Honestly, where does stuff like this come from?
Anyone who respects the Forum guidelines (in a nutshell, be nice!) is welcome here 
It is true that Claus was a heavy critic of the “pickslanting” concept, but it was clear that, at the time, he hadn’t really understood it. To be fair, in the older nomenclature it was easy to get confused between pick trajectory and pick orientation.
Now that we have much clearer nomenclature, I wonder what he’d think. We’d be certainly open to have him discuss his doubts on here… again provided the discussion stays civil
Just thought I’d add to this long thread by saying that for me, repetition was definitely necessary to be able to acquire the correct picking motions. I know a lot of awesome guitarists here can just immediately try out new motion at high speeds, but I can’t. I have a feeling most guitarists can’t, but they don’t post here so you don’t see them.
After struggling for years to find a fast USX motion, I tried for a month or two doing the “play fast immediately” approach that this forum recommends, but it always felt silly to me, because to play fast I need to be able to play fast. It’s a catch 22.
So after realizing that doesn’t work, I decided to analyze why my motion wasn’t working, and slowed it way down and practiced it monotonously at tempos I could effortlessly do. I didn’t use a metronome. I actually did exactly what Claus Levin suggested in that first video you posted (with no left hand involvement), which is coincidental since I’ve never seen that video before.
So yeah, I just repeatedly played the same damn thing over and over again while watching TV or Youtube vids, and slowly over time I was able to speed it up, often in jumps. I can now do that USX motion at fast speeds (about 210bpm 16ths), but 6 months ago it was impossible for me.
So the moral of the story is that I don’t think there’s a global technique that works for everyone.
My personal recommendation is to try to play fast first, because why waste any further time if you’re the type of player who can do it immediately? But if that isn’t working after a considerable amount of time, just drop it, and don’t waste your time with it any longer or you’ll never make an ounce of progress. Practicing mistakes won’t make them go away. Unconscious repetition is a viable fallback option as long as you understand the motions you are using.
Though I should add that I’m not a licensed guitarologist, so don’t actually listen to me.
Lol, no I think we should be listening to everyone.
I think that that this is hard to prove or disprove, but both view points are valid - we shouldn’t try to ignore experiences that don’t fit into our own paradigms.
One line that I can’t get my head around is this one:
If you know what motions you are using, is it ‘unconscious’ repetition? I’m not sure I understanding this
Also,
How did these ‘jumps’ occur? Are you saying that you sat down in front of the telly and just started playing faster? Or did you slowly work up and breakthrough to a new speed?
What you appear to be describing as ‘unconcious repetition’, isn’t that different from the start fast method in that you are letting your body do what is natural to it, which maybe is the biggest component to your success and got lucky that you didn’t burn in a mechanic that wouldn’t cope with high speed.
Again, we seem to come back to determining what constitutes ‘massive’ reps or time spent. Personally, to go to 210 bpm in 6 months is not a long time. I spent 15 years trying to get mine!!! 
@lime, could I ask, at the time you began your 2 month experiment with ‘start-with-fast’ - how would you describe your level as a player? What kind of fast playing could you already do (if any)? If you have any metrics (e.g. bpm’s), please include.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply he is literally banned here. But I’ve seen many threads where his ideas about practice are very harshly criticized, sometimes unfairly in my opinion.
Claus is great, I’ve used a number of his bundles and he has great, musical licks in so many styles. I’ve followed him since he was ‘The Wizard of Shred’. I think he forged many roads before online lessons and courses were as popular as they are now.
CtC has broken new ground in terms of understanding mechanics and making progress efficiently. Take what you need from both and leave what you don’t - it’s most constructive way forward.
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Oh don’t worry, I’ve actually been stuck with slow picking for the past 12 years. Like, no exaggeration, practicing straight alternate picking on one string is all I’ve done for the past 7 years. You can read more about it in a post I made last year: My long-standing problems with tremolo picking.
This recent progress was quite sudden.
Yeah I couldn’t think of a good name for it, so don’t overthink it. I just mean playing it repeatedly (and perfectly) without exerting a ton of mental focus on it. A bonus is that it helps preventing boredom while practicing something as monotonous as 00000000000000000000 on one string.
I slowly worked up, but some days it would inexplicably feel “smoother” for some reason. I struggled for awhile to even get my newly invented motion past 100bpm, and it was fairly gradual getting from that to about 160bpm, but one day I decided to alternate between palm muting and clean playing for fun, and for some reason that helped speed up my progress. It only took about a week after that to get it up to 200. It was still the same basic motion, but I was able to do it faster.
If you see some of the videos I posted (in that link up above), you’ll see an example of what happens to me when I try the “play fast immediately” approach. That was specifically for that one motion though. I tried a million other motions too and had various other problems speeding them up. That was actually one of the “faster” motions, ironically.
