Teach Me How To Eddie!

When I went to see Stevie Ray Vaughan play, he played the song “Dirty Pool” and used a picking technique for the tremolo picked chords in it that looked kind of like this technique.

Also, Pebber Brown teaches something called “Sarod Picking” which also is kind of like the Eddie technique.

Yes, it seems pretty spot on Eddie tremolo technique although more controlled.

Thanks dude! :beers:

This doesn’t really look like Ed’s technique to me. The path the pick is traveling is not curved in the way a forearm path is curved. This path is more straight into and out of the strings. That’s more of a wrist path, or a wrist-plus-forearm path.

Also, at about 9-10sec if you look at the elbow above the instrument body, that’s upper arm rotation, i.e. rotator cuff involvement. You don’t need upper arm to do forearm, and Ed’s upper arm is motionless. So there are some interesting things going on here but I don’t think this is exclusively forearm rotation.

We’d need to see some more examples of “sarod” to even know if all sarod players do this particular motion. But if everyone reaches around the side of the body like this player does, then that might explain why we’re seeing this blend of motions, and not a pure forearm thing like guitarists who approach from the top, and rest the ulna on the body itself.

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Yeah I would agree with this. My understanding of the gypsy and sarod techniques is that the body of the instrument forces the hand position and subsequent movements. I think in one of your CtC seminars you mentioned how the huge gypsy guitar body forces the hand away from the bridge.

A really easy way to imitate that sarod movement from the clip above is to position your pick on the strings allllll the way towards the bridge, right on top of where the string meets the saddle. It will force a natural arch in the wrist and it almost looks like the EVH technique, but I can tell from experience it’s still the Yngwie rotational mechanic where there is a blend of movements. This is provided you don’t actually start trying to do the EVH mechanic and instead just focus on picking as normal.

This is definitely where CtC materials come in handy, because I think there is almost a danger in reverse engineering a movement from another instrument without taking into consideration the specifics of the instrument that “creates” or “forces” the movement in the first place. The gypsy jazz technique is one such reverse-engineering case.

These are really great, thanks for posting. I remember the first one - sounds super smooth. This looks pretty much like forearm, as best I can tell. It looks like you have a palm contact point. Can you adjust this to mute the notes you’re playing or just the lower strings?

I get the trial and error/haphazard approach to dialing in picking hand motions. But I think the fretting hand has gotten a heavier dose of the “strength and conditioning” treatment by lots of guitar instruction over the years. For a long time I could see the merits of that, until after years of plugging away on the various pumping nylon-type exercises, my fingers neither felt stronger nor more generally “independent” of one another. So with the fretting hand, should more emphasis be on the trial and error/haphazard approach to learning movements? Or should precision be emphasized from the beginning?

Thanks! Yes I try to have an anchor point with the palm against the lowest strings. This acts like a mute as well as a “palm mute” when I want that. If I want open sound on the lowest strings, I simply raise the wrist a bit, causing it to flex slightly but more or less remain in the same position.

Yes, it’s also possible to palm mute the higher strings through leaning over more on the ulnar side with the arm, supinating the wrist more. This doesn’t feel that good though as it hinders the rotational motion a bit. I don’t know about you, but that part of my hand moves quite a lot and forcing it down, stiffens up the whole thing. Yngwie style swept ascending scales works great with palm muting though, having the hand in the same position.

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Dude that pop tarts lick @200bpm sounds sick. How long did it take you to attain that speed?

I don’t know! I guess I’d ask, what was the problem you were having that you felt could be addressed by strength training?

When it comes to fingering, most guitar stuff is super repetitive and not the kind of thing you need crazy coordination to do. It’s the same three or four diatonic shapes, or two-note shapes over and over again. Even jazz. It’s only when you try to transcribe non-guitar pieces, like Bach or something, that you even get anything weird at all.

Hey Juan, thank you. I already had the right hand speed down by the time I sat down to learn it in May 2018, so it was a week or two to get it to that speed. Once the coordination set in the speed started piling on.


I recorded a new clip today with much better lighting. It’s a run through of a riff from the band Emperor, specifically one of the opening riffs from the song “Ye Entrancemperium”. The song is recorded loosely around 240 BPM, this is at 260 (!) BPM because I wanted to push it very hard.

