I’ve seen Jason do this head shake before, like a cartoon style, twisting the head very fast. Like a shudder. That jolting feeling is, now I really am talking out my ass here… Ok…
An increased excitability in your motor neurons.
Most people get it in their lip. When focusing on high dexterity tasks.
Jason goes full head shudder.
If you don’t think Jason’s fast lines are based on patterns which he worked on over several years, you’re wrong. His fast lines are sequenced scale fragments blended with swept argpeggio shapes.
You’re shifting the goalposts. You specifically said that Jason and Shawn had unnatural hand speed, and now you’re implying that hand speed only counts if it’s in a full song.
I had several full “shred” tunes under my fingers as a teenager. Pieces by Racer X (including Scarified and Technical Difficulties), Steve Morse (including Tumeni Notes) and others. I just practiced them like a violin or piano student practices their standard repertoire. I never learned any Cacophony tunes in full. I spent some time practicing lines from the Speed Metal Symphony record when I was about 16, but I re-fingered a lot of the swept patterns into Paul Gilbert style string-skipping patterns.
I stopped working practicing the small repertoire I’d built for myself after a while, instead using my practice time to work on other things.
Nope, only different in your mind.
I said patterns, not exercises. A pattern is a sequence with a regular, repeating form or design. Jason’s fast playing was full of patterns, as was Shawn’s.
Jason wasn’t playing unusually difficult lines when he played his fastest. He was blending sequenced scale patterns with sweeping patterns. He did it well and the vocabulary of basic units which he blended was expansive enough that he could keep it interesting and enjoyable to listen to. The individual units themselves are all idiomatic to the guitar and well suited to being played quickly.
There are a few composed passages Jason recorded which didn’t quite fit his mechanical vocabulary, and which he had to practice regularly to maintain. I’ve seen interview footage with him where he said that he wrote material, worked on it for the studio and then couldn’t play it later.
Shawn wasn’t much for sweeping, his vocabulary consisted primarily of sequenced scale patterns and an expansive array of digital patterns based on efficient repeating fretting sequences. I’ve discussed this aspect of Shawn’s vocabulary at length in other threads. The basic units of Shawn’s fast vocabulary are also all well suited to being played quickly.
Sure, many patterns need to be practiced individually. It’s important to develop a mechanical vocabulary of different co-ordinations.
However, many physical co-ordinations are common to different musical passages. Sometimes the the commonalities are obvious, and sometimes not. These co-ordinations still reinforce each other through those commonalities.
I wrote an entire article here on something I called Efficient Digital Cycles, where I shared a discovery I had about the fretting sequences in Shawn Lane’s playing.
It’s clear you’ve a great admiration for Jason’s playing. That’s totally understandable, he was an awesome player who developed a distinctive style and impressive technique at a very young age.
I think that kind of admiration can tend to blind us a little, and actually be detrimental to our own development as players.
We are so impressed by a player’s style and technique that we elevate them to a special status. We say that they’re different, that they’re outliers, freaks even. We’re inspired at first, so we try to emulate their playing, but our initial attempts fail. It’s frustrating, deeply upsetting even. Soon we console ourselves. That player is special, an outlier. We convince ourselves that our limits are below theirs, and that what they achieved is beyond us. We’re just normal. It’s just a fact of life we tell ourselves. We’re not one of the special people. We stop trying, why try when you now know you won’t achieve what they could?
I’ve done it. I believed that Shawn Lane was some kind of genetic anomaly, and that I’d never have that kind of speed. I’ve told myself that my hands we’re just too small or too inflexible to play Allan Holdsworth’s lines. I’ve told myself that I’m not one of the special people. It’s an excuse. They’re all excuses.
Sometimes things will come quickly to us, sometimes they won’t. Sometimes we’ll make rapid progress and sometimes we’ll plateau and stagnate.
Inevitably, trying will result in failure. It’s deeply upsetting, deeply frustrating. If we believe that we should be capable, but we continue to fail, we can become angry with ourselves for our failures.
But, when we stop trying, we deny ourselves any chance of further development. We close that door for ourselves.
