How to bring it all together?

[bobbybojo]

Hi team,

Sorry if this has been asked before (happy to be pointed to the correct thread) - but I did some searching beforehand and couldn’t find what I was looking for.

Quite simply, I am wondering how people bring all of these different mechanical options together into a single playing style?

It seems to me that the ultimate goal in being able to play and improvise fluidly is to have a set of tools for changing strings without the pick getting struck between the strings.

So are people closely dissecting each passage they want to play, working out which mechanics are most efficient for that passage, then shedding until it comes together. Rinse and repeat for each new passage and eventually this will build into a natural style where you don’t have to think about how to play something?

Or, are people choosing a system which allows the pick to always be free (for example DWPS with legato when the pick gets stuck, or TWPS, or DWPS or UWPS with swiping, or cross picking etc) and then using that system all the time, forever, so it is drilled in and fluid and allowing you to play whatever you want without thinking?

Just looking for some guidance on if it works better to think of these mechanics as a smorgasboard of options to choose a small subset to stick with, or use everything depending on the situation?

Cheers!

[Troy]

Quite simply, I am wondering how people bring all of these different mechanical options together into a single playing style?

Hi! Good question. This has been discussed before but more in the context of different players and why they do what they do.

Short answer, your mechanics are like a language and you write and improvise within them. So there is a strong influence from the one to the other. Players like Marty Friedman and Yngwie don’t have “every pickstroke escapes” playing styles, so they don’t write those kinds of lines. They just tool around with what they have and come up with cool things. Some combination of stuff they “hear in their head”, as we’ve discussed on here recently, and also feedback from things they play spontaneously by just tooling around on the fretboard, and then develop further creatively.

In other words, they are not like “us”, worrying about why they can’t do a three note per string scale with alternate picking. Relatively few players can do that anyway. I think they discover a few things early on using that natural mechanical learning gift they all have. If it’s enough to write a variety of things, that’s where the technique learning stops. It’s why their techniques are all different, their vocabularies are all different. And so on.

So that’s my recommendation. Learn a few simple things, get really good at them, and start writing lines. If you’re happy, then you’re done. If you find you can’t play enough things you want to play, then maybe you “more” technique. I’d simply caution that you sometimes don’t know how much technique you really need until you actually do get pretty damn good with any one of them.

I always use this example because it’s one of the cooler things I’ve come up with. It’s plain old dwps so it’s not the fancy pure alternate technique we sometimes fuss over. But you’d be very hard pressed to play this, and even to write it, with pure alternate. Sometimes, in order to write a line, you just need to have a certain technique and experiment with it to come up with the really cool stuff: