Too late to improve technique?

Playing Technique
#14

I’m 38, have been playing since I was 15 or so, and coincidently am ALSO named Drew, and it is absolutely not “too late” for you to learn things. It may take some work, and some un-learning or at a minimum at least some becoming consciously aware of the things you’ve been doing unconsciously, but I’ve made some pretty serious progress in the last couple years and today can do things pretty consistently that I’d be lucky to pull off cleanly on a good day five years ago.

Put in the time, learn to understand what you’e currently doing, and you’ll get there.

2 Likes
#15

I know the struggle you’re going through. I had a breakthrough when I watched a video by Claus Levin, a YouTube guitar teacher. I’ll try to find the video if I can but he essentially said if you’re frustrated trying to accumulate all these different skills to try to pick a particular skill, say wrist motion or downward pickslanting or a mechanic from a particular lick, and practice that skill and only that skill for 30 days. Your other skills won’t disappear and you can maintain them when you’re just jamming and playing for fun. It worked for me when I was having trouble with getting used to downward pickslanting and the Cascade chapter. I did only Eric Johnson pentatonic licks with wrist motion and USX like the 5s and 6s and after a couple weeks I was blazing. I feel like after all that time something different happened in my brain, like they don’t require much maintenance if at all. It’s like it’s permanently burned into my mind.

#16

I am 69 years old now and I finally figured out what I had been doing wrong thanks to Troys videos. The downward pick angel is the clue that gave me my answer. I always picked with my thumb bent, which puts your pick at a weird angle. Watch all of the monster players and you will see that their thumb is straight and not bent. When you use the downward slant, your thumb is naturally straight with no effort. I use to tape my thumb joint so I couldn’t bend it, but could never make it work. The downward pick angle changed my life. I will tell you I practiced it for a few hours a day and it took a year before it became ingrained without conscience thought. Stay hungry and don’t quit and you will find it.

3 Likes
#17

I second this…Claus Levin has a free lesion series called ingenium on his website guitarmastery. He demonstrates exercises with isolation movements for perfecting your picking. Definitely recommend checking him out. It is a game changer for me.

1 Like
#18

Hi there,

NO, its not. I can try to explain a little in this message.

I feel for you. We see many people who are technically so advanced that I think we get lulled in to thinking we all should be able to play similarly. I’ve struggled for many years for many different reasons. I’ve made a great deal of progress over the last 3 years (been playing over 25 years, with a 12 year hiatus - depressed and frustrated because I was simply awful, no kidding, I mean BAD and that was with many hundreds of hours, obviously not able to figure it out) or so since I adopted this website. Nothing ever has come easy to me and guitar is no different. I am pleased with my progress but likely will never be relaxed enough to play comfortably (repeatable/consistent) at those speeds that other people have no problem playing at.

I will keep working at it as I have discovered effective exercises to work on the picking motion and also what type of patterns and sequences that work best for me. This might be very different for you and that is okay.

I need get your topic off me and back to you…

Okay, be extremely patient. Don’t feel like you can’t slow things down a bit and try to hone in on your technique. I use a mirror at all times and this has helped me focus in on technique. Get the pick to somehow feel like it isn’t resisting your string crosses. For me, it was a few things: slight angle adjustment, figuring out what pick direction was most difficult. UPX is easier when I decent but DPX is a bit easier when I ascend. Now, I create exercises that I use daily to focus on improving the difficult strings crossing and also take advantage of the string crossing that is most comfortable for me. This helps me understand why certain ‘runs’ are easier and why they are easier. Back to the mirror for a second. I will sometimes go to a white pick, and choke back (away from strings) so I can clearly see more pick between the strings and my pick fingers.

In summary, relax the body and mind, hyper focus, use a mirror?, be willing to experiment with your pick grip, or anything that might benefit you. There are many talented people on this site who can help you if you provide a video with a good camera angle and ample lighting.

Good Luck and I hope you stick with it and can get satisfying results in the near future.
I wrote to you because I empathize with your disposition.

Paul

1 Like
#19

It’s never too late. Wasn’t Troy in his 30s or so when he came across TWPS and the Antigravity seminar material?

I think the message of Cracking the Code, in part, is that if you have a functioning brain with functioning limbs there is probably nothing you can’t learn. Or at least that is what I like to think.

2 Likes
#20

Let me tell you something.