I burned myself out with those negative feelings when I was younger. For a while I hated the electric guitar and I got no enjoyment from it whatsoever. So I spent a few years playing acoustic fingerstyle instead. I made my peace with the electric guitar in time and fell in love with it all over again. I made my peace with the process. I learned to keep myself open, to keep trying and to keep it fun.
Maybe I could prove you wrong. I think you can prove yourself wrong.
“I’ve seen interview footage with him where he said that he wrote material, worked on it for the studio and then couldn’t play it later.”
That’s just memory. He didn’t lose the skill to do it. It’s the 1989 aimm video.
Do you have evidence of what you claimed? The speed? Not just a pattern, a full shred piece.
The ability to play super fast all over the neck in many different ways is far more than a practiced pattern. It’s a conglomeration of vast amounts of practice and a very high learning ability, 1000s of patterns, licks, bends etc all combined in the brain creating a general intelligence emergent property ability of free flowing movement, such as we all have with speech.
Doing a fast four pattern or a 3nps pattern skillfully does not create this. It is night and day.
I have provided documented scientific comments on everything I mentioned.
I am talking out my ass, but like ace ventura I can somewhat do it.
Just look at him in that video. He’s 15… And showing the signs of excitability in nervous system, his playing at that speed is incredibly clean. I’ve seen dave mustaine on coke pull off similar machine level accuracy. Not at Jason’s speeds of course.
I know what you mean about idol worship. But there are literal signs of everything spoken about in that scientific text with Jason. It’s fairly obvious to me as I look at high skilled people all the time as I’m sure you do. I believe Jason was predisposed to an excitable nervous system and very interconnected motor cortex. This quite frankly abuse of these abilities started to damage his body, and over time brought the whole system down.
Ofcourse I could be wrong and always love to be told and shown I am, no pain no gain.
Don’t turn this into me not being able to do something and making excuses.
I’m very confident in my ability to improve.
But no matter how hard I train, I won’t outrun usain bolt. I’m a realist. And I’ve a fair amount of experience in physicality and the body. I can see an outlier when I see them.
We could talk about Roy Marchbank who is a shining example of efficient technique.
Jason is pretty inefficient. His movements are pretty big, his fingers big, his fretting action high. Yet plays so fast and powerfully. This is part of what makes him such an expressive player.
So, here’s the thing, Jason could learn or create a full multiple minute long shred piece in days and perform it flawlessly.
This is general intelligence at work in the motor areas, and fast twitchy hands.
Someone who’s only learnt to play some notes fast DOES NOT have the ability to create memorize and perform perfectly a full piece of melodic shred music in a short time.
It take us “normal” people excessive time to memorise vast numbers of individual notes, and then even longer, like months for iron out everything. This is because we don’t have this fluency on guitar as we do with speech.
It really is like someone knowing a few english sentences well, vs a native speaker.
I’m sure you know a decently bit more than a few sentences on guitar. But unless you post a full song learnt in a short time played flawlessly. You can’t do what Shawn lane did. Or Jason. They ARE different, they are prodigies on their instrument.
I’m not putting Shawn in the same vein as Jason mind. I do believe a big part of Jason’s ability came from this overconnected motor cortex. And subsequently, once the issues started, due to the cortex being wired so excessively, it easily spread and degraded all those connections. This is implied in the research on als.
Probably. Those who have success tend to think they have and deserve it because of hard work and dedication instead of luck/talent/genes unable to see there are way more those who have worked even harder but failed. Thinking all are equal in outcome is very leftist. Remember, half of the population is less < insert any trait here > than average.
Btw Tom I’ll check out your digital topic, I love Shawn lane too. Thanks for putting in the effort to decode him.
Maybe it was memory. Nobody has perfect recall, I’ve forgotten dozens of tunes.
I haven’t practiced any of the “shred” pieces I learned as a teenager in over a decade. There are parts I remember and can still play and there are a few segments I’ve practiced somewhat regularly to focus on specific techniques. I don’t remember any tunes in full, I’d have to re-learn parts I’ve forgotten.
YouTube has hundreds of videos of teenagers burning through note-perfect covers of shred pieces. I don’t even see it as a remotely extraordinary claim when I assert that I was one of them.
