How would YOU play this Andy Timmons lick?

Playing Technique
#1

Hi fellow coders!

I am trying to learn how to play this lick played by Andy Timmons in the studio version of A Night To Remember. I really love how the lick builds the tension towards the bent pinch harmonic:

image

I think it sounds really cool when played fast and with proper technique, the way Andy Does it.

How would you guys play it? I think the speed in the original song is somewhere close to 120 bpm. Could be faster, but not by much. But I think it’s fairly fast for this kind of licks.

Here is my very embarrassing attempt to play it. (I am not focusing on the pinch harmonic at the moment)

Inside picking:

Outside picking:

Both feel very difficult and I don’t really know which one I should focus on…

Looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers \m/

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Elpii technique critique
#2

I would try upward pickslanting and beginning with an upstroke, swiping whenever you need to play one note on a string followed by a move to a lower string. Good luck!

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#3

I would play it more horizontally

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#4

Ah, that bad boy. It’s an old exercise for working on finger-rolls. I do it with downward pickslanting starting with an upstroke and swipe when moving to a higher string. When playing it I picture it as a repeating two string pattern with one note played on each string. After the first note it’s downstroke on the low string, upstroke on the higher string. Then repeat it moving up the scale.

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#5

A lot of re-fingering options for one way slanting, adding slurs creates a lot of possibilities as well, but to pick every note in the current fingering I agree with @Ian that swiping solves a lot of issues here. I could probably tool around and find a lot of possibilities, but from a first glance i see DWPS starting an upstroke and it seems basically like an upstroke then a downstroke+swipe and that actually just repeats

up
down with swipe
up
down with swipe
up

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#6

Like others have said- Swiping is probably the easiest way to do this.

For UWPS- UD SwipeD. Then it just repeats
For DWPS- USwipe U Swipe (every downstroke is swiped).

An alternative would be to do Hybrid Picking and Economy with DWPS.
This would make it DU m DDU m. Where the DDU m repeats.

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#7

I find finger rolling really hard for this lick for some reason! It makes it sound super messy when I play it.

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#8

Yeah I think the rolling and the swiping together would be tough. I’d do one finger per note if swiping. If economy or crosspicking the rolling wouldn’t be so bad on some, but it also just depends on how good your rolling is in general.

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#9

I should probably work on my swiping, because I’m inclined to use hybrid picking for things like that where you have one note on a higher string because I find it exhausting to have to change back and forth between pick slants that quickly.

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#10

I think all this stuff is about combining considerations of the timbre you want and what is easiest for your technique.

Like…I could re-finger this with legato and tapping and get it to warp speed but it wouldn’t probably have much of the character of how Timmons plays it. I could crosspick it (my weakest technique) and the tone, time, and dynamics would be really dialed in but I wouldn’t be able to do it very fast at all.

I could refinger a few notes to avoid even the swiping and get some stretches going, probably would be a lot faster but maybe lose some clarity because my left hand couldn’t handle it as well…

lot of options!

my recommendation (if one is asking…) is to start with what you think has the best tone/timbre and then make adjustments from there to suit your technique and see if there’s a compromise.

Or…just get great at crosspicking (I still don’t get how hahaha) and then nothing is a problem ever again

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#11

I’m probably being anal, but you guys keep saying “swiping”. I’m pretty sure you mean “sweeping”.
They are different in the CtC terminology.

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#12

:smile: right?

Great discussion. Thanks everybody. I am glad I brought a challenging one to the table!

I think Andy is definitely picking every note in the record. That is why it sounds so bad ass in my opinion.

It is really hard to find a live version where Andy plays that part. His live versions are all different from each other. Though, equally beautiful.

I found this version where he actually (kind of) plays that part [@4:12]:

It looks like he is shifting positions. So as many of you suggested, rearranging the fingering is an option. But then if the pick slanting challenge is solved, the new challenge is to prevent the slide from being heard. Otherwise the lick will loose its aggressiveness again.

Thanks for all the proposals and thanks @aliendough for sharing your video so quickly!

Looking forward to more!

Cheers! \m/

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#13

Hey @Gtrjunior - I very much mean swiping!

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#14

FRETTING: I would just bar it on the 5th, and do the pinky finger-roll in the beginning. (I bar pretty much everything nowadays).

PICKING: plain old alternate picking. I don’t think you even need to swipe or cross-picking here. (maybe Im missing something here, it is kinda late)

The 2 note-per-string rotation always alternates between the two strings in the same direction (either inside or outside). That makes it more ‘pickable’

Where it gets tricky is when it switches from outside to inside, etc. (ie rotating 3s on a 3 note-per-string scale.) That’s where I would swipe the hell out of it in the past. Its a really great exercise, and a good example of the limitations of 2wps.

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#15

I’m a primary down 2WPS, so it would be atrict alternate picking. The main issue for me is the upward (in pitch) finger roll on the 8th fret with pinky. I feels super awkward. So I would change the fingering to get rid of that. As I appear to be a primary down pickslanter, I have used the open a steing to start the run because a) the chunky open string sounds cool, but b), it eliminates a pickslant change for the second note (if I were to star on the 5th fret E string. So all in all I end up with the below first half of the lick. I then shift up to play the second half as written in the opening post. The “*” denotes the switch to UWPS orientation for that note.

Edit*** my attempt to type a tab failed epic style , what is the best way to post a tab?

#16

Easiest solution for me would be swybrid picking, i.e., d u m d d u m d d u m etc.

#17

(edit - bad link the first time)

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#18

Hey Tom. Can post some videos of your swybrid picking? Would love to see it in action.

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#19

+1 on a vid. I’m also interested.

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#20

I would play it straight alternate picking starting on a down stroke. Swiping the changes to a higher string and TWPS for the changes to a lower string. I would play two consecutive downstrokes for the last note to get the pinch harmonic.

I would refinger it like A. ALternatively, to avoid the double down stroke I would re finger the last few notes and slide D to F as in example B

Andy%201
Andy 1.jpg1774×1196 187 KB

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