Left hand not keeping up with right hand...especially after watching Chapter 13 of Testing Your Motionds

[jgabra62]

So went through most of the ‘Testing Your Motions’ and there was an overwhelming amount of interesting insight.
However Chapter 13 seems to speak to me the most in the sense that I have found a picking style that suits me fairly well for decent speeds, but I do have a tendency to run out of steam quickly and my picking hand burns out after short bursts of speed.

The Petrucci Etude is one of my favorite warmups on the planet, and so I tried doing more of an ‘elbow technique’ as explained in Chapter 13…and my picking definitely was faster and I felt far less tension and burnout. Yet, sure enough, my left hand is just not keeping up at all.

I know this was explained briefly near the end of the video, but what do you recommend I do to get my left hand to be able to keep up with my right hand. I didn’t quite understand Troy’s explanation.
Is it just a matter of repetition and doing it over and over again until it works?

[joebegly]

One thing to note about the Petrucci chromatic etude is that (as written) it isn’t compatible with an elbow mechanic. Elbow is DSX so unless you have a clever helper motion it will be trapped on the string changes. Unless you start on an upstroke, which is tricky too. Just wanted to mention that as it could be the source of feeling like one hand is ahead of the other.

[joebegly]

@jgabra62

what do you recommend I do to get my left hand to be able to keep up with my right hand

Apologies that my previous post dodged your question. One way I’ve been going about accomplishing getting the left hand to ‘speed up’ is to play small chunks of the riff. I’ll do the first 2 or 3 notes, ensuring complete sync between hands. Then I’ll keep adding notes, one by one. In my own playing, it often exposes inherent sync flaws I have in certain left hand patterns. I’m much slower when the phrase contains ‘turn arounds’ and also much more likely to get out of sync. Not sure if you’ve seen it, but there is some fascinating stuff here regarding the happy path to fast left hand patterns:

Efficient Digital Cycles

I have been preparing a post about the left hand postures and fretting strategies I use in my playing, after reading through the following thread: That promised post is still in preparation, and I will present it when I’m satisfied with it. In preparing that post, I watched through several instructional videos and CTC interviews again. While re-watching Shawn Lane’s Power Licks for the first time in a while, I realized something about his fretting sequences that I felt was extremely interes…

So along the lines of the ‘start with speed’ we often hear preached when it comes to finding a fast picking motion, make sure when you try to bring in the left hand that you aren’t setting yourself up for failure. Use your absolute fastest left hand pattern.

And of course, back to the topic of my previous post, when you start switching strings make sure your playing things that align with DSX rules (if you’re going with an elbow mechanic, as you mentioned your were).

[jgabra62]

Thanks so much, this is really helpful