Don’t overcomplicate this. Pick the skill you want to work on, learn a few variations of it - different sequences or patterns - and rotate around them in shorter practice sessions throughout the day. If you’re working during the day, you might have to practice at night with frequent breaks.
See Troy’s video:
However, a huge component is accepting that you will have to practice a lot to get results comparable to any of the virtuosos. It’s al learnable mechanics, but 15-30 minutes a day is not going to cut it.
I’ve heard that a well. I would say that practicing the same thing in the same manner over and over again won’t fix it… and in those cases… it would be better just to let it go, and just play it with legato.
If you could, post a video your attempts, as close as possible to a ‘magnet’ position.
As far as how to do 3NPS runs… you have to have a ‘go to’ mechanic for hurdling over your difficult string changes.
If you are a DWPS, and you are ascending… that would probably be your ‘outside’ transfers. So if you can, try to spend a few minutes a day trying to overcome that weakness. Usually that requires some sort of rotation, or some sort of change in your mechanic to hurdle over the string.
Very strange, I’ve been working the last couple of weeks on this exact same lick myself. Just wanted to say thank you to everyone here, this has been really valuable practicing advice and is already pretty close to how I’ve been unconsciously/naturally been approaching my practice. I have one small question:
By “practice sessions that focus on extreme consistency”, do you mean practice sessions where you spend 30+ minutes playing a part slowly and trying to make sure every single note is perfect/consistent? It sounds like the advice here is that, rather than do that, it’s ok to play sloppy and make mistakes while you figure out the movement, then bring things down to a reasonable speed to refine the movement, and keep kind of hopping between “at the edge” practice and “cleaning up” practice to get the speed moving up?
Exactly. If you’re trying to learn a picking motion you can’t yet do, how can you possibly know that it’s “correct” when you’re doing it slowly? Focusing on the notes isn’t going to tell you whether your motion is right because there are lots of ways to play the right notes with the wrong motions. Meaning, motions that aren’t efficient and won’t feel smooth as you speed up.
If you already posssess the technique, and you’re just learning a new piece, that’s mostly just memorization. Feel free to do that slowly if you’re getting results that way.
Yes, learn movements fast, slow them to down to figure them out. But not all the way down. If you don’t have the movement, then you won’t be able to do it super slowly and correctly until the end of the process. Even experts that we interview change their form when playing slowly, so we shouldn’t expect to be able to do better.
In general, you’re not starting out slow and getting faster, and you’re not even starting out fast and getting slower. You’re starting out with a narrow range of mostly fast speeds and getting wider, increasing the window of speeds you can play at to encompass gradually slower speeds, and sampling all speeds during that process.
So my problem is not the picking motion at speed. I know this, because I have build my picking motion on this lines:
E --------------------------------------8-9-10-----------------------------------
B -------------------------8-9-10------------------------------------------------
G --------------7-8-9-----------------------------------------------------------
D —7-8-9----------------------------------------------------------------------
I´m able to pick this chromatical lines (sextuplets) on 160 bpm and the picking motion don´t care,
if they pick chromatical line or the lines below. Thats my opinion and maybe I´m completely wrong ?
My problem is synchronize the whole phrase below, which means that the main difficulty for me is the
location change which has to be done on the B-string. The fingers get confused when I change the fingering and the location.
When I play ever shape separately no problems, only in connection they make problems.
So my question was: should I play this “whole” phrase, to get the whole fingerin in my brain (and not a part of the phrase) slowly, fast, or should I play in 30 minutes slowly without a break … ?
E --------------------------------------8-10-11-----------------------------------
B -------------------------8-10-11------------------------------------------------
G --------------7-8-10-----------------------------------------------------------
D —7-8-10----------------------------------------------------------------------
The fact that the location change to your 3rd string causes difficulty is super-common.
First… I’d see if you can do 3NPS without fretting at all… basically just pick each string 3 times and ascend… and see if you still have the problem on the B string… and listen if it sounds consistent.
If you do… you know your problem: you need to learn/improve on 2WPS, or some variation of 2WPS. Make sure to watch/rewatch all of Troy’s videos on the subject.