I’m not going to re-learn parts of a tune and make a recording just to satisfy you. You could just arbitrarily change your judging criteria again (“that piece isn’t shreddy enough,” or “there’s no sweeping in that piece”, or maybe “too much legato”). You’d find some way of discrediting it, so that what I can do isn’t the same as what Jason could do. Even if you accepted it, you’d just decide that I’m one of the “special people,” that you’re still not and you’d still have the same beliefs regarding your own limitations.
Believe me or don’t, I don’t really care. I also have a beautiful girlfriend, an exceptionally high IQ, a Ph.D in mathematics and a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I make a great steak and I’m a winning poker player. I’m terrible at chess and I’m terrible at drawing. I’m not much of a singer and I suck at ball sports.
I’m not going to prove any of it. I can’t see any reason why I’d bother to make false claims on an internet forum where they’ll only be read by a dozen or so people I’ll never meet in person.
You admit that these things are (presently) beyond you, yet you’ve decided upon an explanation of how it has to work, how it must be. People think it don’t be like it is, but it do.
No doubt. 
By the way, I’m trained to write in a very precise, language of argument style. Some people have told me it comes off as argumentative or even condescending, please know that’s not my intention. For me this is a friendly discussion and I have no hostility towards you.
I think he had a high degree of natural dexterity and a strong intuition for what he could perform quickly on guitar. That much seems reasonable to me. Any supposition of vague abnormality in his nervous system is completely unsupported speculation. Asserting that his playing in any way contributed to his present condition is an extraordinary reach.
Not my intention to do so. However, you clearly believe that Jason was special in a way that you are not, and that his results are simply not achievable for you. Whether you’re intention is to make excuses or not, you’re closed to the idea that you can achieve similar feats. It’s ok to be skeptical, but be a willing skeptic. Just keep trying.
Not an accurate analogy. Fast guitar playing doesn’t work in the same way as sprinting. There have been several discussions about this here on the forum.
By the way, the mechanics of human sprinting is well understood, and depends on clear, measurable factors. Usain Bolt is measurably and demonstrably more genetically suited to sprinting than the average person. Actually, even more so than his closest competition, his build is almost the theoretical ideal. Same for Michael Phelps in swimming.
On guitar, you can only spot outliers by their results. There is no clear, physical factors which we can point to as being better suited to fast guitar playing. There’s no physical characteristic we can immediately point as being a common trait to with the fastest players. So we’re left to speculate. We can say it’s a “freaky” nervous system, but it’s a totally baseless claim.
As @kgk put it:
Electric guitar lacks a standard methodology and a standard repertoire. We have no idea what speeds would be achievable on were those in place. We have no idea what the mean or standard deviation would be. If those were in place, maybe we could start to determine those things.
As it is, I can determine that Shawn Lane was faster than Eric Johnson and that Paul Gilbert is faster than Eric Clapton. I can’t make any definitive claims as to why. There are just too many variables, too many differences between their mechanics. Is Rusty Cooley faster than Carlos Santana? Of course he is. Does Carlos not have the genetic potential for fast playing that Rusty has? How could we begin to determine that?
Of course not, clearly there are other factors. Efficiency of learning method and memorization techniques being among them. If they have the necessary hand speed however, they have the necessary hand speed, whether they developed it practicing focused exercises or melodic lines is irrelevant. I’m discussing only the physical capability.
Honestly, I’m just plain not bothered to do it. I’ll keep learning tunes from my Real Books and practice playing over the changes, and experimenting with technique as I’ve been doing. Much more interesting to me than sitting and learning (or re-learning) a piece I could probably have played as a teenager just to prove a point on the internet. Worrying about what I was supposed to be able to do to be considered “good” and proving myself against other people’s standards made me hate the electric guitar for several years.
If you don’t believe my claims, that’s totally fine. I might not either, if the situation were reversed. But, why doubt me? What possible motivation could I have? If I we’re going to pretend to be something I’m not to make myself feel better, I’d pretend to be Spider-man.
I suppose it’s possible. All I’m really saying is that I had untapped potential for speed I didn’t know I had until recently. At one stage I actually believe myself incapable of it.
I totally acknowledge that we are all different in our abilities and our potentials. Plenty of people struggle to be even mediocre at things I easily excel in. Others easily excel in things I struggle to be mediocre in. Such is life.
