Has anyone experienced a fretting hand breakthrough?

Playing Technique
#1

(apologies if this is too similar to an existing topic)

A few weeks ago I suddenly gained the ability to move my fretting hand fingers faster than I ever could. It annoys me that I don’t know what caused it.

My picking hand has always been faster than my fretting, which would lead to desynchronization at high speeds. I used to rely on chromatic warmups and stretches to limber up my fretting hand, but this did not always work, and I could not maintain a high level.
I was noodling around late one night and suddenly my fretting felt fast and less effortful, and I could play licks faster than I ever could before, even without warming up or stretching. At first I thought this was a temporary thing, but even a few weeks later my level has not gone down. I’ve reached a new plateau.
The discussion I’ve seen on this forum suggests that fretting technique isn’t qualitatively different for fast and slow playing, so I was expecting a gradual increase in ability over time, akin to athletic training. Instead I was stuck at a plateau for years, then something “clicked”, and now I can easily play things I couldn’t play at all before.

Has anyone experienced anything similar?

1 Like
#2

I’m still struggling with hand sync at speed so would be interested in replies to this thread. Wish you knew what had clicked for you! I joined CTC a couple of weeks ago and my picking has improved a lot - I’m optimistic the fretting hand and sync will follow but keen to learn from the experience of others…

#3

I certainly haven’t had a breakthrough moment as such, but, what I’ve been doing that is helping my left hand a lot is this;

Say I want to practice my alternate picking starting with speed and I intend to cover all strings with a sequence or scale, around 150-160bpm. I mute the strings with my right hand, turn on the metronome and play it only using the left hand, targeting the right fingers at the right time with the metronome. The reason I mute the strings with my right hand when doing this is to avoid the temptation to play legato! I don’t need to hear these notes at all, just need to be able to land on the right fret at the right time. Sometimes I’ll need to break it down into chunks but it doesn’t take too long before I can the whole sequence.
I’ve found that after this, I can then practice my picking without the left hand car crashing after a few notes.
I’ve no idea if that’s helpful or works for anyone else, but I’d say give it a try. It seems to help my two hand sync overall if I am able to nail the sequence left hand only.

#4

I had a recent breakthrough when I began to concentrate on positioning my 1st or 4th finger (depending on the lick) on the next string before I’d finished on the previous string. I realise that this is probably a basic rule, but it took me a while to make it work. I can now play faster and a lot more fluidly. This has unlocked the cascading feel of EJ and I can now play jazz like flurries of notes without any gaps when changing strings.
Practicing legato has also helped with this (after watching Steve Vais Knapsack (which is unbelievable), as I realised finger strength was also not working for me.