Up until the middle of last year, I took online guitar lessons with a particular “teacher” who does not have the best reputation. However, I ignored this thinking that he had the answers I’ve been looking for.
I took online lessons with him for three years and took on the techniques he basically advises you to switch to. “Directional picking” or simply economy picking as its actually known as. One of these other techniques is not a usual picking technique hand position at all and I only know of one person, apart from my instructors students, who used this technique. He taught it to my instructor I believe. Anyway, it was an absolute disaster. I could never make it work and got little support from my instructor. He was unable to answer very basic questions I would have asked about positioning and angles etc.
In short, I feel I’ve been robbed and put in such a bad position technique wise that I quit the guitar middle of last year and stopped all my lessons. About 7 months later I picked the instrument back up again as life without it was actually awful. I picked it up with the intention to learn and practice the songs I write and certainly not to go back to my previous instructor. I’m actually furious with myself that I stayed with him so long but you kind of get caught up in what he says… Now I need to relearn how to play and try figure it all out. I’m very apprehensive about paying for any online instruction after that experience but I know that I could really be missing out on the info I need unless I subscribe.
I’m actually ranting here and have taken things off topic… sorry about that!

#21

Find that video! I’m having the same struggles as drewguitar; after many years deciding to finally get my alternate picking together, and while I understand the method a lot better both for my picking hand (where to plant/pivot, etc) and pickslanting, even after several months of practice I’m still very slow. It’s tough.

#23

Not really, you can find a ton of Free cracking the code lessons on YouTube! You can make an informed decision after you watch them :slight_smile:

#24

I’m sorry to hear you had an instructor that did such damage to you (and I have a good idea who you’re talking about). I can’t understand why, especially knowing what I do now thanks to CtC, some teachers force their hand positions and motion mechanics on their students. I think maybe because it’s how they know to do the thing, so it makes it easier to see when the student isn’t doing it correctly. Either that or they just become dogmatic about what they do, which is worse. The best teacher I ever had, Joe Stump, never got like that about anything. alternate, economy, mixed picking/legato, was all cool to him as long as you were getting the notes out and understanding the musical and fretboard concepts.

The only thing I get strict about, motion-wise, is with my young 8-9 year old beginner students I make them learn the rest-stroke USX motion (be it with wrist or rotation/wrist, however they can do it). I do this only because for some reason little kids tend to pick with a severe outward DSX, which when you’re trying to get them to learn to strum chords with downstrokes or play a power chord, is just a nightmare lol.

#25

I think in this case, it was more dogmatic. Kind of like his way is the best way and alternate picking is inefficient wasted motion. Worst of all he was unable to describe mechanics in any sort of detail so there was a hell of a lot of trial and error just trying to figure out how the basic fundamentals worked. This is the extent of the mechanics “The pick must never stop moving” so… no rest stroke in economy picking…??? Plus I seen him contradict himself many many times leading to more confusion… sigh lol.
Ah it is what it is, I stayed a lot longer than I should have so I’m not blameless in this!

#26

Hi drew. To the point; you may need to reconsider what your left hand is doing…and the positioning of the notes you’re trying to play. 30 years ago, the average player didn’t approach the note positions on the neck quite the same. Also their “ears” were a bit different. I think that before you can gain the fluency to use all the concepts and techniques that Dr Grady has uncovered, you need to consider the left hand architecture that is often applied over and why it works. I’m not talking music theory; although it leads to that. Rather the actual number of notes per string, the number of picks they require, and the direction you start up on and the one you wind up with at the end - or reset. A good starting point, if this sounds confusing, is Frank Gambles “speed picking” vids which are about 30 years old or so.
He was one of the first guys that was addressing this on videos that I’m aware of back then and his emphasis was on what the left hand was doing as I recall. You’ll need to do the simple triplet work before you can get into the string skipping, arpeggios, and more melodic stuff. This gain from the right hand can help expand your schematic for how you group relevant notes and your Musicality. It is a tool toward that end.
IMHO. Good luck and never Despair; theirs always more there.
Ken

#27

Thanks for your input Kenellis! This is not really my problem thought, quite the opposite. All those things you have described i have worked a lot on and have a good grasp on. For me the missing piece of the puzzle is efficient picking motion. Not saying i know everything else but i know how to improve further in that area if i want to and that’s not the case when it comes to picking technique.

#28

I think this is absolutely right and this is also a hint, how this whole “start slow and gradually get faster” thing started.
Electric guitar (of course, like other instruments, too) is a thing you start in your youth, around ten, especially if you start to listen to rock music. You mess around, especially in times when information about guitar and teachers are not as accsessible as today, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s - the times electric guitar got widley established and became one of the most popular instruments among young people anyway. And probably one develops his fast techniques in the beginning in a rough manner, like you outlined, @BlackInMind. Slow practice? That’s for the adults…like parents… so to say :grinning:
(I imagine a 13 year old boy 1985, imitating Mick Mars in front of a mirror with a cheap Ibanez… or a 15 year old playing along to a Venom record, trying to look evil and to get over a break-up… good start for tremolo picking)

Later then you slow down to clean up, but you keep what you’ve experienced and probably ingrained. I think that’s how the original speed pickers made it.