The first time around is with my standard technique, the second is the new EVH thing. At the end I threw in a diminished ascending lick to test string tracking with this new technique. I also tried the descending sixes, pepsi lick, sixes connected, and a bunch of Antigravity stuff but it was so poorly performed I cut the clip lol. It does seem possible, though.

So far I’ve found the only thing I don’t like about the technique is that you are prevented from thrash riffing. To constantly palm mute and then arch the hand away from the guitar is exhaustive. I’m still looking for a solution so I will post another clip this weekend to see what others think or if its possible.

This sounds awesome. How did you practice for this result?

I definitely misdiagnosed my problem years ago as a fretting hand issue rather than what it actually was (stringhopping and getting a smooth motion going on a single string!). So I ended up buying a lot of instructional materials that emphasized “strengthening” or “developing finger independence” in the left hand.
Suffice to say that didn’t solve the problem!

Your EVH tremolo post and the comments about it made me wonder about this emphasis on fretting hand “strength training” found in so many books and videos. I think you’re right that fingering tends to be fairly patterned and not requiring crazy coordination in general. But if the phrase does seem to involve some tricky leaping around, I’m curious what a good process is for how to get something like this up to speed. You do talk about this in your lesson on the solo to Yngwie’s “Now Your Ships are Burned” (which, for anyone who hasn’t taken the time to go through it, is an amazing journey of a guitar lesson with a lot of early-era CTC wisdom!), specifically in the legato flurry at the beginning. You mention picking target notes for each of the four legato phrases and practicing cycling through them. That makes sense to me, but I’m curious how you got something like that up to speed. Did you have to work slowly and methodically and increased speed over time, or did you play fast and sloppy and improve the accuracy over time, just like we do with the picking hand?

The Yngwie thing? I don’t recall having to work that up to speed. To be clear, I am no fretting master. I’m just living in a decades-old comfort zone playing super common shapes that everyone is familiar with. I definitely recall a time when fretting “scales”, like the solo in Van Halen’s “On Fire”, was awkward and foreign. But that was, literally, 30 years ago!

Again, I only realized how repetitive it all is when I transcribed some Bach relatively recently. I get it, fingering is not inherently easy, and there are definitely weird fingerings that are not idiomatic to guitar.

So your question of how do you learn something new that you find complicated fretting-wise, I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I would guess that memorizing sequences of motions you already know how to do (fretting) is a fundamentally different motor system challenge than acquiring a new motion itself (learning picking).

I would guess further that the sequencing of known motions responds better to traditional music practice, like slowness and repetition, because it’s largely a memorization challenge. And the acquisition of new motions responds better to the techniques we are discussing here because it is about the discovery of a way of moving that is totally unknown to you currently.

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Wow! These are great quotes! I have long wondered how to put into words the seemingly fundamental difference between learning picking vs fretting hand challenges. This makes it all clear. Thanks!

This is cool Troy! I like how you use an EVH signature pick too!

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Thanks! Well it’s hard to say because, as many of us, I don’t really have a very structured way of practising. But there has definitely been a lot of the same licks going round and round. All the basic sequences, ascending and descending. I also spend a lot of time working on swiping and getting that to melt into the not swiped stuff as effortless and unnoticeable as possible.

At the moment I mostly work on the absolute basics, getting a good reliable tremolo that is totally relaxed and as uniform as possible on all the strings. The high strings are kind of reliable right now but the low strings are a bit hit and miss on different days.

Your playing as absolutely fantastic though! You have got a very unique setup/form it seems. Do you play only upward escape (DWPS) with that setup or do you also do downward escape (UWPS) or two way?

That’s funny, for me it’s the opposite, as I’m more at home on the lower strings. I guess it’s just a function of where we spend our time practicing and not much more than that. In other words a mental thing.

The things I do are DWPS and TWPS for three note per string sequences as in the Antigravity seminar. 90% of the time for me it’s DWPS because almost all metal involves even numbers on lower strings, especially for thrash metal riffs so that you can hit a power chord/dyad/actual chord with a downstroke. I’ve never tried UWPS because I’m afraid of the tension it causes in the right arm to maintain that position, and besides I can’t get a chunky palm mute with edge of my hand rotated outwards. The speeds I usually play at are 180-260 BPM and I’m not willing to blow my arm out anytime soon haha.

I found these pictures in my archives of how Eddie holds his pick. These are from Guitar Player magazine and were published in 1984. I’m posting them here for discussion.

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