I’m getting all these death metal recommendations on YouTube now. Here’s another great shot of Hobbs where the wrist aspect is very clear:
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Wonderful video Troy. I’d like to comment on the small movements discussed. I’m a proponent of beginners using small movements when learning these motions and overall control.
I agree 100% with you that small movements are not required to attain / play at these speeds. It’s a fun exercise to, for example, tremolo at a very high bpm and then change the movement distance from very small to very large without any disruption to the tremolo being played. No question about it, speed does not require small movements!
I always emphasize to those starting out however to keep the movements on the small side especially when they are still mastering pick depth. I think it’s a quicker cycle to mastery and pick control to start smaller and allow it to open up more as the control develops rather than the other way around. Thanks for creating the video!
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If this has worked for you — by all means. I didn’t mean to be too religious about this topic!
The reason I mention the motion size thing in this lesson is purely based on what happened when I learned it. I really couldn’t do this technique at all until I just went for it and allowed the hand to do whatever it wanted. And that produced a very fast motion which also happened to be very large when I filmed it. I wasn’t expecting that, but that’s what I got.
It could very well be possible to learn this technique by deliberately trying to “do” a small motion. But just based on the way it feels, my current best guess is that doing the motion “small” is actually harder because it requires more control, not less. Again, I’m not sure how we would test this, but that’s just my impression.
I’m only aware of one viewer who was able to replicate this technique — that’s Luis Gomes from YouTube, whose video I linked to earlier in the thread. If you look at his technique when he does both the upstrokes and the alternate picking, it looks pretty much exactly like what I’m doing in terms of the size of the motion. His feedback is that the technique feels easy, so I don’t think he’s straining himself.
I know that’s only a sample size of two, and we would ideally need more data. But my best advice so far is not to think about motion size at all, and instead focus on ease. If we get better data / better answers, of course we’ll update the lessons.
Man, do we love continually updating the lessons!
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Slight tangent on death metal:
“True” death metal (Death, Suffo, Immolation, etc) tends to have a cultural focus on originality and “riffs over technique,” and I suspect you wind up with so many ultra fast players at least partly because nobody’s worrying about whether they’re “doing it right.” They’re free to “go for it” and not worry!
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I agree. I think it’s an established dogma that picking from the wrist is “proper” form, and that any elbow movement is “bad” by extension. I was definitely lead to believe this when I was younger.
In my own case, I was able to “unlock” a higher gear in my dart-thrower form when I allowed myself to break damping contact with the strings and let some elbow movement occur. I don’t know if the elbow movement is totally incidental, it’s possible that the greater freedom triggers a change to a compound wrist/elbow movement.
It feels exactly like whatever movement I use when drumming my fingers on a tabletop and when mashing a spacebar on speed tests, which feels to me more like the DT movement than an elbow movement, and I have to start the motion by throwing my wrist along the DT path.
As for the hyperspeed RDT movement, I can only kinda sorta do it. I can do it off the guitar no problem, the speed feels similar to the dart-thrower. On the guitar, it’s a bit hit or miss right now (through it is improving). I think I may have some interference from my other RDT-based forms.
On the spacebar test with my left (untrained) hand I do DT, like an American grip drumming motion, and I get faster speeds than with my right hand, where I do RDT. I assume that I choose RDT as a result of training from picking. I can’t really say if there’s a speed difference inherent the motions, since there are so many factors.
I’ve seen some general improvement in the speed of the motion on an actual guitar but I think that’s mostly coming from learning to do it better without all the other muscles tensing up randomly. I don’t know if I’ve actually succeeding in training faster neurological speed, which is what the traditional “working up to speed” advice implies. That may be possible, but if it’s happening, it might be in tandem with the other stuff, and hard to tease apart.
We’ve also talked about the genetic differences and to what extent they exist. I don’t know how to separate those from training differences. But every time I see a completely untrained person tap faster on a table than I can, it feels like I’m just an average person with training. Don’t get me wrong that can take you very far.
I think an American grip drumming motion is almost exactly what I’m doing with my picking hand. The highest speed I have hit on click tests is about 11 hits per second (instantaenous speed), and spacebar tests average around 10 hits per second (average over 10 seconds).
I do think that the spacebar test helped me become more comfortable working close to my limits, and it gave me a reference for what speeds I could be capable of on a guitar and what it should feel like.
I find it very difficult to synchronise my internal clock to these crazy fast tempos. I actually think it’s part of the reason I never became interested in extreme metal genres. I would find it much easier to play sextuplets at 180bpm than to play 16ths at 270bpm. It’s super impressive that you and the METAL!! guys can do it. I think I would need to learn to feel it at half tempo and chunk as 32nd notes.
I’ve been fascinated by this same thing for forever. I get it when it’s patterns that are 4 or 6. But single note tremolo at basically the same speed but different tempos shouldn’t feel as different as they sometimes do. I wonder if it’s a Pantera style triplet or Metallica/Slayer style 16th’s that a player gravitated towards when they were starting that influences it.
