Dear Troy and CTC Team, dear forum members!
The purpose of the following really is more an attempt to connect, other than saying hello, and thank you for your amazing work over the years. I’m writing because I had an epiphany of sorts a few days ago, watching Troy’s recent pickslanting primer YouTube upload. It’s the one where Troy talks about a fairly fast picking speed being natural to most human beings. I went to my guitar, trying to replicate what he did and “sure enough” was able to. Then I went to a technique book to try and apply it to some phrases. The exercises on the page called for upward pick slanting, so that’s what I went for. It took some adaptation, because one spot requires a sweep across two strings, and I had to figure how to do it, but it worked.
Even though it’s still very early to tell, I can feel picking should never be a problem again.
Let me say a word about my guitar situation. I’ve been a subscriber for a long time, but didn’t focus on picking excellence until now. First I have limited practice time - but see it as blessing now because it forces you to focus on what works. Second my area of focus has been rythm guitar and strumming. My epiphany about that came a few months ago through videos of Andy Wood and to a lesser extent Molly Tuttle. I have a very clear idea now about what I need to do. The style that motivates me most to play is jazz guitar. But I’m no jazz snob. I’ll take good rock’n’roll over boring, overdone, disconnected jazz any day. Good rhythm jazz guitar is rare. I don’t really like the finger-plucked timid, thin-sounding comping many guys do. I am fortunate to have had a guitar teacher who could comp with a pick and the pulse and swing he got that way would literally thump you in the chest and make your feet want to dance. I don’t know where he is now. Cracking his code turned almost into an obsession, and I’m not there yet. All of the above explains my slow rate of progress re single notes picking - but I like everything I learn to be solid and proceed in order! So now that the rhythm is starting to fall into place, of course I want to throw in melodies, arpeggios and single notes stuff.
I’m grateful to Troy from, very early on, drawing clear parallels between picking technique and any sports technique. I used to play tennis quite a lot and made a lot of progress in my early thirties - an age where many so-called pros say you can’t learn anything new, like a new backhand technique - after meeting a teacher who, like Troy, had the ability to analyze technique in minute detail. I kept a handbook of all the tips and fundamentals and by rehashing them constantly as I played, making sure everything was right at all times, eventually my game sort of took off in speed, power and coordination. One day playing rallies with a friend, for the first time in my life I reached the famed zone, where you literally can’t make a mistake and everything just flows*. That’s* the power of technique, and makes a good case for the primacy of technique. Daniel Coyle wrote a great book on world-class coaches and training methods that everybody should check out. Troy is right on the money! Of course, for music learning, other things will enter the picture like ear training. But, as Wynton Marsalis put it, technique is like a guardian, if you don’t have technique the guardian says “no, not you, you can’t enter”. Well, that’s how I feel about it anyway.