My picking progress thread

Technique Critique
#21

Much better! Thanks for the speedy turnaround on this.

There’s some guitar shake, and I think it’s elbow movement causing that. This happens even when I use deviation movements, and I’m starting to think this is just the way these movements work. A certain amount of stealth elbow tension / movement is necessary to fire up the deviation movement. If that’s the case, then let’s assume that you’re doing it correctly.

Then the question is, is this really your current maximum top speed? If so, is that physically determined, or is it simply that you haven’t learned to go faster yet? Meaning is it the case that your ‘real’ top speed is actually higher, and we have to unlock it with more athletic training / motor learning?

Only way to find out is to train this movement for speed. I would suggest you are now in @milehighshred territory. John, what is your recommendation?

3 Likes
#22

Thank you, @Troy. This the fastest speed that I can go with me playing clean. If I was to play faster, my left and right hands lose co-ordination and it turns to mush, probably because my right hand’s movements become inconsistent due to muscle fatigue.

#23

Ok that’s a different story. I want to see that clip. We’re not trying to promote accuracy at this very moment. We’re training your hand to make a new movement, one it is unfamiliar with. And we are simultaneously training the physical aspect so you can go faster at it.

One part of this is what we might think of the ‘motor learning’ aspect, e.g. learning to ride the bike. Then the other side of that coin is building more aerobic capacity / neural firing speed so you can pedal it faster.

You’ve spent years with a different movement at moderate speeds, so you’re basically doing both kinds of training right now. Foremost, we want to know how physically fast you can move your picking hand with this new movement, so that we can be sure you are doing it smoothly enough to speed it up. Do it sloppily if you must. That’s fine - you’ll clean it up later. You can also try leaving out the fretting hand as well.

Again, I’d defer to John on these sorts of topics, but by all means make that movement go as fast as you can make it go, and let us know where the upper limit really is.

3 Likes
#24

I’ll defer to @Troy and @milehighshred , but for what it’s worth, my experience supports the principles Troy is talking about. The roots of my fast alternate picking mechanics (forearm rotation DWPS for me, at least in the beginning) came from doing very simple “tremolo picking” licks (e.g. the tremolo bit near the end of the solo in Van Halens “Dreams”) as fast as I could without a metronome.

Edit: Just listened to “Dreams” and Eddie actually doesn’t tremolo pick as much as I did in my interpretation. Same principle applies though: slow, simple fretting hand with notes being repeated fast with picking. Another example would be the tremolo picked “violin exercise” part in “Eruption”. For starters you could even just do one open string by itself, or one fretted note by itself.

2 Likes
#25

Thanks guys! Tomorrow I will post an all out speed video.

1 Like
#28

Me too.

Watching the video tells me no, @aliendough, you have not reached your top speed. And, you’ll basically get the same answer I tell everyone else who wants to play fast, and that’s metronome, metronome, METRONOME!

It’s very odd anyone can play very fast just because they can. Again, linking shred guitar with weight training, most people need to slowly build strength over time. With guitar, most people need to build their top speed, slowly, over time. Proper metronome practice will not only get you faster but help make sure both hands are synced up properly. I have yet to see it fail.

1 Like
#29

I’ll agree 100% that the metronome is the most efficient way to get the fretting synched up with the picking, but I disagree vehemently with any claim that the metronome is necessary for the “athletic” component of speed development.

Speed training in athletic domains is not a regimented incrementaly measured endeavor like weight training is.

World class sprinters like Usain Bolt don’t train their cadence with a metronome, gradually working up from low BPM to fast. Sure, sometimes they’ll work at less than their maximum speed in order to perform technique optimization, but that’s not about locking into a specific sub-max tempo, it’s about going slow enough to be able to make prescribed corrections to technique, regardless of the exact tempo.

And sometimes sprinters do practice where they are trying to maintain a consistent tempo, but that’s again about finding a technique sweet spot below maximum speed, not about matching tempo to an external rhythm.

And if we look to nature, cheetahs, horses and foxes don’t learn to run fast by using a metronome.

Is metronome training in music important? Absolutely. But it’s importance isn’t in connections with the raw athletic component of speed development. When it comes to doing something musical with whatever speed you do have? Yeah, absolutely there needs to be metronome work.

1 Like
#30

Yeah, I was thinking something similar. If I try to approach my max speed gradually from ‘below’, My hands/arms may get too tired before I get to the desired tempo. So sometimes it feels useful to warmup a bit and then try to play as fast as I can immediately. In the end both types of practice can be useful.

