Thanks all, I’m happy to get so many nice replies 
Weekend is a bit busy but will write proper replies to all of you in the next couple of days!
Wow man, this sounds great!
Am I the only one who had this elite mindset in his teens (and, tbh, later on) that hidden legato in these lines must be considered cheating?
You really motivate me to tackle stuff I couldn’t play so far but to make it my own this time (fingerings to fit my uwps approach, maybe even a hammer on or pull off here and there).
1 Like
As Paul Gilbert says… your goal isn’t always to pick every note, but to pick ‘most of them’. I think even MAB sneaks in legato to make his patterns more playable.
I think unless you have committed yourself to learning a double-escaped technique at high speeds, this goes for almost every guitarist, including those who are masters of 2wps.
Thank you all again for the kind words! Time for nerding out in detailed answers/discussions 
That is totally a relief, and reminds me once again that I shouldn’t obsess too much about getting perfect takes
Unfortunately that hand position does not allow for proper chugchug palm muting, though I can mute the “unwanted” lower strings. The mechanics has some similarities with the Batio setup although much less extreme. For proper palm muting I would use the mechanics around 0:43-0:45, but with that one I’m not very good at escaped downstrokes (particularly the ‘outside ascending’ transfer).
Thanks man and I do realise these are good takes so it may look like false modesty to post them in technique critique! I had a private discussion with @brendan who agreed I could post it here as a sort of “show and tell”, because this solo has been discussed multiple times on the forum and I was hoping that sharing my thoughts on it - as a guy that struggled with this solo for years - would be useful for others.
I admit there is of course an element of “I finally made it, please look at me!” (or I finally 95% made it ).
Gotta go away from PC for a bit, but will add all the other responses soon!
Yeah, that is my issue as well, almost exactly. When I go into my MAB impression of ‘shredding mode’, my elevated wrist makes it difficult to mute, but without it, I can’t escape properly at high speeds. And I too have the largest issue with ‘outside ascending’. The last year, I’ve been fixated on trying to fix that particular transfer.
Anyhoo, I hope to get as clean as you… but am not quite there yet.
1 Like
Totally, and it also feels like an athletic feat! I need a lot of warmup to be able to play this part at (approximately) tempo, and I also have a limit on the number of times I can play it in the same session before getting too tired. For reference, I think the above takes where No 9 and 10 of a session of 12-13 in total. This excluded the warmup where I played the solo about 4-5 times from 75% speed to about 95%.
By about take 12 I was unable to play the solo and decided to stop!
Also, the gain helps to keep the attack consistent, in the recorded direct input you can hear quite a lot of volume inconsistencies between the different notes - it’s much less impressive. Happy to share the DI if people are interested!
Thank you but trust me it doesn’t feel like that I am still looking for ways to make this solo feel more comfortable, so that my performance on it can be more consistent from one day to the next. As I said, this stuff is cherry picked 
I would do some minor polishing here and there, but it is definitely the string skipping part that needs the most work. In particular I would like to improve how it feels, rather than how it sounds! At the moment it’s quite an athletic thing for me, while ideally I would like guitar playing to feel as effortless as possible.
The sheer picking speed is of course the main difficulty here, coupled with the fact that the picking motions need to be big enough to cover quite large distances (between 3 or 4 strings). I am exploring slight variations in the right hand setup and even non-fully-picked solutions to make the whole thing feel smoother and more repeatable, see for example this post that I wrote in @zhang’s thread:
Hehe, thank you but technically it’s more like: if I could have about 10 attempts at the solo next to JP, hopefully in one or two of them I won’t screw up 
. PS: and it would have to be in my bedroom withou 10000 people watching!
This is also in reply to @lars and @hamsterman, regarding swiping. In my case I don’t really try to avoid it, in the sense that I know “mathematically” that it will happen if I don’t make a conscious effort to clear certain string changes (e.g. by changing pick paths). I don’t feel that swiping is the bottleneck in this solo: if I focus on the left hand muting, the swipable parts (e.g. ascending fours) come out quite clean and repeatable.
Yeah I would totally endorse that! Life is too short to not play something you want to play just because of a pulloff! (Talking to myself as well, as I often get trapped in that “cheating” mindset).
2 Likes
Great job, tommo! Nice tone and your playing is really nice and fluid!. Your picking sounds great! Well done!
1 Like
Yes I would be interested in hearing that for sure!
1 Like
This about the third or fourth hardest thing about Gilbert’s “Technical Difficulties,” for me, though the order is reversed - decent vibrato, then blistering 6-note run. I assume it gets easier with repetitions, so maybe another 5,000 or so and I’ll have it down, lol.
Is this something you’ve observed in your own playing, or is this more driven by reason and theory? Reason I ask, is while theoretically speaking I can see the appeal of that argument, in the Antigravity seminar Batio certainly isn’t having any issues with swiping in descending runs, and if you think about it, really, the margin of error is pretty low for ANY motion in a fast alternate picked run. If you miss slightly with the tWPS wrist rotation, that’s gonna trip you up just as good… And that’s a much mechanically “bigger” movement than a ghost sweep across a strong.
Anyway, Tommo, this is exceptional. \m/
1 Like
I saw the unintentional swiping happen under the magnet and when there was a clean swipe the run would be good, but when I missed the swipe it would be bad. I thought I was doing clean TWPS when it went well, but I never was.
