Hand size and joint mobility matter for some things, and there are genetic factors at play there. While flexibility can be developed, there are limits and an attempt to push beyond that could lead to injury.
I don’t see any evidence that genetics play a major role in fretting hand speed.
You would have to show me the evidence that you are referencing.
I cannot show you an absence of evidence. This is impossible in any context. Moreover, the burden of proof does not lie with me. I am not making a positive claim.
Anybody who is claiming that genetics are a major factor in guitar speed is making the positive claim and the burden of proof lies with them.
When mechanics, fretboard organisations and line construction methods are accounted for, Shawn Lane’s playing shows no evidence of exceptional genetic potential or an abnormal nervous system.
Believing genetics has something to do with one’s ability to play fast would make a wonderful excuse. “I can’t do it…my genetics won’t let me.”
CtC is all the evidence you’d ever need to debunk that. Too many people play at extreme velocities to think genetics plays enough of a role to matter.
The only person I’ve ever heard suggesting their nervous system (or genetics) plays a part is Shawn Lane in a video from 1993. Two decades before Troy released his first video on YouTube.
At the time, Shawn was trying to explain something he didn’t understand himself. All he knew was he could do it like few others could.
Shawn seems to have gotten the “unusual nervous system” line from stories about Simon Barere, a Russian pianist who was known for playing very fast renditions of pieces, and who inspired Shawn to play fast.
See here at the 25 minute mark
I would imagine that Shawn probably started using this line because he didn’t completely understand why he could play the way he did, or couldn’t articulate quickly it to others. A prepared response to deflect a difficult discussion where he couldn’t give a satisfactory explanation in the time available.
I can’t even play 180 bpm quarter notes, my body just wont do it. I have no control at all at high speeds and my body starts to fly appart like a motor going to too fast. I’ve tried and tried and tried everything suggested and I just decided screw it I can’t do it, and I never will be able to.
Not everyone is capable of it. It freed me up to just play what I can play and have fun with again rather than trying to believe what people say that anyone can do it, when they clearly cannot! I’m glad you and other can do these things, good for you. But stop trying to tell people that can’t do it that they can. I’ve spent 40 years trying to do it, it starts to become insulting.
I know it’s not a very popular or inspiring answer, but in my experience, either genetics or something that’s likely congenital can absolutely be a limiting factor in playing fast. For me, it’s fretting hand ability. I’ve already posted about this before so I won’t belabor the point but I’ve spent years trying to get my fretting hand to behave at speeds higher than 90bpm. At a certain point it just “does the wrong thing” and seemingly no amount of practice has really helped. Even at slower speeds, my fretting hand has always been clunky, imprecise, and slow. Meanwhile, it sounds like most people don’t really struggle with the fretting hand at all until you start getting into crazy territory (> 150bpm at the very least).
Certainly genetics (or whatever other congenital limitations one may have) shouldn’t cause somebody to entirely give up on something they really love, but the trope of “there is no talent, only practice, and if you haven’t figured it out it means you haven’t been practicing hard enough” is very tiring and discouraging to hear. I know that generally people mean well, especially on this forum, but I suspect that those who say things like this haven’t had the experience of actually being really bad at something they were passionate about. It’s fairly crushing.
Coming from the other side, another hand-related hobby I engage in quite a bit is bouldering. I’ve been doing it on and off for over a decade. And for whatever reason… it comes extremely naturally to me. I’m the best climber in my social group and it’s not because I spend an extraordinary amount of time training (I don’t). When I’m on the wall, I often just have an intuition for which moves will work well and how to execute them. And often times once I’m done with a problem, I don’t even remember quite how I did it. My point is, I’m able to do difficult bouldering problems due to a combination of hard work and dedication but also simply because I’m unexplainably good at it through no doing of my own and it would absolutely be a lie to claim otherwise.
