Struggling to increase Picado speed

Playing Technique
#21

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! :grinning: :grimacing:

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#22

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”.

Give into your anger lol…

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#23

Not at all my man… I was afraid I was maybe deluding myself. I had to post some evidence and get the truth out.

Okay, now I am not sure why this guy doesn’t get much love but he is UNREAL. Was. Truly a force technically, especially as an all fingers guy…

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#24

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!

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#25

Oh me too! I love that stuff, great playing and it’s usually pretty savage despite how pretty it is!

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#26

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.

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#27

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.

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#28

I wonder if we can find it! lol I keep coming up dry, but I haven’t really invested any serious time into it.

#29

Yeah, Matteo is the scariest guitarist I’ve ever seen in my life! Right next to Shawn Lane. But his tone is miles beyond. And he’s a freaking kid….

#30

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.

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#31

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.

#32

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 :hammer:

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!

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#33

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

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#34

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…

:smile:

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

#35

@joebegly why do you torment me?! Jeeze Louise, my first comment on this thread was “wrong forum, try somewhere else,” was I in for a shock! I love that Grisha’s so matter-of-fact, does everything in real-time one lick after another like he’s doing laundry or something. Amazing.

#36

Like I said I feel stupid. It’s got to be just like @Jakeh15 says where he just watched a little and was like “yep, that’s fast…moving on”. TBH I never thought that type of speed was possible with fingers. I always thought the Shawn Lane legends were 18nps (never heard the clips myself, but I don’t doubt it). Grisha is playing faster than that with high accuracy. Granted, he doesn’t do it for very long, just a few beats. Still…the only way I can play 6’s at 190bpm is if I play (wait for it…)…one note lol! You cannot disprove that the note lacked the potential be followed by other notes that could have gone that fast. :slight_smile:

There’s some other video I found of him where he shows some pretty complex flamenco cascading scales and he slowly dictates them in real time. There’s never any fumbles or “umm…errrr…wait” going on. Slow, fast, medium, whatever - he just never messes it up. It’s crazy because I don’t think I can play anything without messing up a little. I’m convinced I’m a little mentally damaged though lol. I’m also convinced he’s possibly a robot. I’d love to see him under the magnet.

#37

I think that scale picado exercise is what helped him. Did you watch that one all the way through? I mean the more you do this the holy hell your hands start to burn in the beginning. But eventually you will get more conditioned at it. As well as the fact you keep adding or taking away notes depending on how far you can go, you build notes, then take away, and just keep going until you cant go any more. LMAO The next day your hands will feel it.

I know for a fact this first exercise he shows can build incredible speed with plectrum based economy picking both ways with scalar passages.

Trust me this is no easy little kids exercise, on the surface it appears so. But trust me the brain and hands do stupid things at first. LMAO

You have to keep track of that last note you were at so there is that audiation at play, this takes some time to get to grips with, then the hands technique have to work right.

Economy picado is easier on that second exercise that descends and ascends both. Traditional picado it fries my brain. With economy I can use the lean (rest stroke) as my bookmark so it is easier to cycle. Traditional picado it has this skip step when switching strings musically descending so it throws me off big time.

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#38

Ha! That’s the one I was talking about where he goes through all these complex sequences and just doesn’t miss…anything. Most stuff I know that’s “fast”, if I had to talk through the notes I play and slowly explain it…I’d mess everything up because I only know it fast (muscle memory). I doubt I could actually “speak” while playing scales too. He’s just amazing. All one continuous unedited take too.

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#39

haha yea i would be much better off showing me playing then doing a voice over narration.

i am rewatching this picado exercise video and trying to hear him with the voice of arnold in the terminator. lmao! my cpu is a nueronet processor a learning computer. :smiley:

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#40

I would probably have to sing the pitch, saying the note name would destroy my brain. Another thing is on the very tail end of that second exercise when it starts to wind down or even on the wind up the 1 - 1,2,1 - 1,2,3,2,1 and the ending 3,2,1,2,3 - 2,1,2 - 1. i still haven’t come to grips with smoothly doing this i still struggle when i first hop on this exercise so the first minute or so is trying to smoothly get that aspect of it then i can begin to add more and the flow comes. but if i dont do this daily this error will always occur for me.

and the funny thing is its basically just saying abcdefg gfedcba eventually it would be easy you would think lmao. i would be more trying to focus on the engine motion of ring middle index, and probably just repeat the letter names on accident. :smiley:

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