Transcription and analysis: Troy Grady can play the guitar very fast

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Awesome playing, and that soundslice app is very cool.

And is there a way to slow it down? It’s tough for me to see whats going on at the end.

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Yes! Poke around. Depends which device
You’re using

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Do you have these SPEED buttons in the lower part of the screen?

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Yeah thanks @Alexander . Depending on a few factors, it will either look like the image you posted or you will have to go to the gear icon and change it from there.

I don’t think I had ever seen this level of alternate picking technique before! Keep on raising that bar :metal:

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I am actually mind blown by the amount of techniques and movements that you have managed to learn, especially considering that playing guitar is clearly not your only job! In fact I am curious: when /how do you make time to practice all this stuff? Do you ever sleep? :smiley:

I also have a question about this lightspeed crosspicking you have just posted: I noticed that the fastest section involves only three strings: is this incidental, or do you feel any limitation in the amount of string tracking you can do while “cross-shredding”?

Great great playing!

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I think this is a bit of an illusion. If you go back and watch our old stuff, which I’ve been doing lately, I appear to make a range of movements, sometimes with more forearm and sometimes less. Knowing what we know now, I think I was pretty much always in large part a [Edit:] “various wrist movements” player, depending on the forearm position - which itself also varied without being aware of it. Take all that and throw in various amounts of forearm rotation as well. And as we’re coming to understand, this is a very common mix of techniques.

Like most players, I wasn’t really aware of this. I could sense weird day-to-day differences but didn’t know what they were. Now, I’d look at me back then and in two seconds, I’d be like, duh, you’re doing wrist today that’s why it feels different buddy!

We see this all the time in tecnique critique clips. In the space of a single 30 second clip you’ll see someone flip back and forth between slightly different types of movement, never completely one or the other, and never just one mix of them for any more than a few moments. And no wonder they are all confused to hell about why things feel weird.

All these movements work, and it’s clear their capabilities are all very similar. But it is hard for beginners to know what it is they are doing, and how to recognize that both by sight and feel, without dead-clear instructions from us. That is our mission.

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Man, this is brilliant, I might give up sweeping entirely

At least for me, while the mechanics of the x-picking stroke are more advanced… once you learn the pick-motion, and the 4 movements (Ins asc, outs asc, ins desc, outs desc) it actually makes picking MUCH simpler.

I would definitely not do that. It doesn’t matter if you can play everything with a particular technique. In actual practice, you won’t. It might not even occur to you to do so. There are simply lines you will discover with certain techniques, just because of what’s easy with them, that you will absolutely not discover with other techniques. For example, you might be able to play something like this with pure alternate:

https://troygrady.com/primer/getting-started/clips/pickslanting-primer-intro-lick/

…but the odds are very good that if I didn’t write this for dwps and sweeping first, I would not have thought to write it at all with alternate.

TLDR the best option is all the options!

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The only time I go back to sweeping is for fast arpegio-sweeps. Because they still sound cleaner using traditional sweeps. But other than that… I don’t touch economy picking anymore.

By the way, I’ve also found that I don’t hybrid pick much anymore, unless it requires it for chords.