I’ve been doing your version rather than my own since it feels a lot better to play it this way. But this part…
…those 4 notes specifically, screw me up so damn much doing it the EJ way. I can play pretty close to speed with alt-picking, but the sweep on the G to the B sounds so much better and the economics of it are well worth it. It might be the main reason I want to learn the USX motion so much. The 3-string sweep in my version is cake but it lacks that THING. That stupid freaking thing I like so much, lol
That same little bit is also on the tail end of the most difficult Desert Rose lick as well. I posted it before and I think we both shared our tabbed versions of it. The few notes before that one has a 3-string sweep that I can nail, but the last 3 notes that follow are the death of me.
Which leads me to think that this might be my biggest problem area in this whole USX/EJ thing. It’s not the 2nps stuff, it’s this:
In this clip here, the first part is as fast as I can do the entire lick, which is not very fast… The next part is just dumb BS sweeping to show that I do have the technique down pretty well. The last part is my attempt to do the lick at a faster speed, and that’s where the issue is. The first sweep is fine but just trying to get to the C on the G-string suuuuucks lol And it’s like that with pretty much every lick with this thing in it that I try to do, no matter whose lick it is. I think I’ve had a handful of attempts with most of the other licks where I sorta kinda had 'em close to speed. That situation when everything clicks and you don’t know why or how to do it again. We’ve all had them, but not this lick. I have yet to even get close.
It was not my intent to be insulting. But my experience is different. That doesn’t negate or marginalize yours. It makes it different.
I’ve spent 35 years playing. Believing for most of that some were ‘blessed’ and others not so much. Not until CtC and a handful of extended lessons did I realize what was holding me back.
That isn’t what I said.
What I did say, primarily in the context of explaining Shawn Lane, was that I haven’t seen where genetics plays a role.
I stand corrected.
I think with guitar technique it’s actually not that people aren’t practicing “hard” enough but rather that they are practicing “too hard”. In ways I attribute it to great work ethic and it’s extremely counter intuitive. The best players found an easy way to make the motions so that they don’t have to work so hard. It’s why most of them got their chops within the first few years and spent the rest of their careers on the important stuff (composition/style/tone/phrasing etc)
So you probably don’t need to work harder, just work differently. There must be something you are doing that needs tweaking, maybe large, maybe small, to get it more in line with what other players have done.
We’ve seen you play probably 16ths at that tempo though lol! It sounded great, and Troy said it sounded great. You took the videos down, so the evidence is gone though lol!
We can’t feel what you felt. Maybe it didn’t feel great. Saying you can’t do something that you’ve clearly done vs not having control of that thing aren’t exactly the same problem. I get it though, this stuff is nuanced. If at the end of the day you feel that your fast playing is unusable, maybe there is no difference at all.
I have mixed feelings about the entire “genetic freak” sentiment. Virtuoso guitar playing is what I’ve chased my whole life. I’ve “done it wrong” a lot. I feel like CtC has me on the right track though. I can do things now I used to think were impossible and it definitely all feels easier. I don’t know that many would pay $ to hear me play though lol! I of course don’t care because for me it is just an insanely fun instrument. Success or failure I enjoy every moment. And maybe I have the physical capacity to move at Shawn speeds. I like to dream lol. I would say there is something “elite” about those who have found the way to unlock the capacity.
History is full of very ordinary things that have become extraordinary. There are probably plenty of engineers who could have done what Eddison did with the light bulb. Once you know the trick it’s easy! Figuring out that trick though…
I think it’s important that I clarify something.
It may be entirely possible for a person to have some limitations which will prevent them from being able to play fast. Whatever the origin of these perceived limitations may be is usually nebulous, but there are disorders affecting fine motor control and I would have to concede that they would limit a person’s ability to play fast.
However, most guitar players who complain about a lack of speed have not been diagnosed with any such disorder by a medical professional. Instead, they have built the narrative in their mind that there is something “wrong” with them, despite demonstrating more than sufficient movement speeds in tests.
