I’ve analysed a few solos in slow motion, enough to deduce the general gist of his system, but I’m sure there are exceptions so take this with a grain of salt, but here is the general framework:
Ascending:
I-M alternation for 2nps, add in ring finger if there are 3 notes on any given string(although occasionally he arbitrarily sticks to I-M, even when the ring finger addition would be appropriate). He also uses A-M-I for 4nps chromatics at high tempos
Descending:
Almost always forgoes A-M-I in favour of I-M with index finger economy when possible except at the highest speeds. He seems to avoid descending A-M-I in general except at his highest speeds, although I have seen him do 4nps descending with A-M-I, and mixtures of 3nps and 2nps descending with A-M-I. For example in his Technical Difficulties cover instead of doing the descending scalar sextuplets with 3 fingers which would theoretically be much easier, he does the ascending 2 string portion with 3 fingers, then completes the descending portion with I-M only. So no A-M-I with any economy as far as I know since he very rarely does it descending, but I could be wrong.
Edit: Oops, I was wrong. I just double checked and he does do index finger economy for some A-M-I fragments, but no ring or middle finger economy. He also does use A-M-I when descending, often mixed with I-M with index finger economy, or sometimes purely A-M-I for descending scalar lines when possible.
There’s also a video someone shared on another post called “Matteo Mancuso game changer fingerstyle” which is worth a look.
That almost seems detrimental I would choose this system as you have a bookmark point of where to go next. The rest/lean is your bookmark to guide you as you learn(engineer) new cross string phrasing/sequences/fragments/etc picking/fingering pathways. This is similar to how the gypsy jazz thumb/plectrum pick works. furthermore you retain the engine motion of always doing a,m,i even though you are crossing strings the motion remains. He doesn’t go into the economy picado until about the half way point of the video. I didn’t time stamp because you should watch this entire video, he has some amazing insight into picado technique that will be highly beneficial to you as you learn.
Does it have to just be Picado? I messed around with just jamming around with some ideas and came up with some stuff on the fly that could be probably developed into some “okay” stuff? PMI and PAMI and heaps of legato, although I can do a pretty dang fast tremolo (For me) with either of those two and trust me, I suck - if I can do it anybody can! Heck, the OP is probably already much better at this than we might think!
After I recorded this video I messed with some just 2 finger stuff; Billy Sheehan is a master of 2 and 3 finger quickness… Maybe he’s worth checking out also?
Anyways, yes it’s terrible, and yes I’m cool with it.
Okay, Joe! Thanks so much - always so kind, but the truth is that this is my playing ability minus any regular practice or technical development. So, it could likely be a lot faster, better connection to time clock, rhythmic control and heck, even note choice in this situation is heavily influenced by ability or lack thereof!
I posted it because I am a massive music nerd, and to maybe justify/clarify any opinions I might have on the posted topic. Y’know, show where I am coming from!
So some observations on fingerstyle; Matteo is bloody awesome, as is Billy Sheehan, as was Paco DeLucia. Victor Wooten can do some crazy fingers stuff, Steve Bailey as well. Les Paul, Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins are interesting as well and of course, Jeff Beck! Check these guys out, all of them as well as the No name YouTube people mentioned above might have a bit of information that might help.
My .002 on fingers playing- keep in mind that I am nobody, these are just my experiences.
2 fingers, 3, or 4 - playing with them going from MI or AMI or MIP or AMIP or PMI and PAMI flows the best, and for me is more conducive to speed.
