This dying soul final unison practice diary

Show and Tell
#23

@gabrielthorn Excellent playing dude! I’m reading your comments about your own playing. I wholly respect that you’re striving to be as clean as possible (because well, me too), but I’ll echo others’ responses: You really have no reason to speak so negatively about your playing! It’s not nearly as raw or unclean as you probably think it is. It’s certainly not “awful” by any relevant standard. It’s already miles ahead of most players and it’s only gonna get cleaner with time. It’s crucial to be able to put a microscope on your own playing, but it’s also crucial to be able to take it off.

This next bit is Petrucci fans only:

I actually tried listening critically to your second This Dying Soul clip while suspending disbelief and imagining if it was Petrucci playing. I wondered, would it sound “not good enough to be JP”? Nope - it sounds like it could be one of JP’s takes. Disregarding amp tone and video sound quality etc, this particular snapshot could have been from Live At Budokan. You’ve got a great situation here, keep it up!

4 Likes
#24

Couldn’t agree more. Even some of Petrucci’s album isolated guitar stems have ‘artifacts’ in them - its called playing guitar through a heavily distorted amp - its gonna happen!

2 Likes
#25

@Shredd @PickingApprentice Thank you for your words, it really helps me to feel better about my playing. I hope it will be cleaner over time, and this is really new territory for me. If I could perform the entire unison the same quality as my attempt in the second video, probably I’d be a really happy person. My real problem here is consistency and stamina. Even if I catch the “feel” and I can execute stuff at these higher speeds, I feel like my brain just can’t keep up and I mess it up. It’s not my left, or right hand, it’s some kind of coordination issue I think.

1 Like
#26

I think a good next step for you is to learn to evaluate your playing more objectively.

Don’t just say a take is “bad”, listen to it carefully and decide rationally what are the problems to fix, if any, and think how you might want to fix them. Is it the timing? A note missing? Some open string ringing at the wrong time? Or none of these, maybe you want to change the phrasing / accenting / dynamics?

This way your threads will also be infinitely more helpful and instructive to the people following you. Remember this is show and tell :slight_smile:

Edit: and in this way you will actually make even more progress!

That being said, your takes are always at (or very very close to) “professional shredder” quality.

2 Likes
#27

Trying to play the ascending lick, with less luck and precision, but on a higher tempo. Still praying things will click one day on this tempo. My fretting hand also needs to get used to do things this fast.

2 Likes
#28

I haven’t touched this beast for a long time, but in the last few days I wanted to take a look if I improved at all in terms of speed and stamina in the last few months.

Still far, far away, and with lots of mistakes and I got really tired before the final descending run, and I fell behind the beat, I could recover at the end though. I tried to do it in one take without stopping. Lots of sloppy parts and sync issues when shifting positions on the ascending runs. One day I’ll make it… I hope. :woozy_face:

Sorry for the terrible audio quality, I cranked up my amp really loud, my phone couldn’t handle it :sweat_smile:

I can do it at 192 bpm if I split it into two parts.

Edit:
What I also noticed on the Budokan version is that the tempo is slower than 202 bpm. In the middle of the run it’s getting close to 200 but most of the solo is played around the 190-195 range.

2 Likes
#29

Pardon if I am reviving an old post but I’ve been interested in learning this piece for a long time ago and just wanted to ask if John Petrucci has released an official lesson for this? I’ve seen quite a couple of youtube videos that have tabs in the video but I was wondering if there were any official tabs on this or did most of the people just learn this by ear? I was wondering if it was worth it to invest in the official tab books for this. Thanks for reading this guys and I would appreciate your replies.

#30

The Train of Thought guitar tab book was really inaccurate but here’s how he plays it:

This Dying Soul outro.pdf (43.3 KB)

#31

wow! thanks so much this sir!

#32

Regarding the “This dying soul final unison nasty bit”, does Petrucci start that lick with a downstroke or upstroke? I assume it’s the former, but it’s a lot easier for me to do it with an upstroke, which essentially changes that lick to the usual Paul Gilbert lick, albeit from a different starting note