Lurker coming out of the shadows

Introduce Yourself
#1

Hello guys and gals :slight_smile:

I’ve been reading this forum every day for a couple of months now, so I figured it’s about time I introduced myself before I start asking questions of my own!

I had never worried too much about technique or playing speed before as I’ve never been too much into shreddy type stuff (I’m more of a 90s rock guy myself), but that changed a couple of years ago as I really wanted to start to develop my technique and start pushing my limits a little bit, so I started practising religiously at least a couple of hours per day and eventually, I started taking classes for the first time as well.

Then, after making some pretty good progress, I hit my first big roadblock… I’ve never really played any lead licks remotely resembling fast, probably nothing close to even 120 bpm 16ths, so it turned out that after months of practice, I was unable to play cleanly the classic 1234 chromatic exercise up and down the freatboard at 100 bpm 16ths. Oops!

So anyway, long story short, I thought my problem was mostly related to the picking hand as my pick ended up getting stuck between the strings when descending from the first string to the sixth, so after some googling I found Troy’s videos, and thanks to this whole Covid situation and the strict quarantine we have here in Spain and all the extra time I had I paid for one month of Masters of Mechanics membership, watched all the stuff in the Primer and parts of the seminar and started checking out this forum too to look for practice tips on how to develop speed :slight_smile:

I’m going for a wrist USX motion, and I think I’m currently at the stage where I’m trying to get my two hands in sync to play the Yngwie chunk on a single string fast enough, and even though I’m happy with my tremolo (I hope to upload a video soon, although I don’t have a fancy phone with 120FPS slo mo) I seem to be stuck at the 70bpm 16th triplets range due some piss poor two hand synchronization… Once I get over that I’ll resume my membership and start looking into switching strings, but in the meantime I did manage to improve my 1234 chromatic speed to 120bpm, so I guess that’s something!

Well, that ended up longer than I had expected, haha. Anyway, see you all around!

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#2

Welcome. Have you ever tried tremolo picking one note. I hate the term but that is what they call it. Not knocking hand sync as it is important part but sometimes I feel both hands need separate exercises somewhat sometimes and then can be brought together after a bit of one handed work. Just turn off your metronome and trem pick as fast as you can to almost ludicrous out of control speed so as you feel your on the ragged edge then bring it back down to manageable speed where you feel more in control then do it again and again for say a couple minutes. then turn your metronome on and try the 1234.

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