@JakeEstner obviously I’m not a smart man.
DUD / D U / D U / D U / D U / DUD / D U / D U / D U / DUD / D U / D U repeat
I like it because it’s easy to count: after each DUD just count out 4 iterations of D U for the first cycle, then 3 for the next and 2 for the last, repeat.
@Pepepicks66, Clearly not, but you play guitar very well, and that’s more important! This sounds great to me, I’ll have to give this orientation a try. I get the logic of it - keep the beat<—>stroke orientation more familiar and just accept the occasional double-down like I was saying.
It’s totally fine, I know you mean no ill-will. It’s the Internet and things get lost in translation.
@guitarenthusiast Great! I’ve been a little lazy in my ‘editing’ on these things too, so I’ll note to maybe double check my wording in the future before hitting the send/reply button.
True, this goes back to your joke earlier about playing with your nose. But we all know what the conventional wisdom is around here for utilizing motions that have a low speed cap.
Yes - but there are always competing factors, and we don’t want to let one variable take up more ‘space’ than it should. Here’s, imo, a great example: Say you have some scale run that could be played on a single string but would require some intense left hand stretches, or some maneuvers that are pretty awkward. Otherwise, splitting the figure on to a few strings results in some 1 note-per-string stuff back and forth between a few strings. For discussion purposes, assume/agree each note must be picked in this scenario. From a certain perspective, the one string version has a higher speed cap for most, because most people have a much easier time buzz-sawing one string than doing some sort of double escape or swiping or something back and forth between two strings. In a certain sense it’s a no brainer, but really it comes down to just how difficult the left hand movements are, and the player’s left hand facility.
Sometimes that kind of thing is unknown. That specific example, I personally come across it often, because I, personally, have some very blunt picking weaknesses vs strengths, so there are sometimes things I know are a piece of cake for the right hand if I rearrange the notes…and my left is pretty good…but often it’s like, how long is it actually going to take me to be able to get lefty to do this?
Trying not to tangent here, because I do think this is relevant: mechanical efficiency and the concept of speed caps always have to factor in many variables, some of which are dependent on the individual. It’s tempting to get attached to certain principles of efficiency while ignoring other ones - especially, imo if the other ones are less tangible, more based on the individual, less quantifiable, etc. Anecdotally, in teaching I come across this a lot, where there’s a ‘better’ way to do something, but let the student do the ‘less good’ way because in the end the effort and time they’d have to put in to change their way wouldn’t be worth the extra 15% efficiency or what not.
This isn’t really a direct disagreement with anything you’re saying, just emphasizing how complicated things can get when trying to determine a best way to do something.
If you put a gun to my head and asked me how many people I actually think can sustain downpicking at 230BPM 8th notes on this forum for an appreciable amount of time (multiple measures) with a professional level of control and dynamic conviction, I’d say I’d need one hand to count them.
Understood. I assumed it would be difficult, but not aware of how rare or not rare the ability is.
This is all well-taken. Thank you for bending my ear to the idea of how certain rhythmic patterns can be utilized as tools to teach students who might not be able to perform at a high tempo or even care enough to. I did appreciate this exchange. I am not a teacher in a strict sense of the word so the change in perspective was interesting.
Great. Yes, stroke direction and rhythm (as well as accents) are very much intertwined in my experience and opinion, even if ideally we train ourselves to be able to get the same accents, rhythm, and tone from our downstroke and our upstroke. And I think it’s common in a lot of genres to maintain strict downstroke on downbeat and upstroke on upbeat for lots of rhythm figures and even lead.
And tempos are all relative I guess. We saw @Pepepicks66 do, what sounds to me, like a pretty great take of the figure at tempo, with some consecutive downstrokes. I’m sure, like anything, there’s some max tempo where that approach falls apart, but clearly 115 is not only possible, but if we have a forum member that was able to crank it out with what I’d assume was not a ton of practice time (As the thread hasn’t been up that long) then it’s probably not a very uncommon ability.
Anyways, all in all this is an esoteric rhythm that you just won’t see in most metal. Is it worth learning? I don’t know. That’s up to whoever reads this post.
I didn’t really have metal in mind, just thought the rhythm was cool! There are probably some stringed instruments from non-western cultures that might commonly play rhythms somewhat like this, but that also gets pretty out of my area of expertise…maybe i’ll ask around…some Oud stuff, or Balkan, Greek…dunno…
Re the Shawn Lane/Despacito/Nut-Punching/Magnet-Face example, I think desired tempo is a huge factor here. And this relates to my points above.
Say that doing this Tenet bit at 115 might require a little discomfort squeezing in those double downs, but then in X amount of time learning it and practicing it, Johnny Guitar can perform it comfortably. But maybe Johnny’s approach doesn’t get him to 135, but it’s fine, because the song is not at that tempo. Say hypothetically Johnny COULD relearn it and practice it with the purely alternating “option A” version, with some work on the new rhythmic orientation, but it takes 3 times as much time to get up to the 115 as it did before. And in the meantime, the biggest stumbling block is that it sounds pretty crappy because when there’s failure, the failure is in keeping the time steady. And then blasting up to 135 becomes possible, but it’ll take another 3 multiples of X to get there.
In this hypothetical, is the second approach in the paragraph above more efficient? For getting to 135, yes, because it’s not possible with the first, or maybe it would take years, etc. For getting to 115, it’s many multiples less efficient. Obviously these are very very hypothetical figures - again I don’t see ‘option A’ as being all that difficult, but just commenting on rhythmic comfort of stroke choices vs mechanical efficiency. And more broadly, commenting on other roadblocks or challenging elements/variables besides pure-speed mechanical efficiency.
This is actually a little less hypothetical when I consider a real world example…there’s a certain shred guitar teacher that’s been online for a while that shares a lot of videos of his students, slash/he has many students that post videos of themselves playing. Often, these players are playing really impressive (to me) speeds in terms of notes per second. however there’s a consistency I’ve noticed which is that they almost all have horrible, awful, terrible, no good very bad time feel and sense of rhythm. Their pants are pocket-less. It’s very very very rare that I’ll ‘diss’ any other players, even when I’m not naming them, but the lack of groove is so obvious that I feel comfortable expressing the judgement. (I have plenty of my own playing posted online and easy to find, plenty of warts and imperfections all around, so I’m not excusing myself from critique either, especially on time and rhythm, but I feel comfortable enough with time and rhythm to be able to make these judgement calls)
It seems to me they are instructed in ways that optimize the ‘pure speed’ aspects of picking and scale playing, but either the methods themselves are suboptimal for time keeping, or the instructional program does not devote nearly enough time and attention to rhythm (or of course, it’s possibly coincidental that these players have this similar fault.)
So this could be, potentially, an example of optimizing mechanical efficiency while sacrificing other variables, to the point that the speeds are beyond what is usually useful and practical for most guitar playing yet the rhythm and time components are…well…I won’t be more of an ass then I’ve already been. There are so many unknowns in this anecdotal example/analysis, but it’s thought provoking to me and brings up the Q, similar to my last post: is it easier to learn to tighten up rhythm and time keeping elements on an ‘speed-optimal’ method, or is it easier and more practical to work on speed building with a ‘not-speed-optimal’ method that is much more conducive to time keeping rhythmic control?
As stated…it depends. On 1,933,345 variables, to be precise. From my view, very few absolutes with music because there are just always too many variables.