I don’t have nails - I use finger pads, and that is likely quite a bit slower. But growing out my nails is impractical for several reasons…
My fastest tremolo PAMI is 16ths at about 180 - I tested that last night after I made the video. Fingers are really light, just brushing the strings. It’s a different tone, lots of harmonics but it could be harnessed to do some crazy stuff I bet. For me having that thumb in there allows me to play quicker stuff, AND have access to a mute so that I can throw heavily muted legato in there for another flavour…
My tone in that video has way too much gain - half that in regards to the distortion probably would sound just as rocking…
It takes time. The very disciplined classical and flamenco guys built their abilities over time, same with Billy Sheehan and Victor Wooten, Paco and Matteo etc. Trial and error over time…
Okay, there IS a trick, and for two fingers or 3, it’s like you don’t separately articulate them, the two fingers move as one, however they are positioned slightly apart so they “land” one after the other; kind of a “reverse flick”. It will have a real dotted 8th to 16th feel with 2 fingers, and 8th 16th 16th feel with 3. Doing it as tremolos won’t take long to develop, you can even practice it on a table top. Using it on various different strings and varying the rhythm can be a challenge though…
There’s an inner voice that will tell you that “hmmm this feels like I am on to something” or “$&@%! “ or “I need help!!!” anyways, listen to that voice - it’s always right.
Okay, I hope some of that is helpful- again, I am no expert - you can tell by my playing! And some of these findings may simply be just due to me not having any formal classical/flamenco training. I think if one can just keep at it, and try to make music while optimizing along the way then everything should work out!
See to me, nails make things more challenging to play and slow me down. They improve the tone (subjective, but at least in classical/flamenco almost universally accepted, less important in electric and steel string acoustic though IMO), but there is a very specific place you have to catch the string. It’s the perfect combination of flesh and nail and the margin of error is pretty tiny. Not enough flesh, the note is thin sounding. Too much, it will be dull and won’t project. I think it’s for this reason that we’ve never (that I’m aware of) here anyone in the classical circles say “just gun it, clean it up later”. Flailing our fingers as fast as they go would likely produce tones that are very inconsistent. They’d see that as very bad (and it is) BUT, we know better now. We know that “learning a motion” is one thing, and the contact point accuracy I mentioned is totally separate from that.
Again, I think if we’re trying to do this picado outside of flamenco/classical, sans nails, it probably doesn’t even matter. I mainly mention it because I had no clue about this until I studied classical. I thought they were just “fingerstyle players who happened to have nylon strings” but there’s a lot more to the technique than that.
To me this is highly interesting. The last time I worked on classical tremolo I took this approach and I got great results. I think there is a speed, likely in the 16hs at 130-ish bpm where doing the fingers more “individually” is no longer fast enough. And to put this into perspective:
I don’t know that I’ve heard any well trained classical guitarist play a tremolo that fast. And this by no means indicates I doubt you. I fully believe you and that gives further weight to the thought that we should all expect these high speeds from ourselves if we’re doing the motion correct.
Back the “unit” approach - I’ve wondered in that’s possible for the strict I M alternation or maybe more importantly, if that’s how the masters are achieving these high speeds. Part of me thinks “well that could very well be the secret sauce” and another part of me thinks “nah”. If you watch this at 25% speed and focus on the little muted “warm up” he does on the low E, to me it looks like his fingers are individually extending and not just sort of “opening and closing a fist in sequence”
And that “extension” is not even what I’d expect. The people who I’ve heard talk about this say that they are just “releasing the tension” but I feel like there I’m seeing a “flicking” motion to cause the extension. Who knows if I’m right about any of that though.
Anyway, I don’t have the answers lol! I think to fully crack it though, we have to consider all possibilities.
@Scottulus I think you’ve shown us enough that someone could easily get a high speed style going from just those motions. It may be a matter of them finding patterns that “match” sort of like single escape playing. I don’t think crossings matter quite as much fingerstyle but just keeping a PAMI synced with moving fretting fingers may dictate we have a core bucket of licks that’s easy with that. Well done
Hey Joe - I may be deluding myself, and that tempo may not be accurate. Video can tell the truth! Sooo I torture you with some mid-morning tremolo practice… Talk is cheap, right? The playing is bad, I admit and there’s a lot of “out of sync” stuff but keep in mind this is out of the gate stuff, zero lessons and teaching, no practice just the fruit of “messing around” for like, 45 years hahaha
As such, I don’t have a clue what is the “right way” to do this, I can only go by “what gets 'er done”. When people start saying “rest stroke blah blah blah definition this, definition that see video # A7_B_0001234567_a in folder 6 of subsection 9” , I almost immediately roll my eyes into the back of my head and realize that what I really want to do is whip out a lightsaber and go Kylo Ren on my practice room via sith tantrum hahaha
Anyways, to the original poster - I hope some of this is relevant or slightly helpful; maybe in a subtractive sort of way/process of elimination! You now know what NOT to do!