1 Like
#31

Here you go guys, let me know if this is what you wanted. Using this technique this is as fast as I can do. I recorded two clips.

2 Likes
#32

Yes man, that looks way better as a high-speed picking technique! In between your metronome practices, try also to play something with this speed on 1 or 2 strings. Since you are using UWPS, I would go for UWPS-only licks for now.

Don’t worry if it’s a bit sloppy initially, you’ll clean it up with time :sunglasses:

PS: Bent thumb à la Vinnie Moore for the win!!

2 Likes
#33

Great! Couple things:

  1. You’re using purely elbow now. Are you doing that intentionally or did that just “happen”? As I’ve said, it may be the case that wrist movement requires some amount of elbow tension to function. See @milehighshred’s massive brachioradialis flex when he gets going. I’m not saying don’t do elbow, by all means continue with what is working. However, as part of your effort to become more physically aware / capable, you may want to spend at least a few minutes trying to feel the difference between wrist and elbow, and turn them on and off. I can’t give you a good method for this yet because we don’t know. But if you discover one keep us posted!

  2. Can you hear that there’s a swing beat to the notes, i.e. every group of two is closer together in time, with a gap in between, like a heartbeat? Put the video into 25% speed mode and you’ll hear it. This happens when the movement is off-center with respect to the string. In your case, you’re going further above the string than below it, so the downstroke and the immediate upstroke are closer together in time. Are you intentionally rest stroking on the upstroke? If so, that may be to blame. Either make a conscious effort not to rest on the upstroke. Or to slide the whole arm little lower down so you even out the pickstroke on each side of the string. Or, adjust the bend in your wrist (deviation offset) to try and add more ulnar deviation, to center the movement.

Otherwise, yes, I like what the others are saying here about applying athletic training to this, and about using this to do small (at first) multi-string patterns to see if you can use this movement without swiping.

Nice work!

2 Likes
#34

Thanks for a detailed analysis @Troy. You’ve mentioned things that I had no idea I was doing - like swinging the notes.

You’re using purely elbow now. Are you doing that intentionally or did that just “happen”?

That just seems to have happened without me thinking about it. I will try and post a video of me making a conscious effort to only use my wrist, but it would be a lot slower than when I’m using my elbow mechanic.

Can you hear that there’s a swing beat to the notes, i.e. every group of two is closer together in time, with a gap in between, like a heartbeat?

I’m not doing a rest stroke intentionally, but I will try and adjust my arm position to counteract this. I will practice this and see how I get up and post an update video.

Once again, thank you!

EDIT: I recorded a quick video - this is as fast as I can go without using that elbow movement. No very fast but…

#35

Nothing is “necessary” but why ignore a useful tool of measurement? Metronome speed practice is like weight training because of the small increments in upping your speed just like the weights. Without using a metronome to gauge your progress, how will you know how fast you got? How will you know what speed to try and beat?

This is how I built my speed to go over 300 BPM. Countless hours of metronome and pushing myself more and more and more. I do not believe for one second I could pick this fast without gauging my progress with a metronome.

Using cheetahs as an example goes along with my saying that if you can already play fast because you’re genetically gifted, then you’re like @Troy who can already just play faster than most people can. Even Shawn Lane. Dude even said he had a freakish nervous system. Cheetahs are born fast. Usain Bolt? Obviously genetically blessed, but I’m sure his version of metronome practice was beating his times around the track. He measured it. He knew what to beat. The stop watch was his metronome.

The principles I talk about are “like” each other, not EXACTLY the same. And, when I refer to weight lifting, this includes bodybuilding where the goal is the beat the ever living shit out of your muscles past the point of great form. Sometimes that lifting approach is necessary for new growth.

So, again, is metronome “necessary”? Maybe not for some, but most of us mortals need it to gauge our progress and push our physical limits.

I will forever disagree with this after what I’ve managed to achieve using a metronome, and what my students have achieved. Unless of course, you ARE faster than me.

1 Like
#36

I was talking to a student about this yesterday to some degree. I feel there tends to be a mix of wrist and arm movement for me as speeds progress. Even a bit of thumb sometimes.

Even if I can play something at a given speed without using my elbow, eventually my thumb muscle and the muscles moving my wrist begin to tire, and my elbow begins to help out and keep things moving along.

