Trying to start-with-fast

[lime]

@Troy

But when we look into it, sometimes synchronization is perfect, where the first note of each pattern really does start on a downstroke. So technically there is no drift. But you slow it down and you see one of the middle notes is simply being fretted wrong, held for two notes instead of one note. That’s not really a chunking problem, per se, that’s just a fretting mistake.

But it’s still a synchronization problem, just a different one.

I thought this comment was pretty interesting, because it perfectly describes my left hand. Chunking has always been easy for me, but I’ve had a good sense of rhythm long before I ever picked up guitar so maybe that’s why.

However, getting the notes within the chunk to line up? That’s where I struggle, which seems to be opposite of the norm.

In particular, I’m awful at descending phrases like a chromatic 4321 or other variants. As I get faster, my fingers just mindlessly flop on the string and they won’t do their job correctly. I can hit each quarter note beat perfectly in time and keep my right hand perfectly in time no problem, but the rest of the notes are a blur. Currently, I’m at around 95bpm with 16th notes but actively working on it.

Given that, I’d absolutely use the phrase “My fretting hand can’t keep up with my picking hand”, which is hilarious since 6 months ago I’d be saying the opposite.

[Troy]

Sure, but these are qualititatively different problems, and we know this from the playing samples we see on here. The individual who can line up the first note of the chunk properly every time is a sizable step ahead of the individual who cannot. And the solution to the “interior notes” problem is probably not the same as the solution to the initial note problem. By seeing problems for what they are, we are likely to devise better solutions.

For starters, in your case, I’d film the examples and make sure what you think is happening is exactly what’s happening. You can never be too sure. And then if so, I’d change the patterns around until you find one that is clean for you. Not all fretting patterns are created equal, and some may very well be easier to coordinate than others at high speed.

[rmbles]

I’m intrigued by the comment that table-tapping your fretting hand fingers pinkie-to-index is faster than index-to-pinkie. I wonder if this is universal - it certainly applies to me.

Pinkie-to-index seems effortless, and is at least 3x faster (for me) than going the other way (index-to-pinkie). I have to really concentrate to place and lift each finger from the table index-to-pinkie.