BUT many well known players and also teachers tell you to start slow, for example prominently Al di Meola - a wonderful player of course! Why? I suppose masters like him relate to the fast playing that has to be clean! They probably remember how they cleaned up their fast playing by slowing down and maybe it felt for them like starting all over again. The first but for motorlearning important step to go fast and wild like a punk rebel is something that for them belongs to times without the seriousness of their playing.

So either they (subconsciously) take that step of trial and error speeding up for granted or they believe it to be unnecessary because of the cleanliness priority or they simply don’t remember how they started the real first time. In addition, through his access to publishing media - books and videos - or being a teacher in new kinds of music colleges like GIT (founded 1977) such a virtuoso speed picker along others can so to speak institutionalize that kind of teaching, which is not bad at all! It is good for syncing up, for learning phrases and scales and so on. But in the name of seriousness it seems most important for many teachers. And that can probably become an obstacle… like skipping a natural play instinct in favor of a more rational and serious (“adult”) approach. Hey after all we play guitar like we are playing a game… who started Tekken by learning all the combos as a first step? Probably nobody while we get many things and rules of the game architecture as a whole intuitively in the first few tries.

tl:dr This was just a little essay with historical references

Edit: MAB always teaches to start with fast tremolo picking. And he says it does not matter if elbow or wrist or what not

3 Likes
#29

100% I think accomplished players (educators) don’t remember the organic process in their youth and just know what it takes to refine the accuracy (slow down).

I’ve sort of sussed out 3 types of tempos and what they are generally good for:

#1 slow practice - use for improving accuracy
#2 medium “jog” tempos - use for improving control
#3 fast “burst” tempos - use for developing speed

I think a lot of pros tend to spend most of their time in #1 and #2. I recall Stump telling Troy during his interview he still does a lot of “endurance” work. This would fall into the #2 category. It makes sense, if you already have the fundamentals for your max speeds, control and accuracy is what you’d need to maintain.

As an interesting aside, I’d always hear Joe practicing outside his lesson room at Berklee, and for a player like him, the “medium” jog speeds were around 160-180 BPM 16th notes.

3 Likes
#30

Very cool categorization! But what about a #4 in which a (new) learner just tries to freak out on speed and, let’s say, plays to a song that’s actually too fast for him but he does not care? is this covered by #3? It’s that punk mentality I described. Maybe it goes in the direction of what Troy says, too: start with speed. as long it feels smooth it’s okay to sound sloppy. adjustment over time. this is a practice I consider to go beyond bursts of speed.
It’s a thought of mine inspired by Troy, by you and @guitarenthusiast and by my own experience. I also refer to this thread:

1 Like
#31

Ok, sorry if the post was facile. Well, then I guess that leaves you to dissemble what you’re doing
Across all the vectors and then compare to the abundant examples here-in; and then see what and how much you can accommodate your picking. A lot of interesting and rewarding discovery.
Best of luck. All good. Ken

#32

It’s all very dependent on the student’s level, age, and goals. In my “beginner of beginner” examples (young kids) it’s simply trying to get them to play along to songs at tempo, or at least some kind of steady consistent, normal tempo (ie not take 10 seconds between each chord change). I wouldn’t even recommend any kind of the practice I described to any beginner. Really, that’s for intermediate and advanced players that can play some songs and know some chords and scales, maybe can play some easy solos or licks.

As I’ve said before, the only thing I try to instill in a beginner is USX with the rest stroke, because it helps with strumming down strokes and most basic pentatonic kind of scales and chromatic exercises. Sometimes I might have a kid tremolo just for them to see that speed is possible, not “hard to do,” and they have it in them already, so slow the fuck down and work on cleaning up now :joy:

Now, for a more intermediate player who knows they want to develop speed with scales and lead or metal rhythm, then yes, I go to step #3 as soon as they have the scale fragments memorized. But this practice is limited to single string only until they can do that relatively quick. So basically, things like the melody of Wasted Years by Iron Maiden, or anything that stays on one string, really.

#33

See my reply to @Scott_Blundo above.

#34

10 posts were split to a new topic: Great Guitarists: self-taught or formally trained?