Awesome! I hope you didn’t view my last post as a challenge or anything lol! I believed you were getting 180ish but thanks for the evidence just the same. To me, this is great. If you spent time “living” at that tempo, I bet 160 would feel like cruising and that’s more than enough speed to play classical tremolo pieces at the tempo people are used to hearing them. The fact that just “off the cuff” you can get speeds like that and sustain for a couple measures means “something’s there”.
Oh he was awesome. I’m a huge Chet Atkins fan ( he was my gateway to fingerstyle playing, classical followed soon afterward), and Chet was a big fan of Buster. Great player!
I’d never heard of him until around 5 years ago, and his playing actually briefly fired up an excursion into fingerpicking for me, something I’ve never had much interest in. I have an instructional dvd with him around here somewhere. An absolute shame he passed away so young.
Summoning @joebegly holy crap dude, that clip of Matteo playing PG got my attention in a big way. Someone get that guy a Magnet, I’d love to see the mechanics that allow such articulation with electric-style string-spacing, not to mention the control required to avoid unwanted noises with high gain. I’m certain you’re right, there’s a technique out there unknown to the average fingerstyle player, and likely to the elite as well, something akin to the Volcano.
It won’t be easy, even the few closeup clips I can find of the best guys conceal the escape motion. Also the classical world is still pretty conservative . . . the “slow and perfect, speed up incrementally” dogma is near-universal, as you mention. Even knowing the exact technique YJ uses I still cling to alternate picking, I don’t see classical players hooking up Magnets en masse in a bid to overturn traditional pedagogy any time soon.
True. After all, somehow, what they have been doing all these years “works”. Thanks to YouTube it’s clear how many amazing classical players are out there.
So, I feel dumber than usual, but I don’t know that I ever even watched this video all the way through lol! I didn’t even realize that he was talking in it. Troy posted this in a different thread, and for some reason I felt compelled to watch the whole thing.
Did you all catch that he gets to 6’s at 190 bpm ?
Even as he bumps up the metronome there are barely any klunkers or “sync up time to feel the beat”. Most of the reps he just goes straight into and it’s just super clean. Sounds so good too. Rest strokes with nails + great hand sync makes each note sound like a freaking
Grisha might be a machine…
Do we know of others who are this fast with picado? What types of top speeds are people like Matteo hitting? It’s crazy that by comparison Technical Difficulties is quite slow lol!
Funny, I had the exact same experience after Troy posted that and was gobsmacked when he showed the metronome at 190 at the end. I had watched it only enough to categorise it as ‘really fast’ in my mind and move on. 16ths at 285 is ludicrously fast, and yet it sounds so articulate.
In the technical difficulties video Matteo plays sextuplets at 130bpm which would be 195 in 16ths with only I-M, and there’s no indication that it’s his maximum effort, so with 3 fingers he’d easily reach well into the high 200s no doubt. The fastest other examples from him that I can think of off the top of my are his ‘Silk Road’ solo video, and also the timestamp in the video below. I haven’t clocked the speed but they’re quite fast
Man I thought you guys got this when I was posting up that Felipe Coelho video on this 3 finger economy picado speed secret trick long time ago…
There are some other more hidden flamenco players that can do it, but I would have to dig up their names. I believe their youtube channels probably aren’t very popular since it’s more traditional flamenco. I also think 3 finger economy picado gets negative feedback. As it is very difficult to hide the dynamic when the sweeping through the lean occurs (the angle changes further when sweeping through that second string so the attack will be weaker) on a wooden classical guitar. But it might very well be possible to hide it a bit better on an electric guitar via high quality studio compression rack module if necessary.
With the ease of the technique this would be the way I would choose to try to shred if I really wanted to get back in that groove again. But I am just enjoying chill laid back gypsy jazz rest stroke, at my slower speed. LOL
