Hello everyone! My name is Mylo and I’ve been playing guitar for about 11 years (Since I was 10), with about 6 of those being professional. I’m interested in a wide variety of genres, but my playing is mainly oriented on funk and rock. My main reason for coming here is that I’ve been working on my picking for about two years (until then I was mainly a legato player), and I’m still struggling to figure out how to maintain consistency; some days I hit each note with very equal volume, other days I get bound up in the strings horribly and cannot achieve string crossings. I can comfortably play minor pentatonic at about 150 bpm, and above 160 I’m pushing it, though I rarely (if ever) simply run straight through a scale without emphasizing melodic notes or utilizing patterns that make it more musical. I might be able to pull off higher speeds with Dorian, but bounding straight through scales isn’t something I’ve spent a lot of time on - moreso trying to figure out melodic patterns that players I like find improvising within the scale.
I started with a teacher, but he was mainly a songwriter and didn’t focus so much on technique and theory as he did on melody and showmanship. From there, I simply studied players on youtube. I spent about 5 years obsessing over Hendrix, and once I felt like I had that kind of feel down, I got into John Frusciante. I mainly fell into his particular style of rhythm and expression… And his enormous pedalboard. Beyond that, I found Eric Johnson and the '88 ACL performance of Cliffs Of Dover, and that is what solidified me needing to learn proper picking. Jeff Beck has been a huge influence lately, and I’ve been trying to blend his whammy bar technique with Eric Johnson’s picking.
I’ve watched practically every lesson I can find on youtube for Cracking The Code, but I’m very limited in
my interpretation of the material simply because I have no clue what my specific technique is. I don’t recognize it from the videos.
Either way, I hope to get a decent POV video up soon to see if anyone can tell me what technique I’m using, what I’m doing wrong, or anything else from observations made that could help me achieve greater consistency.
