It’s great that we’ve got so many qualified people on here ready to help. I was just wondering whether in this case a face to face teacher pupil situation may be more effective.
Just a suggestion but maybe one of you experienced guys like @Fossegrim or @Pepepicks66 or @jptk or @Johannes could have a quick face to face video call with @357mag and see if you can diagnose the problem.
I don’t think there is any substitution for a real live human being teacher. I’ve inquired into lessons on the internet but they are expensive and I live in a small town where there is only Schmitt Music.
I tried a different way of tremolo picking where I took my right hand and curved it outwards kind of like Van Halen and it sounded fairly good. But when I tried to play a single string sequence out of my Alternate Picking book I could not pick the lick using that motion.
I can’t be that far off. I watched the videos. And on YouTube. It’s just the upstroke that doesn’t sound as strong or clear as my downstroke. The problem is with the upstroke.
This is definitely true. When it comes to speed while being clean, the sync between hands will be the biggest bottleneck in speed for most people IMO, unless you have unreal coordination.
The main reason to split the picking / fretting hand when it comes to working on issues is to really focus on the technique that’s lagging. Each person will have different results so it’s hard to generalize, but personally I work on my picking the most by doing single note practice, at least when it comes to honing in technique. When I feel like that’s good, I’ll do sync training. He could benefit from doing fretting hand practice first to drill in good technique, then do 2 hands.
Just to be contrary, many metal players would disagree with you 
@357mag I’ll try to record a video for you soon with fret hand explanations of what I’m seeing.
Here we are going to work backwards via an example I composed to illustrate my point. This gets to the gist of what I’m talking about and hopefully this can add some clarity.
This is a typical Yngwie type lick played at 140bpm, which isn’t out of the question for most and below what @joebegly in the previous threads clocked as what your top tremolo speed was:
Again 140bpm isn’t out of reach for the average player by any means, but you CANNOT expect to do that at 140bpm until a certain threshold of development happens first. So you can’t expect to do the first lick without being able to do this second lick at 120bpm, again which is a very attainable tempo.
Further you cannot even expect to lock in with that at 120bpm without your left hand only being able to do this at 120bpm
Again these are not blistering tempos by any means, but all of these things are requirements before you can even hope do the first lick at 140
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Hi @Fossegrim, good teaching approach might be worth putting the tab on there or a link to the tab so @357mag can try it himself.
@SlyVai I can I guess. It was more done to illustrate a concept and a point really, and don’t want there to be any confusion and to have someone just hyper focus on that particular lick. It’s really the concept I’m trying to drive at.
@357mag I made a quick video to explain my feedback from earlier:
Let me know if that clarifies things, again it’s just for your fretting hand, I can make another one for upstrokes.
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Yeh maybe that lick is a bit too much I would say maybe just concentrate on a 3 note sequence like:
10-12-13-12-10
Or something to build up the coordination of the fretting hand and legato.
I wouldn’t be very confident in my teaching skills and I’d be afraid of making an incorrect diagnosis and make a problem worse!
But I do think it’s important to go through the picking primer. It’s laid out in a particular way and you just gotta set the time aside to do it. Once you do, then it’s much easier to diagnose your own issues and know exactly what motions you are making and the right approach angles and anchor points etc. And also to understand single escape and all the terminology used, usx, dsx etc. It’s hard to give advice sometimes if these concepts are not fully understood.
As mentioned already, there are some left hand issues that need to be addressed too. It would be extremely difficult to get licks and sequences up to speed with inefficient left hand technique. Maybe some of the guys could give advice about that?
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be anything more advanced than just a repeated 4 note phrase, it’s just something that has to be done.
One thing I don’t see suggested very often, but that I’ve found invaluable, is that staccato practice is “practicing something slowly, but is meant to be played fast”.
This board by its nature investigates the picking hand. Super crucial work. Can’t be overstated. Not downplaying it whatsoever. And there’s a lot of advice about getting something under your fingers slowly and then flooring it to feel the difference and ensure that the technique holds up when sped up. Also critical and hugely helpful.
But there is one piece of advice I see thrown around a lot which runs contrary to that, and it’s not just here but it’s really sort of an assumption a lot of players just run with, so I am not saying it’s a problem unique to any one community. I think it’s in the same vein as old bad advice about using “less pick” or holding the pick perfectly orthogonal to the plane of the strings.
That (not-always-good) advice is this - “let every note ring as long as possible and move your fingers at the last second.”
For anything that’s meant to be played quickly, this can only lead to trouble. Practicing like this leads to baking in too much anchoring, your fretting hand won’t be ready for note transitions, you’ll be jumping around a lot trying to make the next note. It’s the fretting hand equivalent of stringhopping; you’re practicing the hardest way to get to the next note and you will hit the speed limit.
I would recommend slowing the phrase down and playing it with very short note duration, as short as you like. Get your picking and fretting synced up nicely that way, then start cranking up the speed. Use the same emphasis on the first note to try and get the phrase “chunked” as an X-note pattern.