I wonder if, we’re just talking the picking part, it has to do with chunking. I’m not anywhere near these crazy speeds but when I play at my maxes, I find that too frequently accenting is a challenge. If we accent every 6 notes, that gives a little more time between the “pulse” than we’d see if accenting every 4 notes, even if the notes-per-second remains the same. Maybe accenting every 8 notes would help? Chunks are sort of a “spasm” where the brain just thinks one thing and the hands do lots of things. The faster we go, I’d think the bigger the chunks need to be. Just a theory, I’m often wrong lol
In terms of METAL!! it could be that the Slayer style 3 16th note gallop, which might be an Iron Maiden thing (?), can be an aspect.
It’s a very interesting topic.
I think you’re likely correct about this. I can’t internalize 270bpm, so I can’t feel 16ths at 270bpm. I can easily internalise 135 bpm, so I imagine that I should be able to feel 32nds at 135bpm.
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I’ve always found the black metal style trem picking harder for sustained amounts of time. Death/Thrash tends to have slight breaks in the riffs where the chords are.
Something I notice with BM players is there tends to be some amount of elbow at play (almost like some weird middle ground between strumming and usual thrash/power/death metal wrist picking). I suspect this is because once you are trem picking more than two strings it becomes very difficult to use exclusively wrist mechanics. I kind of inadvertently discovered this trying to learn some Burzum riffs a while back and almost really jacking up my wristusing exclusively wrist mechanics. It’s hard to describe but It helps the arm breathe if i had to describe it.
As others have mentioned above I had grown as player with the “never use elbow” mantra. No idea where this comes from but likely it was a mantra for new players to learn to use their wrist when picking and not locking it up.
I’d guess the “locking” up of either joint is bad as that can cause the thing we as players are always trying to avoid which is undo tension in the picking hand/arm.
Take a look at any of the close ups of Abbath here with Immortal
Ihsahn and Samoth of Emperor are excellent examples of what I’m trying to describe. Lots of good shots throughout.
Understandable! It’s tricky to make public content alongside lesson material for subscribers because they serve totally different purposes. It’s rare that you have a self-contained lesson from the site that also works as a standalone YT video. There are a few. But most of the site lessons are relatively unexciting and don’t make sense outside of the sequence. We’re always keeping an eye out for platform lessons that also have some curb appeal.
In this case we thought the lesson on metal speed might be that. So I thought, ok I’ll just record a new intro. Well that turned into a whole saga and it ended up as a kind of ship of Theseus — all the parts getting replaced with new ones.
So what did we do next? We went back and re-did the platform version of the lesson to be completely new. What we now have is a brand-new 14-minute, step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to do the very fast motion featured in the YT lesson:
The new lesson incorporates all the feedback we’ve gotten from everyone who has watched the public version. It’s much more focused on hands-on steps. If you give it a watch, let us know if you find it useful.
One of the things I specifically address in the new lesson is how to do the chunking. Short answer: it’s twos. That’s how I do it. In fact I would say it’s not really twos per se, it’s “ones” — one round-trip upstroke motion that just happens to come back through the string and play a second note.
I think it’s notable that multiple players who have tried this were able to get upstrokes first, before alternate. In the Luís Gomes clip above, he’s faster with the upstrokes than he is with alternate. And when I was doing this, I was the same at first. Except that I would sometimes accidentally hit the string on the way back and do alternate. That’s how I learned the alternate side of it.
So I think that “tapping” is just a motion that we are able to do rapidly, either via training or something deeper. As further evidence for this, I have video of John Taylor doing pure alternate at 315 bpm, and accidentally slipping into all downstrokes at the same speed. It was just something I noticed while editing, and when I replayed and slowed down the footage, sure enough, he was missing the string on the way back.
I also have footage of James Seliga doing mandolin tremolo at about 220 bpm where the motion almost becomes downstrokes. This is visible in slow motion and audible in sound:
Finally, if you listen to the tremolo section in the intro to the Van Halen song “Little Guitars”, the two-chunked accents are unmistakable:
Ergo, chunking your high-speed tremolo into twos, expressed as single round-trip tapping motions — this is the way!
Are you thinking of playing upstroke 8th notes at 250+ BPM, and the downstrokes just happen to fill out the 16ths? I don’t think my problem is the chunk itself and it’s definitely not a lack of movement speed. It’s finding something to “lock” to at a 250+ BPM click.
I’m kind of an odd duck. I can’t do consecutive upstrokes or downstrokes at speed, and I find unmetered tremolo to be a super weird experience.
EDIT: I think I’ve got it. Something different is happening.
This is interesting but I’m dropping the needle in a few spots but not seeing any elbow. Given the length of the concert footage (hour+) f you can edit the post to cue up the player at a representative example, that would be cool to take a look at.
Third clip with the two guys sitting down, also mostly just seeing wrist motion, but I didn’t watch the entire thing. Again, cue it up if you can!
