I have been playing guitar for 15 years and can’t seem to alternate pick faster than 135BPM. I have worked on improving my speed for a year now and only gone from 120BPM to 135BPM. Please help.
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What happens when you try something like 160+ bpm? Try it and record a video for us to see would be great.
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And welcome to the forum!
I’ll soon be out of a job here, I’ve seen you giving excellent advice left and right 
I can only add to also try to do a take without the metronome. Eliminate the focus on regularity and just go for “fast” and see what happens. That is always the first step
PS: it may also help to do some speed tests without the guitar, to get an idea of what a speedy picking motion should feel like.
We have a bunch of examples in the primer, one of these can be watched for free on YT:
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I am way behind and not close to being that fast, I’ll shoot a new video this evening and post. Thanks.
I was in the exact same boots regarding speed, I’ve only wasted 2.5 years in that zone though. The guys here transformed my playing in a few days literally.
Doubt that very much Tommo, if we cut you in two, streams of CTC wisdom and a steady stream of 16th note triplets will be all we would see lol. (Bit grim, sorry!).
I’m working from home, waiting for something to save over the slowest broadband connection, so if a new post pops up I notice and get a nice dopamine hit! Lol
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You’re using a very small picking motion and in the slow motion it appears that the pick is travelling pretty far below the plane of the strings on the downstroke. Maybe try incorporating some of the other motions (elbow flexion/extension, forearm rotation) and divide the work between the wrist musculature and other larger muscle groups to loosen things up a bit more. Lots of fast tremolo pickers seem to get a lot of mileage out of rotational movement from the forearm or picking more from the elbow.
This in conjuction with decreasing that picking depth on the downstroke might make the whole system operate a little more smoothly. I know Troy has debunked the whole tiny picking motion fallacy but there’s gonna be a lot more resistance when picking deep like that so it could be another optimization to make. The upstroke travels at almost a 90 degree angle on some pickstrokes - it goes straight backwards along the body of the guitar into the strings and then travels upwards to escape. Keeping the upstroke and downstroke happening on more or less the same axis might help with that and like @tommo mentioned try the table tests and the other motions and see if using a different one might make things flow a little more!
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I don’t want to discount your experience but this is one of the reasons why I posted the above video with the EVH motion test.
Often times people discover that they are able to perform these movements at 200+bpm, even though on the guitar they may be stuck in the 120bpm region - indicating that they have much more raw speed than they think. I hope this will be the case for you as well
Thank you, I will try this out this evening after work and post another video.
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In addition to @Tommo’s comments, I would point out that our most recent update to the Pickslanting Primer is pretty much tailor made for exactly the situation you are in:
It is a sequences of lessons designed to show you how to test your raw physical speed, and then to how to test different common picking motions, without an actual guitar, to see if you can do them fast. At the end we look at case studies of players solving stringhopping and other “can’t play fast” type problems, to see how they do it. This includes watching a total beginner (Tommo’s wife Kim!) do a tremolo for the very first time.
I don’t want to be the guy that’s like, “buy our products”, but this is pretty much the best advice we have given on the forum over the years, collected in one place, into a single hour-long sequence of lessons.
If cash is an issue, we have a scholarship program that includes discounts up to 100%, which I would encourage anyone to check out if they can’t swing the full price. Anyone we can help, even for free, is a customer in some way to us.
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That just means you’re doing your job WELL, tommo. 
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I would like to thank everyone for their feedback. I attempted the 160BPM, I’m slow and this is absolutely the feasted I can currently play at this time.
Is my picking motion ok? Is it string hopping?
This looks good to me, not “string hopping”, I think that issue would be more noticeable if you switched strings.
It’s not string hopping but it seems you’re actually playing 8th note triplets at 160 in the last video, which equals 16ths at 120. In other words, you’re moving at exactly the same speed as in your original post!
It’s been mentioned already, but I would turn off the metronome. It’s not going to help you find a more efficient motion. Second, what does it look like if you really go for it? I would also play around with different pick grips, points of contact, and so on, to see if something clicks. Variation!
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Take the slow motion clip and drop the speed to 25%, and look at the path and speed of the motion. The first thing that jumps out is that the pick appears to pause during the upstroke, right before it hits the string. It doesn’t look like the string resistance is stopping it, it almost looks like the pick is stopping before even hitting the string. Check my math on this.
Also, it looks like the “above the string” phase of the motion is vertically escaped, whereas the below-the-string phase is either horizontal (trapped) or sometimes also escaped a small amount.
Finally, I would add that there is also a fair amount of motion randomness, where the pick strays from its path, sometimes obviously.
So, while this is not nearly as obvious a case of “stringhopping” as we’ve seen from other players who are going super vertical on every pickstroke, there is plenty to notice here in terms of lack of efficiency. This definitely does not look like the kind of smooth, straight-line motion we see when a player gets a single escape motion happening quickly and smoothly.
Don’t mean to call you guys out at all here. Your observations are always on point so I think this is an interesting case that’s not immediately obvious when you first look at it. But when you slow it down, stuff becomes apparent. I suspect if we filmed large numbers of people, we’d see the obvious stringhoppers, and then we’d see a lot of people that look like this, where something is obviously wrong and motion is slow, but you have to look more closely to see what it is.
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Hi! You can read my notes above for what I think of what you’re doing technically. But those are somewhat irrelevant technical details, mostly of interest to the teachers and nerds on this thread! the bottom line is, this is not efficient motion and you have much more speed in you than this. That’s the good news.
Did you take any of our table-top tests? This is important, because if you get a much higher number on the tests than you get with a pick, it means you don’t have physical speed issues, you’re just doing the motions wrong.
The EVH-style wrist motion test in the YouTube video is one place to start. Give that a shot if you get a chance and tell us what metronome number you come up with.
Thank you. I took the test and with a pen; I could achieve 1 measure 16th notes at 210BPM and I was able to sustain at 190BPM.
I appreciate your feedback and last night for the 1st time I think I felt the smoothest you were speaking of. I was still slower than 160BPM, but was closer to being in time. I decreased my downward pick slant slightly when I first felt the smoothness of gliding on top back and forth during alternate picking. I’m going to work on it and will post another video Sunday.
Thank you again
Gabriel
What sort of advice did they give you that helped you improve in just a few days?
I could definitely use some useful tips
For me it was all about the mindset I think. Before submitting my first post here, I started working on my tremolo picking (I had no clue about the new material here about starting fast and finding the picking motion working for you) but I could increase my tremolo picking a single note speed singificantly in just about two weeks from 140 bpm 16th notes to 180 bpm. I couldn’t apply this to any licks or anything but at least in the first time in my life I could experience how it feels to pick fast. I focused on relaxing the motion as much as I can and tried to “catch the flow” as often as I could and maintain the smoothness of the motion.
After this, I recorded a few videos and already pushed myself beyond my limit by trying to play some scale fragments at 160 bpm 16th notes. Pepepicks66 pushed me to my real limits I think. I was a bit worried it was a one time thing but in the last few days I could execute stuff relatively easily in the 170 bpm - 180 bpm range which I couldn’t ever do before so now even after picking up my guitar I can play on those speeds in a few minutes, my hands are already ready for that. It’s a whole new world for me, I feel more brave and experiment stuff I never dreamt about before and I really think I just built a nice mental block with the metronome and was stuck in the 120 bpm range. I really recommend you experimenting with a single note tremolo picking and spending time on this until it clicks. There are much more experienced players on this forum so it’s my own personal experience.
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