How do you move from the higher strings to the lower ones?

Technique Critique
#42

Hello, thank you for your response and reassurance haha

Hand sync and timing are turning out to be major issues for me, there’s “hesitation” in my picking hand, tension, inability to sync with metronome, and more.

And I’m trying my best to repeat things in an optimal way, with guidance from you guys, and looking stuff up :sweat_smile:

Here are my recordings, forewarning; the metronome sound is quite loud so please be careful with your volume.

110 bpm - I can play this consistently with no tension, can sync with the metronome, pretty much feels I’ve got it like 90%

130 bpm - a lot of tension, I just play the first note in sync with the metronome then pray to god rest of the notes land on the beat (they never do), missing notes, yada yada, this is just utter garbage

Fastest I can play without metronome - medium amounts of tension, tried my best to play clean

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#43

I think the problem miiiight be my left hand, I’m sort of death gripping the fretboard. Tried to tap the song with just my left hand and I still couldn’t do it at speed, but tried it again with less pressure and there was some speed gain, I guess I should try and work on this.

#44

Hey @Thornus ! Thanks for filming these and sorry for the late reply.

It’s a little difficult to hear what is going on, since you are not plugged into an amp. Do you always practice like this? I’d recommend practicing with the amplified sound too, since this is anyway how the lick is intended to be played. You might find that using a sound that you like helps you enjoy the practice and helps you relax too.

From these examples I am thinking that the metronome is not helping you at this stage of development. It’s almost a distraction / additional stress factor!

I would experiment a bit more with playing fast without a metronome, allowing the tempo to fluctuate a little until you you feel comfortable with the lick. When you feel like you can do it reasonably fast and smooth, you could then try to nail the timing to a click

At the same time, I would also suggest to practice a more stripped-down version of this lick, for example you could loop something like a bunch of maj 7 arpeggios on 2 strings:

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The basic mechanics are the same, but we removed some of the challenges like the string skips and the little variations.

1 Like
#45

Ahh please don’t apologise, I understand you must’ve been busy, and I’m always grateful for your advice no matter what time it comes at.

Yeah I mostly practice without an amp because my amp is trash, not a lot of options with sound and its malfunctioning a bit :’) but I will try and use it more often because you’re right, playing unplugged is contributing to my stress. By the end of this month I’ll get an audio interface + a nerualDSP plugin so life will be good again.

And yes, the metronome is doing nothing but making me want to cry, I tried practising without it + isolated the shapes that I was having trouble with (which was pepepicks’ advice) and that made me jump from 110 to 120 on the metronome.

I have a question though, part of the reason metronome is being hard is because I have to divide the song into a 4-4-4-4 chunk, but my natural tendency is to hear and play it like 6-10, is there some way I can tweak my metronome to fit in line with that? Or should I just divide it into 4-4-4-4 when I play with a metronome?

And thank you so much for the alternate version of the lick! I’ll play the hell out of it.