Thoughts on Malmsteen's Reh video

Masters in Mechanics
#1

as with many people, I too was obsessed with that video…actually, Troy’s ‘case study’ called ‘the volcano’ is the reason why I subscribed, even though I really have been satisfied with my technique for years now…I learned alternate picking, sweeping, classical guitar, you name it. But I was still curious about ‘the volcano’ videos.

At the end of the video, Malmsteen says ‘he doesn’t think about his technique’, and he has been known to repeat this over the years, but now I think it’s total BS…the reason is that he simply didn’t want people to know or figure out his style. Which I can even understand…after all, he doesn’t owe anything to anybody. I would have done the same. After all, it would be like owning a working business and reveal it to other people who want to open a business. Dumb move…

#3

Can’t speak for Yngwie in particular, but I will note that in our experience it’s actually pretty common for elite players to not really know how their technique works. Yes, they’ve attained this high level of performance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can explain it to you! See my post here for more detail.

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#4

I used to think he was fibbing too, absolutely. And who knows there may be a little of that. But after having done years and years of these interviews now, I am pretty convinced the naturals are mostly genuine when they say they don’t know. Have you seen the Oz Noy clip? Guy is a top-flight economy player, and legit does not know he is sweeping. Crazy, but Oz is a super genuine dude.

At the end of the day, I was / am personally wrong about many aspects of my own playing. This stuff is hard and if you take a few steps back we realize there are tons of things we’re all simply not aware of when we play.

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#5

Troy, yeah I agree with what you said…but Malmsteen is a different animal, he has always been having this complex about how every player who learned to play fast, owes everything to him. Once he said the same about Macalpine, and personally I think Macalpine as a musician is even superior to him, the guy is a concert pianist too, as you know. An album like ‘Premonition’ is just one of the very best shred guitar albums I have ever heard, and I think a very tough act to follow even for Malmsteen’s wonderful madness.

I don’t doubt for an instant that Malmsteen is a natural, however.

In the end, whether one masters the instrument in any ways, ‘naturally’ or by being very analytical, makes little difference: what matters is that the destination is reached. We often hear this ‘the journey is more important than the destination’, but we know that’s baloney most of the time :grinning:

The journey can and should be interesting, but in the end the results speak much more loudly .:sunglasses:

I have never heard of Oz Noy, but of course I will check out the course you have done with him. I generally never took technical courses (nor any guitar lessons, not even on classical guitar) as I sorted these things for myself, but your course was an exception, 'cause I was obsessed with that Malmsteen tape too :wink: I used to just watch it even without the guitar, merely to blow my own mind everytime.

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#6

I think too that Yngwie is hiding some insights, too.
Probably the best example is Eric’s instructional video, Eric tries to explain what he’s doing while Yngwie points on his genius, as he does pretty often - at least IMO.
But that’s not a big geal, Gypsies are hiding that slant secret even longer, and in classical teaching that was just common.
That kind of made sense some decades ago, when teaching meant basically forming the entire style of playing, nowadays people tend to get specific information at different places, which makes perfect sense to me cause it should end up in a wider range of styles, on the other hand it puts some more responsibilty on learning, now learning includes to decide if things can be glued together.

I’m not totally convinced of that genius thing. Oz said he practiced all that stuff, that means to me it’s not that he picked up the guitar and all that stuff just fell in.
I think - or maybe hope - in the end we all do the same thing: we try until we find a way that feels right to us, just some brains seem to focus automatically on the ‘right’ things.
Probably Troy is the best example to show that most mechanics can be reached if you know where to put the focus on.

#7

The Gypsies have been teaching the downward pickslanting form for a long time. It was never really a secret. And from speaking with them, they still really don’t perceive the slant as a string-switching device, because they focus on the importance of the downstroke not the upstroke. So the gypsies are another great example of players not really understanding why they do what they do. But they get props for actually teaching it, which is a big step beyond pretty much every other guitar style.

You have to be careful to look at what these players do and not what they say. Oz has been playing this way forever, probably since he first started. Players that learn technique on their own tend to do so quickly. By contrast, I’ve been working on this for literally decades, and I couldn’t alternate pick an arpeggio until last year. Even if it took Oz, oh, two years of tooling around to build his technique, that basically instantaneously compared to me.

#8

Sorry if that came out falsely, that is exactly what i mean. There’s no better example that you cannot even hide the mechanics, but nobody really explains the reason.

Yes and now that you know what to focus on, you nailed in weeks? months?
And that’s not one way to pick, of what i can see you now have access to the mechanics of pretty much all the people you interviewed and probably some more.
Again, there might be hope the reason for my view, but i think you’re not the smaller genius than them, they ‘just’ found the right focus faster.

Btw thanks for doing this great thing here - and taking time for people like me.
That genius thing is to me personally kind of important.
It’s no problem to accept that people do things better than others (in person me).
But it kind of hurts to get the impression that there’s missing a capability or talent or whatever.

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#9

I think Yngwie may be hiding his secrets too, He wouldn’t be the first. I read that in Van Halen’s early days, Eddie would turn his back to the audience whenever he would do finger tapping. That’s a very well known fact and is as good an example as I can think of of a guitar player not wanting people to rip off his secrets.