I really enjoy the work Troy has done to help the guitar community. There is a certain satisfaction derived, however, from figuring out how to do a technique without any help from anyone because it’s all dependent on your feel, your critical thinking ability, and your ability to think of creative solutions to problems.
In my first two and a half years of playing, I had a teacher who taught me some theory, the scales, the importance of alternate picking, muting, pinch harmonics, vibrato, etc. A typical lesson would be me telling him what song (including the solo) I wanted to learn next. I would give him the tape, and he’d start learning it and writing down the tablature right there. Then he’d take the tape home and the next week I’d have the complete tablature to the song. That was $15 a half hour in 1984 which is roughly equal to $45 a half hour today but of course he spent considerable time at home finishing these transcriptions.
One day I wanted to learn “Locked In” off Judas Priest’s Turbo album. Lousy song but a very cool solo, especially for the time. There was a section that was one note per string picking over 4 strings - from the d string all the way up to the high E string. I had never heard of sweep picking and I don’t know if he had or not but if he had, he didn’t mention it. So I learned how to pick it with strictly alternate picking!
From then on whenever I saw an arpeggio in a tablature book or in Guitar For The Practicing Musician magazine, even if it was supposed to be swept I had no idea of that technique, so I just assumed that these guitar players were alternate picking the arpeggios they swept!
Of course that made me think it was normal to be able to alternate one note per string lines incredibly fast and I have to say that while I didn’t do it quite as fast as a sweep, I did learn to alternate pick these types of things extremely fast. Because I thought it was normal to be able to pick arpeggios incredibly fast with alternate picking, I refused to allow myself to give up and say “I just can’t do these arpeggios fast,” So I learned to play them up to speed or damn close no matter how hard I had to work at it!
The cross picking section (for me) begins around 2:46 into the song.
