Mike Phillippov gives his perspective on this video.
[Doing Legato To Shred Is NOT “Cheating”… But THIS Might Be - YouTube]
I was watching along and nodding about it being reasonable until he mentioned his mentor was Tom Hess, at which point I closed the video.
Even if the content is decent, I refuse to have anything to do with Tom Hess because of how… cultish… he tends to be.
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I watched the video all the way through and had some thoughts.
I did cringe when I heard this, but right is right. If someone is wrong about 99 things but correct about 1, we shouldn’t throw it out just because the person is ‘usually’ wrong. I think that extends even further if someone is affiliated with someone else. Most of what he says in the video makes sense. I’ve seen a small number of his other videos. There’s always some good advance in them, with a variable amount of dogma. So I do want to call out the danger. Beginners (and even experienced players who don’t understand how all this stuff works) can easily be misguided by a great player who speaks charismatically.
Agreed. But taking Mike’s advice (in a free video) I think is fine 
There’s almost nothing he says in this video that’s at odds with Troy’s recommended approach.
Mike mentions people spending 3 or 6 months practicing ONLY tremolo. That’s of course a huge waste of time. Nowhere have I seen Troy advocate anything close to this. The point of the tremolo is to identify what your escape motion is so that you don’t waste time practicing things that don’t work with your motion. Are you an Yngwie fan but you’re best motion is from the elbow? You’ll have to adapt his patterns to your motion. Are you a USX player and really want to play Tumeni Notes? Get good at hybrid picking, stomach the way it sounds with some legato, or learn a DBX motion. If you’ve done a tremolo test, you’ll know what makes the most sense to do next…
And what you should do next, is what you should do almost immediately next. That is, to work on hand sync on patterns that stay on one string, using the same motion in your acceptable tremolo. This doesn’t happen after 3 to 6 months on just tremolo picking, it happens either the same day you find your best tremolo motion, or maybe the next day if you want to go out and celebrate that you found your tremolo motion.
Mike mentions a tremolo giving people a false sense of how fast they can play. The idea of people thinking that their fastest tremolo is the same number you’d give someone if they asked you how fast you could play is…weird. It’s not hard for me to do a tremolo at 230 bpm, and there are several motions I can use to generate this speed. I’m not abnormal and this is nothing to brag about, because most people are capable of doing a tremolo this fast. I would never tell people I can play guitar at 230 bpm though. I would tell them that most days I can play 16ths in the 180 - 190 range, and on my very very best days I can last about a measure or two at 208. And even that last speed I mentioned, I feel it’s like people at the gym that brag about how much they can bench when they have 2 spotters and also bounce the bar off their chest. Point being, I don’t think what Mike says about most people thinking their tremolo speed is also their speed is something that most people would follow.
Also, he mentions how tremolo is sort of a fake representation of how to play because your only playing on either side of the string and not getting the benefits of practicing string switching. This indicates he isn’t familiar with the concept of single escape. This is important - if I had to sum up Troy’s pickslanting discoveries, I’d say something like “If you organize your patterns correctly, switching strings should feel no different for your picking hand than a tremolo at that same speed”. In fairness, Mike then plays (very well I’ll add) an excerpt from Erotomania. Yeah, that requires mixed escape. No amount of tremolo will teach you mixed escape. That’s sort of apples and oranges though. There are countless awesome players who can only escape in one direction. Troy recommends we find out what great single escape playing feels like prior to any other adventurous stuff (mixed escape or DBX). We get a baseline when we do this and can compare other little ‘projects’ to this.
And that’s sort of the whole point of the tremolo too. It should feel effortless. We need to use that as a baseline for anything else we do. I was a decent player before I found CtC, but I’d never felt a motion anything quite like the fast tremolo Troy helped me find. I’ve used this ‘feeling’ to learn 2 different USX motions and 2 different DSX motions, and about 3 DBX motions. For clarity, I know that’s not Troy’s purpose for most people. It’s to help them play the music they’d like to play. Most of my guitar playing career I could play a decent amount of what I wanted to play. So learning these motions is fun for me because it’s a measure of progress, just like learning new songs or licks is for most people. It’s being able to conquer a thing I couldn’t previously do, which feels great for a basement guitarist like me.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. A tremolo has its place. It’s a big part of the CtC methodology, but it’s also supposed to be a brief part. It should take days or even weeks, not months. Once you learn it, start applying it.