Further, the existence of people with unusual difficulties is not evidence that players such as Shawn Lane are unusually advantaged or posess “freakish” nervous systems.
In my experience working with people, that would be more than unusually slow. Are you sure you mean quarter notes? One note per beat at 180bpm is 3 notes per second. I’ve worked with a lot of people since starting teaching and I have never met anybody with a movement speed that low. Do you mean 16ths notes (i.e. four notes per beat)?
Please, try this spacebar tapping test. Don’t think guitar, don’t think music, don’t think about keeping even time. Just mash the spacebar as fast as you can for 10 seconds. Try the test 4-5 times and share your results.
If you have the necessary movement speed, the issue is your ability to apply it to the guitar. Maybe you can’t do it, but until you learn how to do something, the possibility that you just haven’t learned how to do it yet still exists.
Your decision that you can’t do it is what eliminates any chance of you realizing that possibility.
It’s not my intention to insult you, but I have worked with players who’ve struggled for similar amounts of time and helped them to achieve results.
I’ve said this to you before, but it really seems to me that you’re catastrophizing. You demonstrated far more than sufficient movement speeds in tests, and you had some clear issues with fretting posture and mechanics.
Correct me if I’m misremembering, but you’ve been playing about four years now?
I don’t think there is no talent involved, or that it is only a matter of practice. I think it’s far more likely that the difficulties people experience are often due to ineffective learning strageties and inefficient practice patterns. It’s not usually an issue of not practicing hard enough, if anything “practicing hard” is an issue in itself.
I’d like to make it very clear to you that I share a profound understanding of this experience.
I think this gets to the core of the issue. We teach technique as a collection of mechanics and idealized movement patterns. We frame practice as the process of learning to perform those movements and repeating them.
Many people think they have issues with guitar technique, but really, they have issues with their “sense of guitar”. We don’t talk about the process of developing sensitivity or building intuition, though these are huge aspects of skill aquisition.
Maybe you could try doing more arpeggio doodling every day to see if you can strengthen that move in other phrases. This way at least you can work on doing it once really fast. You have to trick your body to learn how to cook the motion some how, this would be the way I would have to attempt it. Since I can do those two arpeggio phrases very fast. the back to back thing you could try working on like the pre solo build up yjm stuff like in the tracks rising force or big foot.
It took me 10 years to find an approach that worked, once I did, I had the motion completely down in 6 months. I can’t pick at Shawn Lane speeds but it’s just because I haven’t learnt a motion capable of those speeds i.e. I’m doing it wrong, not that I am incapable - I think this is true for most people 
So that’s why you were asking about how to do a dart thrower motion 
Sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. You’re correct, that’s not what you said. My comment was aimed at the trope in general which I’ve seen in other contexts but not here so much.
On the contrary, I’m actually much more at peace now after accepting that, at least for the moment, I seem to be stuck at a roadblock, and that it’s possible that the causes aren’t really in my control. I’d certainly like to discover that they are in my control, but if I never manage to do that, I can’t keep beating myself up. I was in a much worse place back a year or so ago (as is probably obvious from my posts) and of course you’re correct that four years isn’t long enough to draw any long-term conclusions. I’m not really trying to do that.
Yeah, this is something I’ve thought about a lot recently. Honestly, I think having a practice coach might be more valuable to me than a traditional guitar teacher at this point! For the moment, I’ve really backed off of a lot of the “practicing hard” stuff though (repetitive patterns, etc.) because I really wasn’t getting anywhere with it. I’ve been playing a lot more classical guitar recently. I worked on your rudiments for a few months (trying to focus on posture and fretting mechanics) but to be honest I could never get the “level 1” fretting pattern, or even the simplified “level 0” version. I think I need to start at maybe level -7 or -8
One thing I have been doing a bit of lately is simple chromatic permutations with the left hand only. 1-3-2-4, 1-3-4-2, etc. up each string, shift over a fret, and down each string, and repeat up the fretboard, with a focus on posture and timing consistency, starting at slow speeds (60bpm) and working up bit by bit. I know this isn’t really the approach you recommend but it’s the most “level -8” thing I could think of.
