How does one go about picking this tune? It is from an instructional book I tabbed into Guitar Pro. The book says alternate picking but there will need to be pick escapes I believe. Thx
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To play that as written and alternate pick, youâd need a motion that escapes in both directions (DBX or âdouble escapeâ). This is a great piece for working on that technique since it has a mix of 1 nps, even numbers on some strings, odds on the others. This is exactly what Troy recommends we do for learning DBX. Thanks for posting, now Iâve got another piece of actual music to play for DBX that isnât an âexerciseâ.
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Glad this will help you. This piece has eluded for years at a fast pace. I am new to Cracking the Code so Iâll need to watch more on Double Escape motion.
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Yes, technically youâd need DBX for this, and itâs good for working on that because of the aforementioned reasons, and also that itâs 3/4 with triplets, so the measures will alternate starting on downs and ups and youâll need to be strong starting with either. But (warning: griping ahead), this piece is not meant to be played fast. lol You can turn just about anything into a technical exercise, I suppose, but it will lose its musicality - thatâs a whole different discussion, though.
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I immediately noticed that after playing through it a little haâŚpretty trixy! Thereâs nothing else I mess with that has that concept.
Sneaky little Bachs tries to tricks us, Preciousss!
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2 Truths about Bach that most people wonât admit:
- He got all his ideas from Yngwie
- He hated guitarists, thatâs why all his music is so hard to play on guitar.
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Iâd say that Paganini got even more ideas from YJM than Bach didâŚ
Does âalternateâ mean that there are never two downstrokes or two upstrokes in a row? If so, is alternate picking possible with 1 NPS unless one uses a double-escaped technique?
The isolated cases of 1 NPS would make somebody like me cheat with efficiency picking.
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Just wanted to say thank you to @rogerc for the tabs and inspiration; I randomly opened this up and have been playing it, really fun!
Oh great. Iâm glad people will be able to enjoy this and work on techniques.
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I had a play with thisâŚmade a few tweaks to try and smooth it out for âmostly DSXâ:
Tricky spots marked up as âdouble escape?â 
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Personally I would adjust the fingering of it a little to keep it more in a confined position and build off of the Gmaj root position three string arpeggio (think Yngwie arpeggios) like below. You can use it this way to as a DBX excersize too, it doesnât defeat that purpose: The only downside is that little stretch on the E string, but I feel most people are used to that who have practiced those three string arpeggios,
Like wise you can use what I call the eminor pentatonic fingering to also play it in a confined position and avoid that 15 to 10 fret stretch on the high E, but you have to use more fretting hand rolling across strings.
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Great point! Purely alternate picking every note in odd time really throws a monkey wrench into improvisational playing, where most players use consistent downstroke-on-downbeat organization because thatâs how the seamless chaining is permitted. e.g. First line ends on an upstroke, next one starts on a downstroke, exactly tied to the beat. Over time, with enough playing, you begin to memorize all the common scenarios. Three-note enclosure-type pickup in sixteenths? Must start on upstroke to land on beat 1 on a downstroke. Trying to redo that for odd time really adds a layer of complexity.
In actual practice a jazz player doing something like 9/8 is probably not religiously picking straight eighths all the time, so you can get around this limitation just by having gaps in your phrasing. But you have to know for sure that those gaps will occur strategically where you need them. Because what if you start a downstroke phrase on beat three?
Where it comes up all the time is classical mandolin. Just as one of many examples, hereâs etude no. 6 by Jakob Dont. This goes on for a whole page:
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This makes me want to turn this into a 2 voice melody where the second voice plays âbetweenâ the main melody, on all the off beats to fill out the chord structure (and/or a bass line, since Bach wrote killer bass lines). So we can keep the musicality Bach intended with the original melody and its tempo, but get the benefit of being able to pick âfasterâ since the second voice will be between the beats and therefor have more DBX stuff to play.
Just what I neededâŚanother shiny object to chase.
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