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Are you saying you can’t do anything with your 230 motion? Why not? If you’re referring to the elbow motion, we’ve seen it, it looks great and sounds really smooth. No reason you can’t use that for some type of single escape phrase.
This is a good example of a major misunderstanding of the purpose of finding a fast tremolo motion in CTC.
I can’t sync the hands at those speeds. Granted, I haven’t spent tons of times on those speeds. Maybe I should make that my pet project for a couple of months…
Once I establish sync, I don’t notice it varying with speed. This sounds like more of an issue with this particular joint motion being unfamiliar and not having worked on chunking.
Most probably. It’s always felt ‘mental’ for me at those speeds. Nothing holding the hands back, just some connection I lose where after going through the pattern like once, I cannot loop it again. It ‘falls apart’, if you will Sorry, couldn’t resist!!! lol!
Right, that’s not sync falling apart, that’s just lack of sync. The motion can’t be triggered as a single thing that just goes on its own, there has to be some way of triggering it repeatedly in chunks or it will just drift.
I’ll make a little project out of it and report back. Goal will be 160 bpm, 6’s with elbow motion.
It’s actually really pertinent to this thread, because I found that elbow tremolo almost right away. I know I can see you shaking your head as you read this, but the biggest thing I’ve done with that motion is…not use it. Instead, I recalled the feeling and applied it to other motions I wanted to learn.
I’m aware it’s not what you advise people to do. I’m a special case because my goals aren’t typical. Learning new motions is fun for me. I’ve played more songs in my life than I care to remember, so learning a new motion gives me more warm fuzzies than playing 6’s at 160 bpm would. After all, it should be about having fun, right? I’m fully a retired musician and just play in my basement.
But I do take your point, and since it jives with all the stuff I wrote above about how to use a tremolo to play actual phrases, I’ll do this science experiment and take a largely untapped motion (elbow) and hopefully get some good speedy licks going. Hopefully fairly quickly
Actually this raises an interesting question. When someone is first experimenting with their joint motions and find they can do multiple fast tremolo motions, how do you then decide which motion to pursue? Assuming they don’t have the time or desire to pursue multiple fast joint motions
I think the answer is, the one that allows them to play the music they want with as little ‘adjustments’ as possible. Ex: someone is a huge Yngwie fan and has demonstrated great tremolos with forearm rotation and another with elbow…they should probably go all in on the forearm motion as that should have them playing Yngwie licks in short order.
To me that’s a totally different case than someone who can only do forearm rotation but they are a huge Andy James fan and want to play his stuff. Adjusting his lines to be USX would presumably be less work than them learning a brand new motion.
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Good examples, that makes sense.
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Might be a good idea to split this if possible. Tom Hess and tremolo picking…not exactly a good match.
Sorry for the derailment!!
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It’s very common for players to do elbow and not know how to feel a chunking pulse. And I think this is why there is this impression that elbow motion can’t be “controlled”. I don’t really do DSX elbow so I can’t really comment personally, but since we hear Vinnie Moore and Bill Hall synchronizing just fine then I’m sure it can be chunked. So if you experiment with this, let us know.
One hint I’ll give you is that for very fast picking motions, thinking about them as tapping has been very easy to implement chunking. Meaing, even if you’re picking a very high speed like 240 or above, your downstrokes are only half that fast. It’s not hard to hear that. That sense of “tap tap tap tap…” is the chunking pulse. Try that out on your elbow technique and see if it works. For science.
Right. And to be clear, I’m not of the opinion that there’s anything wrong with elbow. We’ve seen more than enough awesome players, like you mentioned, that there’s clearly a way. I think it all felt too new, too soon for me. I wasn’t frustrated or anything, more excited by the possibility of getting a similar feeling from another motion I’d been messing with. Plus back then I just had hand sync problems in general, that I wasn’t even aware of. Ex: I couldn’t do groups of 3 fingers over and over (index middle pinky like Tom Gilroy’s EDCs) in straight 16ths, since over time the pulse won’t line up with the index finger. I could only do them as fast triplets and I had to have the index finger directly on the beat. I’ve largely conquered that.
I’ve been messing with the elbow thing a little more today. I think I can make good progress with it. I’ll report back with some magnet footage.
Why is it called a magnet? To me that thing that holds your cell phone on the guitar neck looks like a clamp.
It is a clamp but Troy branded it “The Magnet”. It resembles this
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