For what it’s worth I think genetic disparities in speed potential can be quite significant, and experimenting with RDT has further solidified my confidence in that. I’ve been trying for quite a while to fix the “chronic tension” I had with my motions even at fairly unremarkable speeds like 170-180bpm with zero success, and I’m starting to think it was really just a result of fighting against a low genetic speed ceiling all this time, rather than some learned tension. My table tap tests were fairly unremarkable, alhough I could reach 200-210 with most of them, this was always with significant tension, all except for the RDT type tapping motions, and presumably dart thrower, although I haven’t tried that yet.
I’ve now got this RDT trailing edge motion working to some extent to where I can pull off a tremolo with it, although I’m still working on smoothing out the pick attack, and this is the only motion I’ve ever tried where I can get a fairly relaxed 200bpm tremolo. I can push to 220bpm for a few bars with limited tension with it too, and maybe 230 for a bar or two if I really brute force it. On a table I can tap 220 fairly comfortably, and 240 for maybe one bar so I think I’m basically at the limit.
Anyway, point being, even with this highly efficient motion, I can only reach speeds that most people can reach with less efficient motions. The feats you pull off in the video of 250 or even 270bpm playing are likely an impossibility for me due to genetic factors.
Yes, I’ve found the ones/twos idea to be very helpful for me also. I kind of feel like every pickstroke I make actually wants to return to its starting position on its own… like it almost just “snaps back”automatically …and this works regardless of whether I start with an upstroke or downstroke. I’ve also found it useful to think of it as being similar to dribbling a basketball…. i.e. just concentrate on repeatedly pushing the ball/pick away and no matter how fast you do this the returns will always come back at the matching speed.
I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I would draw the same conclusions. Also, sample size of one, of course — never really good for conclusions.
I can’t tap 270 on our joint motion tests, but with training I figured out how to do it on a guitar, much to my own surprise. It wasn’t that way at first. When I recorded the table tap lessons, my table tapping was much faster than my guitar playing. Since then, my guitar playing got faster but table tapping stayed the same. My conclusion is that the guitar motions are simply more efficient than the table ones because of a combination of the specific motions involved, and overall posture. On top of that greater efficiency, I’ve also learned to do them better through training. Your numbers might be lower right now than mine were to start with, but what you’ve described sounds very similar. Your overall progress sounds like it’s heading in the same direction.
The fact that you mention “tension” a lot is what makes me think there are also other things going on. I’m certainly very tense in those 270 clips, because all kinds of unrelated muscles are firing in the chest, shoulder, and back, that really don’t have to be. This is just due to the unfamiliarity of the technique, and trying to “go fast” by applying effort in a very general sense. In the new lesson which I filmed a couple days ago, I did some 270 again and it was better. I got less of the sudden chest / shoulder stuff, with more overall relaxation. There was less elbow joint motion in the resulting technique. I don’t know how much more improvement I can make, but I would guess there’s a decent amount.
Now, “tension” is a notoriously vague term, but if you feel anything like what I’ve described, then it’s possible that you simply have more issues with this to begin with. That can muddy the waters quite a bit when it comes to determining what your actual genetics gave you. Which we may never know anyway.
The good news is that if unnecessary muscle firing and other forms of “tension” are interfering, this is something training can do a lot to alleviate.
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Ah, that’s interesting. So I might have a few more bpm in the tank once I get more comfortable with it after all.
Of course, I’m not trying to draw any concrete conclusions, there could be culprits other than genetics so it’s more of a hunch, but after trying so many motions and ending up at the same 180-190bpm cut off point before tension(usually in the form of unnecessary bicep flexion and elbow involvement) creeps in with most of them, even with efficient motions like the index finger grip RDT, and the further supinated albert lee grip, I think it’s fair to say genetic limitation is at least a realistic possibility. I’ve given most of these motions quite a bit of time to develop and for optimisation to occur, but only experienced marginal improvement at most as a result.
Either way, if I can smooth out the pick attack and get the trailing edge motion working in musical contexts, I’m more than happy with a 220bpm ceiling for speed. Your video was invaluable in that regard.
This is the thing that makes me think you might be reading the signs wrong. When I hit may maximum speed with a given picking motion, it’s not because of tension. It’s because I can’t go back and forth with the pick any faster. I have no “tension” when I do the EVH forearm technique. It just doesn’t go any faster than a certain point. Maybe there is a way to do it faster, and maybe I could figure that out with more experimentation. But it’s not like I have pain and have to stop.
What you’re calling “tension” is something else: muscles firing in parts of your body that aren’t involved with your picking motion, causing fatigue and forcing you to stop. I’ve experienced that with these wrist motions and I talk about it a little in the YouTube lesson. But that’s not what reaching your neuological limit of speed feels like.
Nothing you’re describing sounds like “genetic speed limit” to me. It sounds like coordination / relaxation issues.
Edit: Also, note that before I figured this reverse dart stuff a few years ago, there was no picking motion I could do at 220 - 230. So whatever you think of your current abilities, they are faster than mine were up until pretty recently.