I resubscribed (again!) and, for me, the explanations of picking motions are clearer using the table as an example. It made everything much easier to understand.
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@Troy this is fantastic work, well done. Extremely clear and inspiring.
I have gone over all the chapters and just tested myself with all the motions. Most are topping out consistently at 210 BPM. However, at that poiint Iâm also noticing my shoulder tensing upâŚ
Attempting the âHyper Pickingâ technique, almost immediately my wrist, elbow and shoulder lock up with tension. Not in any way that feels healthy either! My question would be how to progress with any of these motions when shoulder tension appears to be a main underlying occurrence?
Amazing work with the new chapters and thank you for everything youâre doing.
Iâm honored to be a part of this update! I think itâs awesome that the CtC team continues to enhance and improve the content. And this update is fantastic. The fact you have broken down the motion tests into something that a viewer can immediately do while watching the video (no guitar needed) is incredibly powerful.
I watched the new content and was super impressed (Tommoâs wifeâs results were shocking to me). Iâm looking forward to going back and trying each test!
I think you got the cutoff point right for this section. Itâs very easy to get overwhelmed in the technical details. I know I did (and do). I re-watched the Primer several times before I realized: studying every detail in every section of the Primer wasnât efficient. I just needed to put pick to string and NOT over-think it. The phrase âtool around with itâ is used often in the Primer and man - that cannot be overemphasized.
I think the simplicity of these new tests will be enable them to be powerful because you canât really over think it. Tap your hand on the table. Scribble with a pen. Can you do it? Great, youâre on your wayâŚsimple.
I do think a future update should focus on the next step after getting the basic motions working. You talk about control and slowing a working motion down just enough to start doing something with it. I think that topic deserves further attention. I suspect that could be challenging though. Hand sync could be a whole separate primer!
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Yes, for sure we will include more stuff on what to actuall do once the hands are moving. Hand synchronization itself is a relatively simple topic, especially if youâre a rock player, and donât mind playing repeating single-string patterns like the Yngwie stuff.
Thanks for doing the case studies! Great footage, and we have at least one individual on here whose feedback resonated with your story in particular.
That would be great! I enjoyed your recent addition to the primer very much and itâs fascinating to see, how fast we actually are without guitar and pick. Editing and everything is absolutely on point, too.
I also noticed that more and more âYouTube-playersâ or online guitar teachers seem to implement the CtC-findings in their lessons (for example the great Ben Eller, Justin Hombach and one or two random ads for lessons in social media). Thatâs what made me think: wow, Troy offering more âtraditionalâ lessons to songs or solos but building on all the material here would be terrific. A detailed lesson on Technical Difficulties (or for example, more modern, Teemuâs Winter Madness) in the CtC framework taught by our favorite shred nerd, Iâd definitely pay some extra cash for that. 
I donât anticipate doing lessons on entire âfamousâ songs or solos. What we did in the seminars is pretty close though, where we pick out specific phrases here and there from players like Yngwie to explain how certain techniques work. To my mind there is no need to go through an entire song or solo note for note once you get the concepts with a few representative examples. âTeach a man to fishâŚâ kind of thing.
What I was referring to here is doing more instructional stuff on the general process for playing coordinated left and right hand phrases, no matter what the phrase is. The general concept of starting out fast and slowing down gradually, is the same. But itâs always helpful to show examples so people understand very clearly how to implement it.
On the song front, @Tommo is working on more seminar material that will include a number of awesome songs he wrote in an '80s metal style that are tailored for specific picking motions. We need more musical material that someone who is learning motions can play all the way through, where we know for sure that every lick will work with certain motions with no extra tailoring. This way you can play songs instead of exercises, which is always more fun and to our mind, a better learning opportunity. Weâll be filming that over the first half of this year and weâll let yâall know when itâs ready to roll.
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Weâve been answering YouTube comments on the Van Halen video, and a surprising number of them seem to think weâre talking about the rotational forearm motion, and somehow getting it wrong. Things you donât even think about addressing until youâve already uploaded the video. A 20-second sequence showing the two motions and stating clearly which one weâre teaching and why, would have been easy to add.
Another comment is that the âairâ demonstrations of the motions are forced because my arm position isnât really horizontal, so the â1:00â motion Iâm making isnât the real 1:00 motion, just one Iâm choosing to aribtrarily look like 1:00. That may be, itâs just rough approximation to get the concept across. Was anybody really confused by this?
One way to address this, which didnât occur to us until after we were done editing, is to simply rotate the video of the pen scribbling until the arm is horizontal. That makes it pretty clear I think. Hereâs what that would look like:
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Thanks for the reply. Yesterday I rewatched the first Teemu-interview and there you already pointed out that your goal is more to create âtextbook-/reference-materialâ for guitar teachers who then can use the findings in their teaching. Makes sense to me and I didnât expect CtC to become another lick library (although youâd do stellar job).
Iâm a Tommo-fan since his Dream Theater and Paul Gilbert covers, so count me in for his songs.
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That is MUCH clearer, @Troy. I already had a grasp of this but this visual requires no imagination and I think someone trying to learn the clock concept would get this immediately.
Thank you for this update. I imagine fielding all the comments is a bit exhausting and frustrating especially after doing all the work to make the content!
