130

Interesting! Have you been practicing this method of mixing motions? Does it feel smooth? I guess that will be the determining factor, whether you can get it fast and smooth. I imagine string changes might get a little complicated when mixing motions like this, but, I’ve not practiced this so you’d know better than me!

#131

I played around with it for a few days and I think there may be something to it, but I ran into a few issues:

  1. As BurningAXE mentioned, the attack was hard to keep consistent. The main issue was between the elbow downpick and the wrist downpick. I like the extra hard thwack that the forearm gives and am pretty sure I’ve already been doing that for a while, but it was difficult getting the first two downpicks even.
  2. I was having difficulty with the timing between doing the forearm motion and going back to the elbow motion. The motions between the two felt dramatic in terms of movement and it felt odd to stay in tempo at higher speeds.
  3. The elbow downpick was chewing up the skin right below my pinky, likely because it was hitting the string in a spot that had never developed callouses.

I think all three issues above could easily be sorted out with a bit of practice. I will note that I was starting to pick up speed once I could visualize it as one smooth motion, rather than thinking about firing each different muscle group. The difference in fatigue and muscle tension was really dramatic to me; it felt less “athletic.” It reminded me of when economy picking started to click more for me, like realizing that I had a long path in front of me but the limits would be way less than the path I was on before.

One other observation I had is that this particular muscle splitting would probably only provide benefit for a riff similar to MoP; I couldn’t find a way to use it for downpicks on one string without dropping the forearm motion. Might be best for melodic death metal riffs using multiple strings and a pedal note.

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#132

That’s very cool, you could well be on to something here!
Keep us posted if you decide to continue practicing this method. I can imagine, as you say, that doing it on one string only could be very problematic… but pedal style riffs or anything with many string changes could be a good possibility alright!

#133

Hey amigos. I’ve posted quite a bit on this on a related thread. I love this stuff and trust me, you can learn to easily play this at speed. I will say I think we have a tendency to over-complicate how to make this happen. The different approaches are fascinating and I would never discourage its trying many different approaches that allows us to learn. The trick to this riff is just taking a smaller and lighter approach. If you watch all the videos of those effortlessly playing at speed and faster, you will see their hand is not flying around all over the place - James may be an exception - Ha! Even those who think they have small, controlled movements will surprise themselves watching a video and comparing. The trick to this is just simply calming down those large movements and learning to control within a very small range. It’s simple physics. Once you get the iterative movement down and master how the movement feels at speed, you can learn how to “open it up a bit” within your capability. The reason ramping up a metronome fails us so miserably is because it’s a single sided approach. We reach a point where we hit the limits of the motion used and try to use the same limiting motion to go faster than it will physically allow us - and then get fatigued in the process. Because of the single sided approach, we don’t understand the motion has to be changed significantly in order to go faster. That change means learning how to make even smaller movements than the “small” ones you think you are already making. Watch the videos and literally look at how far the hands are deviating from the strings as a reference point. You will see not much. Watch your hand and you will see a much different picture. Also, start by using just the very tip of the pick, choke way up on it. You have to learn not to let a lot of the pick get caught up on the string - this also slows you down. I can literally feel and control whether the tip of the pick makes contact mid-way across the diameter of the string or full diameter of the string. You need to learn this level of control to play it effortlessly at speed. Most tend to get too much of the pick on the string and that will slow you down and cause fatigue as well. Playing at speed is a different kind of iterative motion that the single sided metronome approach does not allow us to feel and without that feel, it’s difficult to attain. Tom Gilroy said it best on a different thread: “You cannot move quickly unless you have efficient movement patterns. You cannot know if your movement patterns are efficient or not unless you try to execute those movements quickly.”
That is exactly why the single-sided metronome approach fails for this.
Trust me - your movements are too big and you are grabbing too much of the string with the pick. Compare your playing with the videos if you don’t believe. That’s the trick - nothing more complicated than that. I’ve heard on more than one occasion that James actually plays with a very light touch. I don’t know myself, maybe he uses both a light touch and heavy touch depending on the passage. Once you learn the iterative feeling of the movement at speed using a much smaller, lighter approach you will be able to “open it up” a bit and use larger movements within the range needed to maintain speed and low fatigue. This is a vastly better approach that I call an in-out approach instead of an out-in approach where we play with large, wild movements and then slowly refine to smaller and smaller. Start small, very small instead and then allow the motion to expand from there. Good luck! You all can do it in a short period of time with this approach!

#134

Im no expert on downpicking but I am pretty happy with the progress ive made the past few months (I can get around 200bpm 8th notes for a few bars worth)

Two guitarists that have helped me tremendously with rhythm focus is John Browne & Olly Steele of the band Monuments. John runs a website called riffhard.com that is solely based on rhythm & downpicking. A friend of mine let me use his login for a few days & I can say the exercises are quite good (from total beginner to absolutely bonkers with the complexity in riffs & time signatures) Both of these guys are absolutely nuts with their downpicking speed.

Ive been trying to mimmick John’s downpicking form & find that the picky anchor has been a huge benefit for me.

I think either of these guys would be an excellent addition for an interview on rhythm & downpicking for CtC.

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#135

I’ve noticed I can do downstrokes quite fast with a pronated arm setup… but I don’t really use a pronated setup for anything else other than descending sweeps, so, I’m trying to get it going with a lightly supinated setup and for some reason, I’m really struggling with that.