Serrana as fast/aggressive as I can play it

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#1

Hey all,

Been practicing sweeping multiple different ways pretty heavily for the past few months, and what better warm up/practice/impossible piece to have in rotation than the arpeggio section from Jason Becker’s Serrana?

Experimenting with a heavier pick attack on this one mimicking Jason Richardson (I still can’t play up to speed with his weird no-barring fingering but it’s coming along, I may post a video of that version as well).
My forearm/hand tires out on this one pretty quick as I’m not great at separating an aggressive right hand technique with keeping my left hand relaxed yet but here’s the result.

A Couple notes on technique - I’m palm anchoring for this, and when changing pickslant/sweep direction it’s a pretty visible forearm rotation.

For contrast here’s my other sweep technique which is mimicking Becker directly.

I incorporate index finger push/pull in the direction of the motion which helps with both control of the pick and escape motion at the ends. Top and bottom of the five string arpeggios are hammer/pulloff no alternate picking involved, and the three string arpeggios are Yngwie economy sweeps but I’m both using my index finger to move the pick sort of like a light drawing motion with a pencil or fine brush, and moving my arm/hand as a whole to mute.

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#2

Already sounds great!

That’s an interesting approach! Is it also doable on the higher frets?

#4

It does, sort of - at the 24th fret it’s definitely crapping out, and it seems to for Jason Richardson too in videos I’ve seen. But I’m working on a Perpetual Burn and Altitudes playthrough and it works fine for those, it’s just difficult lol. Here’s some examples of the major five string box shape - you see it’s tough to hit at the 24th fret but in his Sweeping lesson he mentions this shape which incorporates a slide in the middle of the sweep I try out at the end. I think that’s the solution for the higher frets if you can get it smooth.

#5

Do you mean on the fretting hand or picking hand.

#6

Picking hand, in the second video you can see my thumb bend on upstrokes and it’s most obvious on shorter arpeggios. I was re-warching Jason’s AIMM performance of Serrana trying to get my sweeping back to where it was and better, so I between that and watching the Martin Miller cracking the code, remembered I kind of had a similar motion down at one point, but not nearly as refined and just began working on incorporating my index finger in the sweep.

I also have a friend who’s very clean/fast at sweeping and noticed in our jam sessions he would do something similar so I asked him why his thumb would move when he sweeps, he was just like “I don’t know but I can’t imagine sweeping without doing that so it’s weird to me that your thumb doesn’t”

So, if you look at Jason’s right hand in this video you see the thumb movement/wiggle pretty clearly.

Jason’s an interesting case because at a very young age he had incorporated naturally into his sweeping and picking movements index finger, forearm rotation, shoulder and elbow movement and anchoring. This video makes it super clear he’s using all of these, his picking looks very distinct for it

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#7

Ah ha, that’s a thing for sure, the thumb movement, I’ve also always done it, even sometimes for picking on the same string. Also seen Cesario Fhilo use and teach it! Though I remember one post here saying during a lesson with Chris Brooks, he advocated it was an inefficient way to pick, I suppose everybody thinks differently.

All the years before CTC and much into the Volcano seminar, my thumb would normally be in a bent position. But then I was not getting the right attack on a riff like Big Foot ( Alcatraz Malmsteen Live in Japan? ), those upstrokes needed more attack, it took a few weeks to get comfortable to get my default picking stance to be with a straight thumb, once that happed the tone was on point. I think one of the differences between the HM shredders and Malmsteen is his tone, and a lot of his decisions are based on the sound, ofcourse he says never really paid any attention to technique, in his words he wanted it to ‘sound right’, weather that meant playing it right or and the actual tone is still a mystery.

I’ve queued it to where you can see his thumb bend , but it’s a lot more subtle.

But either way, what your doing with the thumb is critical, thumb bent on the up sweeps, straightens out for the down sweeps. It can also be about reach, your hand is a motion platform, and your fingers are arms on this platform that have their own range of motion, kinda like tuners and fine tuners on a Floyd rose.

When you said push and pull on the index finger, I thought you were talking about using your index to guide all motions in your minds eye. I’ve found that if I consider my index the lead tone arm, my picking is always cleaner, it fan feel a little weird on the down strokes but it’s a cool little subtle trick I wish I remember to work on more often, it’s like tapping into some secret pathway in your mind.

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#8

I see what you mean about the index finger thing. It may be because I’m left handed, I’m definitely more analytical about my right hand movements because they are less natural for me. I think I do subtly consider whatever finger I’m starting the run out with as leading the pick though as if it’s pulling along the other hand with like an invisible string. I tend to visualize a lot anyway. I can say when I’m on a difficult run I’ve definitely conciously done something kinda like.

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#9

This sounds great! It sounds like you have pretty much got it nailed.

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#10

Also Cesario Fhilo is great, one of the only people I can find playing really clear George Bellas playthroughs, and I’ve been working on the solo from Airborne and will post it on here