Is fast playing not for everyone?

Technique Critique
#1

Hello Community!! I need help… I have been playing guitar for 30yrs. I took 10yrs of private lessons (mostly Theory) and Played professional for another 10yrs. I am a huge fan of shred guitar playing but cant seem to play fast lines. I bought the Pick Slanting Primer last year (didnt help). I practice my alternate picking religiously but am not making any progress. I have tried every online “teacher” from Tom Hess to taking Skype Lessons from a few of the JTC artists. All keep saying the same thing, “just keep practicing”. Its been over 3 yrs that I’ve been serious about progressing my picking and i have seen minimal results. Is it possible that not everyone is able to play fast? Not everyone is able to play 16th notes at 150 BPM?
My sweeping is just as bogus as my alternate picking. I have a reverse slant on my pick and I plant my pinky on the body… I thought these were the causes. Then I noticed John Petrucci is a planter… so that not the issue. Then I see Marty Friedman… so my pick angle isnt the issue. Ive come to the assumption that my hand synch is way off.

So my question is… Has anyone else had these issues and overcome them?? If so, How did you break out of this jail??

I will post a video last this week.

Please stay safe.

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#2

I’m kind of in the same boat. I’m fast enough to wow my friends that aren’t guitarists but not that fast enough to play Uli or Vai or stuff like that. Hell, not even EVH or slow sweep picking.

At some point, I just accepted it and tried to be the best I can be at how I sound.

I LOVE the Marty Friedman interview on this site. Best take away on ANY of the interviews — at the end of the day, you gotta make music, not just play fast notes AND ------ you’re only going to play what you CAN play the way YOU play it.

Finding the way YOU play it is hard. Even Marty says in that interview that he creates stuff he can’t play and has to hire others! WOW! Validating.

Downward pickslanting is about the most uncomfortable thing for me. So I rarely do it.

I love shredders but I’m not one. I hope that’s somewhat helpful.

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#3

Seems you haven’t found the right teacher yet. I also had multiple teachers, but only one managed to make me a faster (and more wellrounded) player. You could try Teemu Maantysari. He’s the best “shred” type teacher. My teacher is the best of the best at EJ stuff. Good luck :+1:t3:

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#4

That’s a very good idea! Perhaps there is something you have overlooked that can be seen on video!

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#5

Looking forward to that video @robpags! Hope we can help.

In the meantime, here are our canonical recommendations about speed:

Shawn Lane Q&A about speed (go fast and sloppy!)

Another note: try to do a “door knocking” movement on a table, tapping 8th notes, and see how fast you can push the metronome. Now imagine that for each “knock” you can in principle do 2 pickstrokes.
This will probably show you that your hand can pick fast, and you just need to figure out how!

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#6

Hey! Hello from fellow slowhand! )

I may add one more advise. From my experience I may say that pure technical-exercises-based practice is not for everyone. I tried to do it as many others (metronome, exercise, minutes and minutes of repeating…) It’s boring and it doesn’t work for me well. So I focused on playing tunes I like without thinking much about technique per se. More like “try to play it more or less clean, and have fun”.

After some dethmetal stuff I get fast tremolo. Playing some classical tunes helped me with hands sincronization etc

I know that it doesn’t work for everyone, but choosing some challenging pieces could improve your speed. The main point here is nor to choose too challenging song )

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#7

The Tornado of Souls example you posted is awesome. Your DSX motion looks perfect. I don’t buy In the slightest that you’re not “fast” enough to play awesome stuff. Fast in what way? Smoothness? Accuracy? Because I’m seeing all of that in your clip. As @tommo points out, get some all-DSX phrases to work on and go to town!

The danger with threads like this is that without video it’s easy to read every response as confirmation of the challenges you yourself are having. But you really have to look at concrete examples. Because again just because someone says they can’t “play fast” doesn’t really tell you what they mean by that, what specifically they are having trouble with, or if they’re even really having trouble at all.

@robpags please post an example of something you’re having trouble with and we’d be happy to take a look.

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#8

I was able to do it (after 30+ years of ‘jail’ - lol) by finding my tremolo technique (in my case - months of short tremolo bursts with attempts to double and triple those bursts…then…click). I also posted a video here in technique critique and was able to focus where I was going based on feedback.

I’ll put it out there - if I could do it, anyone can. I’ve played professionally in many, many capacities but could never pick fast so I would compensate and get by - but it still bothered me. It does often take a little help from community and this is the perfect one to diagnose this stuff.

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#9

Hi robpags

It’s a cliche but - you are only competing against yourself. So the question is can you robpags get faster with your picking than you are today?

Looking forward to seeing your video if you can post it!

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#10

Thanks tommo. I have seen every cracking the code video many times over, as well as practicing exercises by good ole Uncle Ben Eller. I did the knocking test today via a tap temp app and it came out to be around 190bpm with 8th notes. I’ll post a video tonight.

Just to clear my goals up a little, I’m not looking to break land speed records but I am looking to be capable of playing licks within songs without having to dumb them down due to my lack of ability. Aka… the fast run at the end of the solo in Here I Go Again by whitesnake.

1 Like
#11

Thanks, @Troy! I have to say that I’ve made vast improvements in speed and accuracy in the last 2 months of working on the principles on this site!

