I think it cracked it! Thanks Troy and co

I joined a couple of months ago, but I fractured a finger on my picking hand straight after that so I haven’t been very involved.

Anyway, in the last week I’ve been back to playing full throttle and I’ve made a real breakthrough with my picking. When I joined my rgoal was to be able to play various sextuplet licks comfortably and consistently at 120bpm. I thought this might mean an actual top speed of 130bpm so I have a little margin for error on gigs.

Well, I just posted this video to Instagram of me playing ascending and descending sequences at 140bpm.

For a long time I thought I simply couldn’t generate the raw picking speed, but that’s clearly not the case now. I knew I could play very fast in bursts. My challenge was bridging the chasm between my top speed for a burst and my cruising speed. I came up with a system of gradually increasing the burst length, and I’ll try to codify exactly what I did because I think it could be a useful system for people who are where I was until recently—decent players, but not able to convert that into full-on shred picking.

I still have a little way to go—I want to be able to do it more consistently and for longer (my hands aren’t perfectly synced on the descent in that video either). And for some reason at the moment if I try to connect the descending sequence with the ascending, it falls apart, so I need to work out why and fix that. But essentially, thanks largely to this website, I think I have cracked the code, or at least the parts of it I was personally interested in cracking. Cheers all.

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Great to hear! Also that guitar looks awesome :smiley:

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Thanks Tommo! Just realised I only use one escape motion for all that so it’s not actually the best example to post, but I guess I’ll just have to get better and post more!