At that point I can either try to make more clean swipes or aim at eliminating the swiping with perfect TWPS and be happy if that gets me to clean swipes instead. To me it makes sense to aim for no swipes, but the goal is really to play the thing so it sounds good and feels good and reliable
I’m naturally UWPS but at speed the way I ended up swiping was that I would adjust my hand to neutral (or even slight DWPS?) and swipe the ascending string change. This made the change to DWPS much easier (or unnecessary?) for the subsequent descending string change.
IOW we’re both half-right: you can miss half the TWPS changes and have it degrade gracefully to a swipe. Right?
Yeah you picked another tough one - also on my to do list for years What helped me in this case was to decide in advance how many “oscillations/mini bends” I would include in each (vibratoed?) note, and what their rhythm would be. So the vibrato is fully planned and can be practiced consistently: I decided for two oscillations of the first note, and a single one for the second which is pretty much just a bend.
Actually I started doing the same for left hand trills: rather than hammering/pulling off randomly like a madman, which caused me a lot of fretting hand tension and loss of control, I now try to do it with a specific rhythm and a specific number of notes.
Of course this is just my way of doing things which is quite mathematical/academic, I’m sure there are players who can just do these things by intuition.
@lars, it’s interesting that we have opposite experiences with the swipes: for me a swipe is a very simple right hand movement with quite a lot of margin for error, provided that the left hand is muting well. TWPS feels a bit more like walking on thin ice! Maybe this is due to our different choices of picking mechanics?
@aliendough, I will soon share the “naked” DI track then @brendan, is there any way to directly upload the .wav or mp3 file here, or should I go the youtube route as usual?
2 Likes
Nice playing, Tommo! You’ve really come a long way!
2 Likes
Huh. That’s an interesting thought, and as a guy who leans towards the analytical himself, I’ll give this a try.
Honestly, at the end of the day… I think it’s going to be that descending pull off diminished lick that does me in. The picking I’m confident with practice and a better understanding of the required orientation I’m sure I can get. Those stretches though, keeping them clean and articulate, are rough, and I don’t even have especially small hands!
Worst case - I have a website and server space to host files, so if you can get it to me somehow, I’d be happy to toss a mp3 of the DI up on my FTP for you. This is a pretty impressive performance, so the least I can do is give you a hand. (Though, web space is cheap these days - a couple bucks a month and a free Wordpress site (even a paid one is pretty reasonable, if you want to get fancy) is easily worth it, IMO, if you just want to be able to host files and pictures on the net.
2 Likes
Hey @tommo sounds good! By default the forum allows image uploads only, but I can try enabling audio as well. I just have to specify what formats as well as max file size. Indeed as @Drew says server space is pretty cheap so I think we can support at least small-ish audio files. For very long stuff Soundcloud also works for embeds, similar to Youtube, but I think it makes sense to allow direct audio uploads of a reasonable size.
For now I’ve enabled MP3 and AAC, and quadrupled the upload limit to 16MB. I think that should allow audio files up to 5-10 minutes long at decently high quality. It should now work via the “upload” button in the composer toolbar, or dragging the file in directly (basically the same as images) and then should display a nice little player right in the post. Give it a try!
3 Likes
Hey, that’s awesome - that definitely will allow you to host high quality audio of sufficient length for analysis.
Is it restricted such that only logged in members can access files? Might not be a bad idea, so you don’t have people using this site to host files for elsewhere.
2 Likes
Good call yeah looks like there’s a setting for that, will toggle it on so only logged in users can download attached files
3 Likes
@Brendan, you added the function I asked about in less than a day, best customer service ever 
Thank you 
I’m not sure how to make the MP3 player appear though!
@aliendough, @Drew, here we go, the slightly humbling DIs! I left a low-volume backing track just to leave a bit of context, but happy to remove even that if you want to hear the fully naked thing
Double tracked version
Single take version
Listening back to it, I am actually pretty happy with the attack, except perhaps for the string skipping mega-lick, where you can clearly hear that some notes are barely hinted at because I am in a rush! I am probably taking a rest from precticing this solo for a while, but my objective in a few months will be to clean up my attack so that even the DI sounds good
You can also hear the swipes quite clearly in the ascending 4s part, so this is a case where -somewhat counterintuitively - the gain helps to clean things up.
PS: I am not too bothered by this as I noticed the same in players like Vinnie Moore and even Batio: when they play the “4s” with a clean tone, you can hear the occasional “click” from the muted string. It’s no worse that the “chirp” you get from some picks when playing acoustic, though.
6 Likes
Nice! Ok this is weird when I tested a file upload to myself in a PM yesterday it automatically displayed as the player, but now I see it’s showing as a download link instead. I’ll see if there’s a way to get this working more consistently…
Anyway for now it looks like if you edit your post and format the raw URL on its own line like so:
https://forum.troygrady.com/uploads/default/original/2X/3/38d861bfed1a26b23255bbd634263ff63fba1371.mp3
Then it should display with a nice little inline player like this:
(This is just a test clip; I see it doesn’t show w/ a title so you’d prob want to add that too when sharing multiple tracks!)
EDIT: another quick test don’t mind me…
atari - warp distortion.mp3 (351.1 KB)
2 Likes
awesome playing I envy you so much righ now man.
1 Like
In the past few days I had some fun Soundslicing the Erotomania solo. I’m not sure I nailed all the rhythms and time signatures but it should be close enough. I’ve tried to be thorough in notating all the “cheats” like the occasional sneaky pull-off or a few re-fingerings that make the job of the picking hand easier (as explained in my long opening post ). If you like escaped downstrokes (UWPS in the old language), this version should feel slightly easier than JP’s.
6 Likes