Hi Im Niles From lebanon, nice to be in such a lovely new positive environment for guitar.
im currently on my 5-ish year of playing guitar. its been a weird and fun journey at the same time.However its been a rocky road. for the past 3 years its been on my own, and before that an on and off with lots of teachers some were nice, some were really snobby but they never really taught me stuff to fix my technique, mainly just economy picking or lower your thumb. I was too shy of a kid to tell them what I wanted to learn so I never fully felt I benefited from them.
I started playing at 13 for fun. started with an acoustic, then moved on to electric guitar, I got into punk and 2000’s bands.i felt like the fun of power chords. however one thing I have a bad habit of is I I used to avoid challenges in songs I didn’t get the riff right away especially solos and fills were a no, I was too scared to fail. looking back I could easily do them now especially the simpler solos. I wish I wasn’t scared as a kid to fail, and I feel that kinda made the image of shred guitar more intimidating.
What reignited wanting to play seriously was when I decided to pick it up at 16 as i listened to Van Halen, Whitesnake and Ratt and loads of other bands from the 80’s, I fell in love with guitar again. the pure melodicness and amazing tasty pentatonic licks awakened something in me
As far as my music taste goes Video game music awakened me to play guitar mainly its still my biggest first influence.I mainly enjoy Glam metal, Melo-Death metal ,Visual Kei, Punk, 70’s bands. and whatever genre you categorize Prince as haha
Also, My fav Ozzy guitar player has to be Jake E.Lee!
I honestly am so excited to learn here. I want to be greedy with learning everything, I mainly enjoy fast alternative picking licks, something Paul Gilbert, John sykes and Neal schon esque. pentatonic licks, tapping, sweeps, fast legatos and pull offs. any little tricks during my learning process id love to share and vice versa.
Skill wise I could pull solos like off living on a prayer, easy solos even the one that small fast licks I could kinda grasp but even then I felt the stumbles of the pick rather then a smooth motion, I. felt if I keep repeating that wrong picking technique eventually it will be correct. I started with shred licks around that time I could sometimes get it but I could never get the speed I wanted, typical play from slow till fast stuff.
however I did "noodle around’ rather then practice sometimes and some stuff I thought I couldn’t do would come up effortlessly like an actual BREAKTHROUGH then back to the stumbly picking technique. I wanna say I spent a little bit on technique, an old teacher advised economy picking and I’ve always blamed this speed problem on my fretting hand rather then picking.
during lockdown like Alot of people I struggled mentally, so I stopped playing for a few months , but then I decided to pick it up again last October I missed playing my songs, above or on my level I wanted to play them . I had no one to discourage me, all I needed was to trust myself and put in the effort, and now Im trying to apply to a music university in England. so it. motivated me more to get even better and led me to buying the Pickslanting primer
ive watched everything up to the second motion test( the one where you try chromatic and pentatonic scales to see which feel smoother) and I also tried the first video of the downward pick slanting.i still don’t know if Upward or downward pick slanting is my most comfortable.
I can play a scale comfortably at average speeds but nothing fast will end up cleanly. honestly speed, cleanliness and licks that use all the strings are especially a struggle for going fast on licks that are pentatonic like and shred ones they feel like the slow motion jump from a cliff to cliff like in movies tiring and no control.