If however… you can pick it fine… then it is a ‘brain-wiring’ issue. And I would suggest attacking this by splitting it up. First, do the run using just fretting (hammer-ons). Then do the picking by itself at the same pace (3 times on each string). Then do them together… again… at the same pace.
Thank you very much. I think its a brain-wiring’ issue and so I tried the last way to clear and reset the brain
After trying it for a while I think it works fine
Awesome. Yeah… I’ve encountered this so many times. Sometimes, the longer we’ve been playing guitar, the harder it is to reset things like muscle-memory.
Yes that’s right…
After two days of trying to re-wire, the left and the right hand feels very strange, seems as they don’t work together, but I think it’s the re-wiring-process…
Hi! Just my thoughts to this, something that helped me…
If you use strict alternate picking in this, the problem is probably the downstroke on the b string. Try to accent the downstroke on the b string and use downward pickslanting, i.e. bend your thumb on the accent, when you play 3nps patterns you should use two way pickslanting, because the first string change is an upstroke, so you need upward pickslanting there, and downward pickslanting when moving to b string. I play most of the time with upward pickslanting like Paul Gilbert and i use upstrokes mostly on string changes, that works faster for me.
But when i need to change the strokes on string change, i accent them in sextuplet lines to get them in my brain, also hand position is worth keeping in mind when you move revelevantly fast down the fretboard.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I know this problem, but it seems that it is not a big problem for me, don’t know why, maybe I am doing something wrong?
I can play the 3nps pattern ( at the moment only the chromatic way, see tabs above ) in 160 bpm sextuplets… but I think I should post a video to show my picking and to see what the virtuous players say to this technical thing?
Hello,
for my “Putting lines together - 3NpS” Question here is the video.
Maybe you can give me some suggestion or make some criticism.
Would be very nice, but keep in mind that I´am a beginner in trying to pick fast …
Here is the link to the video on youtube:
It’s definitely a brain wiring/fingers confused thing. You’ve got the picking pattern down, the only difference between the two parts is left hand fingering. Try this - play the first part once, pause for 5 seconds, then play the second. Hopefully that gives your brain enough time to reset. Then each time make the pause shorter until they’re back to back.
Thanks for posting the video! I just merged that post (and the one reply from Ian) into this existing discussion FYI — since it’s an update to the same topic I think makes sense to keep it all in one place.
From watching your video I must say that you got the picking down perfectly! Sounds great and very consistent! But I can hear that your left hand is not syncing up. On the G and E string the fingers rush a little bit so that the middle note is missed. So you get kind of a double note thing in there.
And from this thread it seems like the picking is NOT what you need help with. It’s the left hand that needs attention. I’m not sure if the same rules of practise apply for left hand problems as right hand problems. Generally for me the left hand doesn’t have the risk of doing “wrong” movements like the right hand can with string hopping. So for me left hand problems have been solved through really carefully doing the movements slow and exaggerated. I’m not sure Troy would agree on this method but that’s my advise anyway.
Practising this fast as in your video and not having the correct sync yet, would really only ingrain flaws in your playing that’s gonna be hard to recover from. So my suggestion is skip the chromatic thing for now and practising the diatonic scale really carefully and with exaggerated left hand movements. There is certainly a slow speed that you’ll be able to have no problems with sync and position shifting. Go from there but skip the metronome. This is you classic advise for building technique and, while it doesn’t apply for right hand practise, it does for the left hand. At least from my experience.
Yes I think you’re right, the left hand is the problem and to be more specific the third and the fourth finger in combination.
To get more strength in those fingers I make a legato exercise on the b and e string:
B: 134
E: 134
Doing it in a loop and in sextuplets.
Maybe Troy or someone else knows a better exercise ?
Do you need more strength? Flexibility and dexterity suggest refinement of mechanics. I barely need to touch the strings to fret properly. As far as legato is concerned, all-hammer-on-left-hand takes a fair amount of finesse (and a properly set up guitar), but not so much strength per se. I mention these things lest somebody induce nerve damage.
