Here is some video of me doing some pretty basic picking things. These are around my fastest speeds for the scales right now and I cannot play anything except scales that quickly. Once I have to learn new things it is very hard to get them even close to that tempo. I have been at this plateau for quite a while now and I’m not sure how to get out of it.
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I would suggest breaking down whatever you’re working on into smaller chunks that can be cycled for quick practice. This is the best lesson I got from CTC.
The first measure would be for practicing alternate picking and the second for economy picking. Once you have one of those patterns down it’s just a matter of repeating the picking pattern along the scale.
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Thanks for posting! This is a great start, and a solid platform to build on.
Whether you consider these “scales” or some other type of musical phrase is largely irrelevant here. It’s not why you can play some lines quickly and not others. It’s the fact that you haven’t isolated and smoothed out the picking movement itself, to the point where it has become second nature and fluid. We know this because at the end of the clip, when you step on the gas pedal, the accuracy tanks and the hand speed goes way up.
That’s actually great. This means you don’t have a stringhopping problem. It also means you have not reached your speed limit. You can already move quickly, just not for longer stretches, mainly because the coordination itself falls apart, not because you don’t have the necessary athletic hand speed.
So for now, you’re going to focus on building both coordination, and athletic speed, similar to what we’ve discussed with @aliendough in the other thread. You can do this with pure tremolo on a single string. The idea is to hit the gas pedal without regard for accuracy or phrase complexity, to experience what the pure picking movement itself feels like when done in sustained fashion, smoothly.
Once tremolo starts to happen, move to simple single-position repeating phrases, like the Yngwie six-note pattern. You can use a metronome for this if you like, though I personally never did that - I just accented the first note of each grouping, like we talked about in the original Cracking the Code series. The accented downstroke works for synchronization between the picking and fretting hand, and it also seems to help in the purely athletic sense as a type of internal metronome.
That’s it. You’re avoiding the multi-string phrases for now, and definitely avoiding the sweepy stuff and two-way pickslanting stuff. It’s excellent that you clearly grasp those concepts and are using them correctly. That will become important a little later on once the motion itself begins to gel.
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Where can I find the six note pattern?
15–12–14–15–14–12 or any melodic variation thereof.