Wow, he’s always been the enigma player for me along with Holdsworth but seeing it in HD is surreal after all these years. It’s kinda scary.
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Very cool vid, and I’ll always dig that Charvel 750XL.
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I’ve always said about this that every wannabe shredder who’s turned up at a local jam night and overplayed over some classics thinks they sound like this, but only Lane actually has.
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I think he did overplay it, but he did so tastefully. He’s also very strong with feedback and the whammy bar. What a monster!
Totally! He has a very slow piece in one of his instructionals which is all slow notes with whammy bar manipulations. In some ways it’s even more impressive to me than the fast stuff.
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I had been studyied footage of Shawn’s playing for years when these AI upscaled videos started appearing a few years ago.
Before these videos, it was very difficult to determine anything conclusively. There was very little high quality video of Shawn’s playing available, and the few videos that were of good quality provided poor angles. Shawn almost always wore long sleeves (to cover his psoriasis), and his increased weight obscures his movements in some of the videos shot near the end of his life.
I genuinely believe that if I can learn to imitate a method, I can replicate a result. For the reasons I’ve stated above, Shawn’s playing was very difficult to analyze and therefore difficult to imitate. I had spent a few years working on the patterns Shawn teaches on Power Licks, and I had made some significant gains in speed, but that didn’t transfer into the rest of my playing. I felt like things didn’t really “fit” together, that I was hammering a square peg into a round hole.
I worked out the EDC concept about 5 years ago, and I had some ideas about Shawn’s picking mechanics that I was testing out. About a year later, I injured my right shoulder and I couldn’t practice any elbow based picking mechanic without pain, so I took a break from practicing the picking lines for a few months.
I was learning a lot about the anatomy and physiology of the hands and wrists at the time, and I saw something in a video which I thought could be indicative of a dart-thrower movement. I could practice the dart-thrower mechanic without pain, and then things really started to coming together. Finally, it felt like the pieces were fitting together.
Then, upscaled videos of Power Licks and Power Solos were uploaded to YouTube. For the first time, I could clearly see and hear Shawn’s playing as it was. No more mystery.
Much of what I had inferred was now conclusive. The few creases that remained could finally be ironed out. Maybe these videos would have saved me a lot of time and effort if they had been available sooner, but I’m not sure that I would have seen what they could show.
The upscaled Power Licks and Power Solos have been taken down, unfortunately. I have them saved and I can see about getting them uploaded as unlisted videos.
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What I find impressive is the fact that he has the amount of noise control he does. During the fastest parts he is always picking so close to the bridge that he can’t be muting a ton with his right hand especially for how fast it is spasticity jerking all over.
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I forget who did a thing on this and a lot of these players that learned in the era where gain had a prerequisite of high volume all have impeccable muting with their fretting hand. That’s likely where he’s muting from. Might have been Ben Eller who did a vid on this.
Or he’s playing so fast it doesn’t matter. The other thing with that though and impressive is how well his left hand syncs with it - those speeds likely make left hand muting as the sole muting source incredibly difficult especially since the low E string loves to ring out sympathetically to pretty much anything.
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Another source of “muting” could be that he’s playing quite hard. We’ve seen this in Batio and Friedman’s playing, where their picked notes are so loud that you can’t hear the background noise from the ringing unmuted strings.
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In the upscaled versions of Power Licks and Power Solos, you can hear that there is quite often some noise on the lower strings ringing out. I couldn’t identify it in lower quality versions, there was too much background noise. Shawn wasn’t really all that clean (not like peak Eric Johnson, for example). You just can’t really hear it in a band context.
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Oh I’m definitely going to try some of those patterns at 4:30 to 4:50!
I wish there were a better version of this particular vid, but it’s still very cool and revealing. No masking tone, playing totally solo - definitely not hyper clean, but it’s all still great.
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If I had superpowers to bring dead musicians back for battles, one would be a whammy bar battle, Shawn Lane vs. Jeff Beck.
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Make it a three way with Vai!
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