I should also note that I completely redesigned my motion specifically to target the bouncy issue I had, so the motion I use now is different than what you see there.
Still, the important detail I’m trying to stress, is that the motion I currently use for USX (and ANY fast motions I’ve ever learned on guitar) required slow practice for me. My current motion was completely impossible for me 6 months ago. And I’m not taking about accuracy or anything, just the basic motion.
Hopefully the above response including the link to my other post answers this question.
As for prior fast motions, I had a DSX motion that took years to build up, but I can’t really do it anymore. I got it up to about 180bpm, or 200bpm for quick bursts, but it was largely useless to me since I couldn’t palm mute with it and I wanted to play metal. I developed this motion before discovering Cracking the Code or Troy Grady.
I took a quick look at that thread and it doesn’t seem like you always did the slow and steady approach - you did some ‘ramping up’ type things and also had “5-10 minutes of trying to play fast (150-170bpm)” as part of your practice regimen (at least at some point)
Also this speaks volumes in how the exploratory/playfull/trial and error approach is all part of the mix:
I’m not denying that you did the slow and speed up thing at all and that it helped you, but its quite possible you did more than just that and it might have been an important factor in reaching the goal - only you did them over a longer period of time than some others have managed to (no biggie, its the results that count).
Thanks for sharing your experience, I think it will gives others that are in a similar situation as you were some hope that they can find their own way…
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This is a big issue when parsing anecdotal accounts. You have what people say they did, versus what they think mattered most about what they did, versus what actually mattered / had a casual effect. It’s pretty much impossible to know from a story what any of these things are.
The way forward is testing and observation. We observe playing issues, we assign tests and homework, and we see what results they get in a short period of time. We may very well find out there are some people who progress in different ways or need some specific hlep.
I will say that so far, the sheer number of people we’ve been able to help in the past few weeks alone, along with the length of time many of them say they were stuck at various levels of slow, means that at the very least, there are a lot of people out there who do fit the model of how we think things work.
@Yaakov you may not know this, but there are numerous comments on the YT video of your case study where people state something to the effect of, “it’s scary how much the ‘before’ video of this guy looks like me, it could almost be a video of my own hands”. And variations on this theme. Multiple people wrote this. One guy just wrote “GUILTY!!!”, i.e. presumbaly referring to his own technique.
Thanks for doing this; you’ve rescued many from the gulag of no progress.
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Well yeah… that’s what I was saying. It didn’t work for me.
The motion I’m currently using, the one I referred to in my last reply, is something I came up with since posting that thread.
Ah I see, sorry I misread. 
There’s no relief like giving meaning to one’s struggle;) If my posts are helping CTC move forward in some small way, that’s very gratifying to me.
I read through this whole thread carefully the other day (took notes!), which I found really helpful. I’ll share just one takeaway, possibly the biggest…
There may be a communication gap between me and a lot of you out there. A great many seem to come to CTC, specifically the single-escape stuff, with more left hand ability (burning in a fretting pattern; maybe legato also) and right hand ability (from one-string tremolo lines). Since I was never into the kind of technically demanding music that a lot of you were, it’s no surprise.
Even if you struggle with USX/DSX at first, your hands are still a lot ‘smarter’ than mine. A kid in his first algebra class, for example, might struggle in the beginning of the year with the new concepts. But ultimately, he can get it. If he tries to teach his kid brother who’s two grades younger, though, that kid might struggle and not succeed. The difference is the preliminaries.
(Found some YT footage of Troy, where he grabbed some frames of his early playing from a school science project on video; makes me believe this all the more.)
I just mention it because if that’s what’s happening with me, I suspect it will happen to others. As someone pointed out, certain false preconceptions about learning guitar keep stubbornly coming back around here. This “gap” I’m describing may be part of the reason. If so, it’s something to think more about, as the site gains the interest of more players who are at a steeper part of the growth curve than has been the case for most CTC members until now.
(realized the point needs illustration…) If you learned a lot of Metallica or whatever back in the day, you’ve likely got a left hand that learned to fret through a pattern fast; you’ve likely got a right hand with some tremolo skills. So starting-with-fast, though challenging, is within the realm of ‘doable’ (with work and patience).
Me, who’s closer to the just-back-from-Sam-Ash stage, without a few years of bedroom rocking and the attendant left and right hand gains mentioned above… I’m feeling ‘underdeveloped.’ I feel like I’m trying to fill in gaps so I can even get to where start-with-fast is a realistic goal.
This makes some sense to me. Needs a little bit of context, so bear with me. (Trigger warning: Anecdotal evidence!)
I’m in the process of trying to recover my early 90s technique level (EVH, Satriani legato) and add the bit that was missing - fast picking. I’ve never been able to do clean, reproducible picked lines.