#12

@tommo Playing groups of 6s with alternate picking at 131 BPM… its on my edge of breakup. I hope you can see the picking better than i can.

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#13

That’s one challenging metronome noise :slightly_smiling_face:

Also your picking is better than mine :+1:

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#14

This sounds pretty good already, particularly the left/right hand sync!

The picking hand just about makes it into the camera shot - so it’s not super easy to see what is going on :slight_smile:

But I can make a guess: are you trying to control / micromanage the individual pickstrokes? That is something you have to give up when picking fast - typically one controls only the accents (most typically one accent every 3, 4 or 6 pickstrokes). You definitely have the potential to pick faster than this based on your 190bpm knocking!

Would it be possible for you to film another video with clearer visuals of the picking hand? (I’m attaching some useful suggestions / guidelines below)

You could play this very same example, and perhaps a fast tremolo on one string.

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#15

I’m not looking to play fast (I know, I know, why am I here?), but I think that Troy’s video is absolute gold. It is one of those things that you need to watch several times and slow yourself down (again, I see the irony) to really absorb. On its face it seems backward. Start fast, but don’t use a metronome. Play sloppy until you play the right technique. Etc.

Said like that, it’s WTF? But if you really hear what he is saying it is really powerful stuff. As I understand him, he is saying:

  1. Think of this at first as a physical thing, not a musical thing. Get in position, hold your pick, and simply try going at it at speed. It is physically something anyone can do. This is not something reserved to the physical abilities of savants. You just have to get your brain used to the motion.

  2. We learn complex movements by subconsciously changing up how we are doing it every few seconds until the brain settles in on what works. That means that you may get it “right” and then stop getting it “right” because your brain is still experimenting. Therefore, don’t worry about it. Just keep going at it and it will smooth out as your brain narrows in on what works. Again, don’t think of this as a musical thing, it is just a physical move.

  3. It is not about “speed” per se, it is really about learning a particular repetitive movement that happens to be at about the speed we knock on a surface. Learn that movement on a guitar by just doing it. You don’t practice knocking by first knocking slowly.

  4. The goal is to get the movement in the right hand absolutely smooth and automatic. Then we can start worrying about getting it to sync with the left hand and to figure out string changes.

At least that is what I got out of it, and it was contrary to just about what ever other music teacher is teaching their kids. We obsess about getting students to hear “tone” and to start slowly and carefully. No one I know looks at it like we were teaching a bat swing or topspin on a tennis racket. Could you imagine someone saying, “I can’t hit a forehand shot in tennis because I can’t swing the racket fast.”

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#16

This a is a really crucial point. Even though we use door knocking/tapping fast as the classic example, scribbling with a pen/pencil/crayon is another classic movement of this type. And one of the keys in these movements is that you aren’t really thinking of each “stroke” as a discrete motion, they just emerge from the “wiggle back and forth” intention. Give a 10-year-old a colored pencil, paper with a 1x1 inch outline of a square and tell them: “color this box in as fast as you can, it’s ok if you go outside the lines”. Most of them probably “color” close to Yngwie speeds.

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#17

I’m really curious if interviewed what guys like Meola and McLaughlin and the so called “first generation” of crazy fast pick players would say with regards to how they learned to play that fast. It’s an interview question I rarely see asked.

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#18

My experience/insight may or may not be applicable to you, but I’ve found the content here to have helped the most in me increasing my speed, and it’s not directly about changing my pick slant at all. I only figured out I’m an UWPS with a downward escape when I started consuming Troy’s videos. I tried DWPS but it was awkward; but what really helped was knowing about chunking, and being able to rearrange the finger positions to accommodate how I hold the pick.

Chunking lets me remember easily that, for example, there’s 6 notes in this string, and another 6 on another, and so on, so I practiced being able to execute those 6 notes at speed first, then the next. Essentially training my picking hand to be able to do 6 notes without needing to think about it, which is I think the key – I couldn’t concentrate on keeping both hands synchronized at those speeds, but the muscle memory of how 6 notes “felt”, and just focusing on the first and last notes as they relate to the beat, helped. Once I had each 6 note grouping down, I started working on the transitions, and soon enough it all just fell into place. I’m not at a level I want to be at yet, but the gains have been massive for me, so I hope my perspective helps!

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#19

@jorgec thanks for the advice. Chunking does help me when the patterns repeat on the downbeat… my issue is when I have throw in a linear run or a non repeating fast phrase. I flop all over the place. Like that fast lick before the chorus of Dream Theaters PULL ME UNDER. I sound like a giraffe on roller skates

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#20

Funny you should mention Pull Me Under; that and Another Day were my litmus tests; I wasn’t able to do them before I started chunking and really analyzing how I was picking at these tempos.

Is it this lick from Pull Me Under?

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I used to think I was doing a downward sweep from the D string to the G string at the end of that initial 5 note run, but after paying really close attention is when I noticed my UWPS; I was actually stumbling on the next transitions with even notes (B string to high E string) because my pick was stuck at the end of the runs for those strings. I had to target that motion and practice it repeatedly, at speed, getting it into muscle memory. I think that’s what helped me the most, just focusing in on the problem chunks.

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