My issue is when we use this as a justification for closing ourselves off completely from what we might accomplish, if we were only open to the possibility. It’s ok to
Only for traits which are symmetrically distributed around the mean.
Cool, let me know what you think. I also wrote a thread on some reflections I had on rewatching Power Licks and Power Solos. Might also be worth a read.
By saying this I might qualify as “smartass of the year”, but half of the population would be less than median, not average 
Tom
Tom G, there is not much I can say besides you’re claiming a lot with no evidence.
If you were in anyway close to a prodigy you’d be able to show it very easily.
The fact you say you can’t be bothered says everything.
I’m not saying you’ve even hinted at being a prodigy, but you are ignoring the abilities of prodigy’s to absorb information very fast and translate it to the fretboard with ease.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about me and my belief in my abilities.
A true prodigy displays an intelligence in an area that is not a naturally evolved trait such as our speech. And they bring those skills to levels that rightfully put them above normal people. I’ve given a fair amount of scientific literature on the subject and my own skill of logical deduction. I continue to say I’m talking out my ass as I’m well aware of how complex biological processes are. But I’m no dummy.
You are clearly also a logical guy as I’ve seen in past posts, but you seem to not believe in genetic talent.
And as for usain bolt I’m well aware of how he achieves the speed. It’s the speed of force that goes into the ground. Directly down vvv there is almost no sideways force in sprinters beyond the acceleration phase. Usain is the fastest because he can maintain this bouncing effect. His long legs give him extended ground contact allowing vertical force transfer for greater period of time than most. I’ve studied this stuff for years.
In guitar players there is no doubt talent involved. I’m actually a bit worried all this talk of mechanics has given people a false sense of what these extreme players are doing.
The mechanics are a symptom, not the cause.
A bit outtopic here… anyway
I’ve been talking to some japanese guitar guys and I found out interesting cultural differences. For western culture the goal is to beat someone while in eastern culture (japanese at least) it’s about beating yourself. They practice to become better then they were a day ago, a year ago. Though they have their idols obviously. I even have that strange feeling that Masmsteen is more popular in Japan then in other countries )
We are all human. Focusing on others is focusing on ourselves.
another offtopic…
a huge amount of japanese guitarists use fingers actively while picking. Could that be related with the fact that they had to write a lot of kanji (hierogkyphs) due their school time? Unlike latin cursive which is smooth, kanji are complex and angular (though they have speedwriting too)
I don’t understand what you mean? Their fingers wiggle?
Oh, like thumb motion. Lol no idea, fuckin japanese thats why. Love em.
I’ve literally posted the scientific texts hinting at what I’m saying…
Yes. Like this guy which was discussed in one of CtC topics
On second video his speed is ridiculous. I can’t understand how he manage to use his fingers so fast. My wrist is faster than my fingers, and my elbow is faster than my wrist. So for me fingers pickingwas always an example of ineffectivnes. But…
There is also evidence of females holding the pick with three fingers evh style. Vs men who mostly grip with just index.
Quite interesting.
I would imagine the wrist use we in the west have is because we’re a bunch of wankers.
Go with what you know right.
What i take away from this is that chicks like it when you can play at 220Bpm+. Noted, thx!
Hey, a dozen or so of very special people which you’ll never meet.
Edit: Ok, that wasnt a very productive post…
I ll try to save whats left to save: For a while i was obsessed with wrist-size. Yes. I literally asked friends if i could check how thick their wrists are. This is no weird fetish, i was just obsessed by the thought that wrist size (among other factors) somehow limits our capacity to built muscle. I’ve been training and dieting for 5 years now but hit a plateau two years ago. I was so afraid that this is my natural limit that i developed that wrist-tick, looking at guys who where heavier thinking “yaaaa, no wonder he gets results with those godlike treetrunk WRISTS”. Took me a while to see how much i limited myself. Changed my diet half a year ago and managed to gain two more kgs.
Moral of the story, imo: Having a scientific discussion is all nice and fine, and we were for sure equipped differently by mother nature but we shouldnt let that affect a positive can-do-attitude towards what we do, otherwise we kill all the fun and risk belitteling ourselves. So i very much sympathise with Tom_Gilroy’s perspective here.
Yeah, i don’t care is bullshit, look at all your posts bro