2 Likes
#37

That’s a bad analogy, because my point is that Bolt isn’t synchronizing his individual footfalls to anything. An apt analogy would be to compare Usain measuring his 100m times to a person picking fast for 10 or 20 seconds at a time under the high-speed camera and then counting the pick-strokes after the fact.

I actually agree that at the top end, the metronome could be useful in idenfiying what your current top cadence is, and then trying to squeeze it higher, which I think matches what you said you’ve done. But it’s about refining a movement that is already a qualitatively different movement than slow movements. If someone walks 100m with a metronome, with a cadence of say 1 step per second, using a metronome to try to gradually speed up that walking cadence a few milliseconds per step to a point where they are covering 100m in under 10 seconds will never happen. Not in a million years of training. That’s my point. Trying to walk progressively faster will not teach you to run. And once you’ve learned the basics of sprinting, you don’t develop by trying to perfect running form at an arbitrarily slow running speed and then gradually increasing the speed while maintaining perfect running form at each increment. You do some exercises at slow speeds that are meant to ingrain optimal movement patterns, you do exercises to make your body stronger, and most importantly: you run as fast as you can. Even without any time measurement, repetitions of sprinting as fast as you can every day will result in an increase in top speed over time. For reference, see every gridiron football player ever (including linemen, who, while slower than lighter players, are still faster than untrained people of the same size).

I’m not saying measuring progress is a bad thing. But where speed is concerned, you don’t have to measure progress to make progress. Realistically, the most sensible thing is to attack the problem from both ends. Do some unmeasured max speed training, and figure out a baseline cadence that’s close to your current max speed to do measured cadence training. And in the case of guitar, since we have the left hand coordination problem, some much slower metronome practice will be necessary to build coordination between the two hands, but metronome cadences that are equivalent to “walking speed” or “jogging speed” are antithetical to increasing picking speed itself. In terms of raw max picking speed, gains from the metronome are gains of incrementally improving a movement that is already very fast, not finding the way from slow to fast.

1 Like
#38

I’ve found a mixture of both techniques is helping me, just playing as fast as I can on one string, and then using the metronome to slowly build up speed. It’s going to be a long road!

2 Likes
#39

Well, here is what I have been working on over the last 2 weeks.

I have been experimenting with DWPS, UWPS and my trailing edge picking and I’ve found trailing edge is way more comfortable for me. I had been using trailing edge on and off since around 2003, when I saw Shawn Lane using that technique on the Paris DVD.

The only thing I have a problem with when using TEP is a tonal one. I don’t like the sound of it on the wound strings, it sounds too scratchy to me and I have been experimenting with different picks and different picking angles to try and smooth it out a little.

Here is my trem picking so far, I’ve been trying to get it as even as possible. I don’t feel the same strain on my muscles when I’m trem picking while using TEP.

Here is me playing some things using TEP.

As always, any advice and constructive criticism is appreciated.

3 Likes
#40

Nice, the best picking you have shown so far I think! I like how there is a clear gear change when you speed it up \m/

It seems it was a good idea to go back to the old grip, it seems more comfortable for you.

1 Like
#41

Very impressive! I could be wrong, but is the second lick you play the “keys to the Lamborghini” 2WPS Batio lick? If so, your two-way pickslanting sounds very solid and consistent to me, and I’m guessing you could speed it up even faster without much stress. Nicely done! I tried zooming in a little to see exactly how your right hand and pick look when you switch strings, but the camera angle and your index/middle fingers sort of obscured things. If possible, I’d be curious to see what the pick looks like when you are crossing the strings in the Batio lick. I can tell you’ve solved this mechanical problem, but many of us probably would benefit from seeing the exact pick angle and hand mechanic you use!

Well done!

-Greg

1 Like
#42

Looks great! I’m not sure what switching to the other grip did, or maybe it just was a kind of blank slate so you could imagine a world from scratch without the distraction of your previous habits getting in the way. Either way keep doing what you’re doing.

Trailing edge doesn’t necessarily involve a huge amount of edge picking - it’s just the three-fingered version of it that causes that. You can check out the Steve Morse analysis chapters as a reference, around the one minute mark here:

https://troygrady.com/interviews/steve-morse/analysis-chapter-6-arpeggios/

For reasons of pure trial and error while experimenting with different movements, I did those in trailing edge, but using a two-fingered grip. It’s still a healthy amount of edge, but it’s not the almost perpendicular amount that a three-fingered grip will give you. If you prefer trailing but want less edge, you might try this arrangement.

2 Likes