If you get it to a certain speed and find that you’ve gone too far in the staccato direction and every note is just like a 64th note triplet or something, then you can go back and maybe work on your sustain, but right now it sounds like the opposite problem is present and you’re maybe not making the next note on time. When I have this problem I find staccato practice to be a huge remedy.
Don’t take this as dismissive in any way, that’s not the intention. Staccato practice is great, and a good thing to bring up, but still requires synchronization to do, or does even more so. I think where we’re at now, is that the synchronization and coordination just isn’t there yet even at slow tempos. So that has to be addressed for anything more to be of value.
Interesting, what do you consider more fundamental to hand synchronization?
I’m only one person, but I’ve found practicing staccato does so much to get both my hands synced up that I have a hard time finding something more useful. I’d be pleased to learn a method that’s even better at addressing the core issue.
I’ve been playing for many years, but I’ve never had lessons. And it’s a real challenge to take on the idea of learning how to play or pick fast.
I’m in a small area with no real teachers. I don’t know of anyone else who has attempted to play the things I have elected to play. I’ve never been satisfied with playing simple things with no challenge. I give myself a lot of credit for attempting this stuff.
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Hey, the last post by @SlyVai is a very helpful one. Simple three, four or six note sequences, on one string, without shifting positions, helped me build speed in both hands.
With these exercises, pay attention to the left hand and try make the motions more economic. If you have an issue where fingers are coming far off the frets when another finger goes down, slow down as much as you need to and reduce this. You can reduce these motions and when you do, you’ll be able to pick up the speed.
Simple four or six note patterns like this really helped my left hand and my right hand also.
Also, it can be hard to fix issues with both hands at the same time, shifting your attention can help.
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Hey all, obviously this thread went a little south in places. Let’s avoid personal attacks and/or judging the value of other people’s playing.
Either be constructive or… don’t post! At the same time, the people who feel attacked should not escalate but rather flag the problematic posts to the Admins. Thanks!
I’ll write more explicitly reminders of our community rules when I have a minute.
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It doesn’t look like recoil to me. It looks more like you are not spreading your fingers apart to reach for the next fret in the sequence. Instead you are keeping your fingers very close to each other and moving your entire left hand to get to each note.
I don’t know whether this is intentional or not, and I’m not a teacher so I can’t say for sure that this is ‘bad’ technique, but it seems like it could easily cause problems. This approach seems to convert every new note into a position shift, which many players find to be less accurate and harder to synchronize than playing within a box (i.e. one finger per fret). It also seems likely that it would make hammer-ons and pull-offs especially difficult. Again, I’m not a teacher, so it’s possible I’ve overlooked some obvious benefit to this approach.
It reminds me a little of Lisa X. She shifts her left hand more than other people to compensate for the fact that her fingers are so much shorter than average (still being a kid and all) and she can’t reach as far as other players can, though she still spreads her fingers quite a lot. (She’s a great player, though. Don’t get me wrong.) As her fingers get longer, I imagine she will do less shifting.
I’m curious. Can you play the standard 1234 chromatic exercise without lifting your fingers?:
-----------------------------------------------------------1-2-3-4--
------------------------------------------------1-2-3-4-------------
-------------------------------------1-2-3-4------------------------
-------------------------1-2-3-4------------------------------------
-------------1-2-3-4------------------------------------------------
--1-2-3-4-----------------------------------------------------------
After you play each note, keep each finger in place until you switch strings.
I’m not saying you should always play this way. I’m just asking if you can do this. How does it feel when you do?
Is there a reason you avoid stretches with your left hand? Do you stretch when you play chords?
Hi all, Tommo back with the moderator’s hat on 
I decided to remove all the comments than in my opinion violated our guidelines — see in particular the “Keeping it Civil” part: https://troygrady.com/policies/forum/
I don’t want to point any fingers in this case, I’d just invite the interested parties to have a read at the guidelines, and hopefully it should be pretty obvious to them why I removed the comments and what to avoid moving forward. Obviously, feel free to get in touch with me via PM if you have any concerns about this.
Let’s keep this thread a constructive discussion on how we can try and help @357mag sort out the upstroke 
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Quick question,
When you are practicing your fast tremolo motion, just right hand on one string. Are your upstrokes getting stuck?!
Is it only when you are going slower that it’s getting stuck?
If so it would suggest that maybe something has changed in the motion and you should keep working on that tremolo.
Also, sometimes there can be a mismatch in the direction the pick travels and it’s slant. There is a section about it in the picking primer.
When I have this issue, there are two things I try first. Wrapping the thumb (bending the thumb) for more edge picking, or the opposite, pressing the thumb a bit. Both of these things actually affect the slant of the pick. It’s not immediately obvious to see, hence why it’s very difficult to spot.
Experiment with these two things. You want the upstrokes and downstrokes to feel even. If one is feeling sticky, there is a slant and the direction the pick is travelling mismatch.
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