I promise - anything with fingers 3 and 4 following each other is a colossal waste of time. You won’t find any of the accepted ‘major’ players doing it except in specific situations - and even then only when there is literally no other way.
In 35+ years of playing, I’ve done more chromatic exercises I could possibly count… If there is one thing I can suggest to never do again - it’s that…it doesn’t do anything except waste practice time.
The funny thing is I’ve got a Bluegrass lick I’ve been playing since the late 80s. It has a 4321 chromatic passage in it that I could never get fast enough…and I worked at getting it rapid.
As odd as it sounds, not long after correcting my right hand and taking chromatic exercises out…I’m blasting through pretty much as fast as I’ll ever want to play it.
Perhaps they are a waste of time. I’m open to alternative suggestions. But you have to understand, I can’t even consistently tap a pattern on a table. My goal here is not to learn something useful or musical, that’s level 1. I’m targeting level -8, my goal is to learn to even move my fingers with any semblance of consistent control at all. Chromatics just seemed like one of the simplest possible starting points.
i would say if you are to do those patterns that you at least try to find other tetrachord sounds beyond chromatic so you can make sure to find alternative ways to justify using those abnormal patterns beyond chromatic. even if that means you might have to attempt them higher up on the fretboard if you are using four fingers per string to minimize the stretch.
Lots of really interesting posts here. Okay, so for one thing - I’d like to say this - it IS possible to learn how to play quickly and learn how to do some moves that seem impossible. I know this to be true because I am dense, dense, dense at times until I have that ah-ha moment. And at times I need to be dragged kicking and screaming, then assured and reassured that yes, it’s right!
Just curious for the original poster - have you tried to see how quick you can get even number of notes things? Those should be fast for anybody - even stupid dorks from Northern Canada who swipe their single string stuff and get trapped on their escape strokes… (That’s me I am talking about! 
) And I can play pretty quick/not too horribly so I’d think y’all are several steps ahead of where I am at picking wise? I spent quite a bit of time playing percussive muted rhythms with the RH only and it exploded through my playing. Odd NPS requires either DBX or a legato or hybrid picked escape hatch or sweepie sweepie moves… There’s swiping also, but it’s too soon still for me to talk about swiping hahaha
Also I spent a few months being coached by Tom Gilroy @Tom_Gilroy and I am STILL sorting through that stuff! We solved a major issue/obstacle and I highly recommend spending time with Tom he is extremely knowledgeable and very, very effective at communicating…
Of course, Tommo, and Troy here are extremely perceptive as well and although I certainly didn’t end up with things going the way I sort of hoped they would unfold with my technique, unfold it did and I am extremely grateful for the starting point I am at in regards to what I wanted to add to my music in regards to my plectrum technique… (Thanks guys!)
I’ve been playing and practicing like a m’effer for 45 years and there I was last Christmas struggling with life basically starting over with my picking. It worked, I stuck with it and it’s getting better. Now this week, I have the ability to do another thing which opens up all kinds of other options, but again I am at the beginning and will have to work at it and pay close attention to how I optimize this…
All I can say is try your best, post some clips and then try again. Try some stuff, step back, re-evaluate and then try again. A happy accident will occur; might not look like anyone you ever heard of but hey… Who gives a @$#@$
PS - Shawn Lane really loved music and I think his output is about much more than just sheer speed. Love that guy’s music! Powers of Ten for the win!
Wow man thats so cool, thats from him to you? 
Got a little story on it?
One of my favorite shred pieces is by Shawn, Gray pianos flying of course.
Theres also that song one more night. This deserves a proper produced rendition.
Gray pianos is like one of the happiest shred songs I’ve heard.
