Hi everyone, I’m a massive Vai fan (and shred guitar in general), and I’ve been playing for almost 12 years. I’m 100% self-taught and only a couple of years ago my technique developed enough to let me at least try to play some technical songs (including some of Steve’s).
I’m glad to have found a community of guitar nerds, where the advice goes way beyond the typical: “Practice slowly with a metronome until you get fast.” Yeah, right…
I always struggled enormously with guitar, it’s not something that comes naturally for me at all, but I’m obsessive and masochistic enough that I got some results in the end, through endless practice and some intuition.
My biggest intuition was probably probably discovering “chunking” on my own, even though I called it “bursts”. That helped with l/r hand sync. After a first few attempts at developing speed with the metronome, I quickly realized how futile it was, because it’s like walking fast to learn how to run, they’re two very different things. So I just practiced in bursts, playing as fast as possible, starting from 3 notes and adding a note to the lick when I felt comfortable doing so. 95% of whatever technique I have developed over the years came out of this.
But the problem is that I can’t play consistently from one day to another, and this is driving me crazy. For the longest time I wasn’t sure about what I was doing with my hands, and when last year I started analyzing my technique more closely I started finding some of the mistakes I was making.
A big one was about my left hand: I realized that I can be more precise on my frets by moving my elbow down and forward, so that it’s easier to use my fingertips. Sounds obvious, right? It only took me 10 years to realize this, and a month or two of practice to burn it in muscle memory. It was quite uncomfortable at first, but what helped me is to pay attention of the feeling of pulling back on the neck, that means that I’m “hugging the neck” and applying too much pressure, and eventually I got much better in everything, from lead playing to chord changes.
This made me improve almost overnight, but the right hand was not so easy to fix, and that’s why I’m here. The problem is that I don’t really understand what I’m doing wrong, and when I do, I don’t know how to fix it.
By lurking the forum I learned that one of the things I always struggled with, maybe more than everything else, is called string tracking. If I start on the low strings, my hand is out of position on the top strings and feels awkward, and vice versa. I still very much prefer playing descending licks rather than ascending, and all my practice only marginally helped with this. I will make a thread about this soon enough, because I think this topic deserves some in-depth discussion.
Anyway, after watching CTC on youtube, I appreciated the level of study and “engineering” effort that Troy has put while trying to understand how he guitar works, so I came here and bought the pickslanting primer. Now I’m practicing DWPS, and even though it felt weird at first it’s starting to feel more natural and now I totally understand the benefits, and where to use it.
In a few days I’ll probably post a video so you can tell me if I’m on the right track with DWPS or if I need to change something before I waste too much time on an incorrect technique.
Until then, bye everyone, happy shredding and sorry if I wrote too much without realizing.