I think this overall addition to the primer is extremely valuable.
Ok someone help me out here. I have a comment thread on the YT video with a commenter who suggests something is wrong with the demonstration of the motion. Which is fine! Iâm plenty open to understanding when Iâm wrong. But at this point after several rounds of back and forth, I honestly canât tell what the concern is.
At first, I assumed he wasnât getting the concept of wrist motion versus arm motion, i.e. the motion Iâm doing in the air is the same wrist joint motion, just with a different arm position. Then I thought he was suggesting that I was altering the wrist motion itself from the table to the air. Which is completely possible â probable, even. I may very well be a little off in the air without a table to rest on. But itâs the concept that counts. Based on his subsequent responses, Iâve now flip-flopped between these two possibilties and canât really tell. Is there a third possibility Iâm missing?
I canât figure how to link to the comment thread itself, but itâs the user âGavin Snyderâ.
To be clear, this is not an issue of being defensive or trying to win an argument, weâre always interested when weâre missing some obvious point and getting something wrong. So just trying to make sure thatâs not the case.
Read it and saw what heâs referencing; I donât think he understands / notices the angle of your hand on the table. He says something to the tune of âyou could in theory hit 1:00 but not 7:00, since the table would get in the way⌠This is 3:00 to 9:00 motionâ Heâs envisioning the âclockâ to be aligned to the table, not your wrist.
The only way I could envision to make this clearer (with your video aesthetics) would be to overlay the âclockâ on a paused still of your hand flat against the table, then as you turn your hand to perform the motion, do another still with a video animation showing the clock rotating to remain aligned with your wrist.
Gotcha â thanks for taking a look. If Iâm right and heâs just misunderstanding, then Iâm out of ways to explain this one in words. True, maybe an animated clock that tracked the arm would be useful.
More generally, you are correct that it is hard to see the rotation of the arm against the table, and to know how much itâs rotated, from the audience camera. One thing I thought of for future demonstrations would be something like a straw or small wood stirrer like you get in a cafe, that I could stick right on the forearm itself, pointing to 12 oâclock. This way when the arm turns, it would be super easy to see the indicator no longer pointing straight up.
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I suppose the pandemic precludes a sabbatical at Kamar-Taj for now.
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This was good stuff. Now I know why I havenât been able to get any faster and itâs kinda depressing, especially if guitar players typically perform better on these tests than on actual guitar (so my actual max guitar speed is even lower). I always knew people are different and genetics play a big part on how we perform in physical activities, but seeing it this concretely was still a sort of a shock.
Is there a poll of the speeds people are testing for the different motions? (Maybe it already exists but I couldnât find it.)
EDIT: asked my wife to do these and she has no problem going 20% faster than I am. I had always admired her skill to whip cream, which I wasnât able to do without cramping up⌠this made her more sympathetic for me hating to do it though so guess Iâll have an excuse from now on⌠
There are genetics in everything of course. We did a poll years ago where people self reported 180 as the average picking speed. Itâs what I would have guessed at the time so it did not surprise me.
However we now know that there is lots of stringhopping and other inefficiency out there. Many people are doing things wrong, and those wrong things are not always obvious. What percentage of people do picking motions 100% efficiently with zero room for improvement? I now think that number is on the low side.
Itâs even hard to design a clear test. I got one set of results when filming, and dramatically different results on some types of tapping in recent weeks after experimentation. If it can be non-obvious to me that Iâm doing something less than optimally then itâs gotta be non obvious to lots of people.
What numbers did you get and on which tests?
So I FINALLY got a chance to watch this (I guess, finally made time to watch it, rather), and this was excellent. Really, two big takeaways for me here:
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A little to my surprise, I was getting similar tempos as you on all of these motions, whereas I expected my primary technique (basically an Al DiMiola style wriast deviation/âscratching a lottery ticketâ motion) to have a clear edge. Thatâs interesting to me.
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The metaphors and tests you used here actually were quite helpful while playing - I have a feeling my actual mechanic isnât perfectly efficient (though with no real basis, itâs not like Iâm feeling a ton of tension while playing, and I should probably try to get some updated slo-mo footage butI suspect thereâs a little more of a curve going on in my upstroke, which may not matter I suppose) but I could definiely feel a difference in my playing when I consciously thought about a âscratching back and forthâ movement. Time will tell ifg itâs faster or more efficient, I guess. and, Iâve always strugged with escaped upstrokes - I have that rotational thing to pull them off on occasion in a two way escaped run, but straight USX felt weird to me and i always seemed to be arcing my pickstroke to pull away from the guitar on downstrokes. turns out, Get my arm into the right orientation and go after it with a forearm movement, and suddenly Iâm doing it if not cleanly, then at least correctly. Cool.
2.a) I guess - I also seem like when I really push tremolo speed, to start to get some sort of a forearm rotation thing going. Again, Iâll need to shoot some footage of that, maybe later today when the lightâs a little better in my room here.
Anyway, this is kind of an insanely helpful series of videos, considering this was a whole line of research, I guess, that even five or six years ago just wasnât being talked about. Thanks!
any idea, when this could happen? it would be great to get more insight in to the synchronization of the new motor skils with actual diatonic examples