I took stock of my picking, came to the conclusion it was ok. What I call my “fake fast mode” is DSX, but I can do USX and economy as well. So I decided my left hand was a mess, and planned out a left-hand practice regime.
But then Troy’s voice was in my head whispering “you should test that hypothesis!”. 
So I did. I tried fast picking just the right hand - over 200bpm, at which point I have trouble feeling the tempo, but I think that’s just lack of practice at those kind of speeds. Then I did short bursts of 3NPS scale patterns on one string and found I could reach 210bpm reliably. At which point I decided that for me fast picking was simply a co-ordination problem.
And it was like some kind of mental block had been removed. I went with the “play it faster than you think you can” approach, and 3 weeks later I’m playing 16 note bursts of 3NPS patterns at 180 pretty cleanly and it’s improving daily.
Then I tried the 6-note pattern, and this is where it relates to your point. It was just hell, didn’t work at all; I could barely manage 60bpm and any sense of shifting into “high gear” was absent, starting at speed wasn’t going to work as I was barely getting 2 notes in out of 6. But sixes was new to me, I’d somehow avoided it. So I added a couple of simple exercises to the daily routine, playing it legato up the neck in all 3 standard patterns, no massive reps, just 2 minutes per exercise, repeated 3 times over a randomised session. Did that for 10 days before I tried picking it again. That broke the back of it, I think it’s around 95bpm now, but it feels in my hands, and cleans up as I play.
So my current feeling is that the left hand has to have a decent level of autonomy for start fast to work. And as you say a lot of us have a few years playing Eddie licks or similar to fall back on. But pick a pattern, work it up over a few weeks and then just go for it. The stuff I’ve learned here has produced more improvement in my picking in 2 months than the rest of my 35 years of playing. So as a group we must be doing something right. 
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So the 3NPS was more scalar/linear, and that you could do, but you couldn’t cycle the 6s - do I have that right?
This absolutely makes you a fascinating case study, especially since you’ve been very open, transparent, and - for lack of a better word - talkative about your struggles, your thought process as you’ve tried to figure them out, etc.
Which, aside, is one of the coolest things about this place - it’s a very open, open-minded community, and I think I’ve learned as much from the discussion here as I have from the CtC content. I’m stoked to be part of this community.
I’ll add, though, sometimes having all that fretting-hand progess is counter-productive in two ways, one obvious and one not. The obvious way is it’s very easy to get around problems with your picking hand - I can (and do) just rely on legato if I want to play a “fast” line somewhere, which definitely limits my progress on picking technique simply because it’s less of a priority.
Second though… it’s very easy to take it for granted that if you’re struggling with a picking run, the problem is definitely your picking hand and not your fretting hand. I’ve been struggling with variations of the gilbert 6s pattern and 3nps two-way-escaped runs for a while now, and I’ve pretty much figured it was either a position-shifting issue, or something up with my picking hand. Literally within the last week I realized if I tried to do the three note pattern on a single string as a series of hit ons or pull offs - like, say, 7h9h10p7h9h10 or 10p9p7h10p9p7, I was actually struggling to do that at tempo, cleanly, and the coordiination issue was almost certainly my fretting hand and not my picking hand.
The irony here is finally getting my picking chops closer to up to snuff has exposed weaknesses in my legato playing, which I thought was pretty good before I started putting it under the microscope, so to speak, by combining it with something that was naturally pretty rhythmically tight. Go figure! So now I’m spending some time a week basicaly “trilling” three note per string patterns in a single direction like that, three hit ons or three pull offs, just to build up some better control there (for some reason it’s easier lower on the nck than higher), and I think a couple weeks of this and I should be able to run some of these picking runs and have them sound clean and coordinated quite a bit faster.
Idunno. Guitar is fascinating, and if it was easy, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.
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This feels very much like my world in the last week. Fretting hand is being shamed at every turn!
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As I look more at sheet music, I’m getting a sense for the real world work-arounds when it comes to playing fast without single-escaping. It’s interesting how when I listen to some of the Clapton/Mayall stuff, he’s playing a lot of notes fast - but then you see in black-and-white that it’s almost entirely HOs and POs, as opposed to single-escape.
I do think that sort of bolsters my theory, though - that using articulation (PO/HO) for speed helps lay groundwork, in terms of giving each hand some skills they’ll need for single-escape. Makes me wonder if I’m skipping a step by not taking “fast” as far as I can w/artic and legato before focusing on USX. (Actually, @Troy, if you’ve got thoughts on that, I’d love to hear them.)
I hear that. And I’d guess it’s easier to make this mistake when you’re a seasoned player. Maybe this is a point where my inexperience will serve me well - I always have to suspect both hands of being the culprit;)
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Hey, I think there’s no wrong way to learn how to play guitar, provided you DO learn. 
And, you do seem to be getting the hang of identifying weaknesses and trouble-shooting them, which IMO is the most important part of learning.
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