What to do when starting with speed isn't working? / Maboroshi's technique

Playing Technique
#21

One thing I’m curious about - have you tried comparing tension of totally relaxed to the tension in your playing? I know @Tom_Gilroy has made some videos about finding what “zero effort” feels like as an anchor point.

What I like to do is take my index and middle finger on my left hand, pointing straight up, put my left elbow on a desk or hard surface, and balance the bone (psisiform bone?) on the pinky side of my palm on the fingers, and let the wrist go limp, and see if I can move it like a fulcrum without tensing up. But pressing on the tendon just below the psisform bone makes the wrist loosen up (for me anyway) and gives me a quick baseline. I try and keep some pressure on that bone from the bridge when I play, and also am balancing pressure on my forearm resting it on the upper body/edge of the guitar. I think a lot about balancing those points and asking “how relaxed does my wrist feel in this position”.

It has helped somewhat, I think a lot of playing is an exercise in mindfulness meditation, it’s way more difficult than most people realize to pay attention to what your body is doing conciously.

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#22

I think @tommo 's assessment of 150 BPM 16th notes as “intermediate” has been somewhat taken out of context. The way I read it, he’s talking about just alternate picking one note (because why would he recommend anything harder for @Maboroshi to get comfortable?).

In that context, 150 is definitely intermediate, including the general guitar community.

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#23

I tend to write in Guitar pro a lot, maybe I’ll pick up some composition software as well.

A while ago I came across the Youtube of a guy, Ben Levin, who I spent a summer with at the Berklee Summer program but lost touch with, and enjoy a lot of his composition insights - he’s a great guy and has a lot of interesting/unusual content if you haven’t come across him before, for example:

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#24

Oh thanks for this clarification, I hadn’t noticed that this had caused some misunderstanding.

Indeed we were discussing Maboroshi’s case, specifically some examples we looked at where he could short periods of tremolo in the 200bpm range but had difficulty making it continuous / consistent. In that context, the idea was to lower the bpms a little (from 200 to 150 or so) so that we are still at “non-hoppable” speeds but we can try to have more control over the details, relaxation etc.

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#25

I don’t think 150 bpm 16ths is intermediate lol. Nothing anyone says will convince me that it is. Anyone can tremolo at high tempos. it does nothing for learning to switch strings accurately or for crosspicking. Period.

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#26

Ben Levin is awesome.

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#27

But nobody is claiming that cross picking at 150bpm is intermediate… you are taking it way out of context

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#28

It definitely depends on the pattern! This particular thread is about smoothing out the single-string picking of a player that can do 200+bpm but not consistently / controllably over long periods. Hence the suggestion to try a more “intermediate” speed of 150, with the implicit understanding that we are not talking about string-skipping triads over 6 strings, but “simpler” patterns like a tremolo or some scalar passages with plenty “notes per string”.

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#29

Incorrect. I’ve been told on numerous Technique Critiques here that if i can’t do it at 140-150 bpm than it isn’t efficient and all my posts were specifically about crosspicking for the most part. So I’d say I’m speaking completely in context.

#30

@RobertFlores I feel like you’re proving yourself wrong here… At no point did @Maboroshi specify that this is about crosspicking technique, and you just said yourself that your posts were specifically about crosspicking technique.

#31

No, you have been corrected about this numerous times in different threads. But you seem very stubborn about this so I’ll not engage with you further about it.

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#32

In response to a comment stating that no one ever said crosspicking at 150bpm was intermediate lol.

#33

This was all covered here.

#34

You’re literally the only one in that thread that suggests lower tempos. That’s my point so what are we debating about? It seems we agree to some degree.

#35

Hey all, I understand that “crosspicking” (a very vague term by the way) is a source of frustration for many guitar players — including myself at times!

But let’s not get off topic here and let’s keep the tone/vibe of the conversation friendly, and most importantly let’s try to help each other out. I think we should absolutely discuss the merits/limitations of different learning methods.

This particular thread was created by Maboroshi, and the intention — I think — is to discuss how to make a basic motion (e.g. applied to a single-string tremolo) more comfortable and reliable. [Obviously, @Maboroshi, please correct me if I got your intention wrong]. In fact it may be worth editing the title to make it a little more specific if you agree.

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#36

Tommo’s understanding is correct, my intent was for the thread to be about possible alternatives to starting with speed for developing your first fast, comfortable motion. I don’t think starting with a double escape motion is recommended anywhere in the CTC literature so I thought the motions discussed being single escape went without saying.

Also in my first reply, the fourth post in the thread, I said:

I thought Robert’s first reply mentioning intermediate motions was referring to single escape motions, since double escape motions weren’t mentioned prior to that.

#37

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry I made you repeat stuff you already wrote!

Well, let’s say this is a multi-layered problem :smiley:

A couple reasons why we usually get people started on single escape motions (off the top of my head):

  • Tremolo-ing fast on a single note is a very simple instruction to give, and very likely to lead to the discovery of at least one fast motion
  • Pretty much 100% of the time, such fast motion is single escape
  • We think it’s important that players experience what it feels like to “play fast correctly”. Single-escape licks tend to have the highest hit-rate and are more likely to lead to this experience of “correctness”.
  • the same experience of correctness should be sought when learning more “complicated” picking motions (mixed escapes and whatnot)
  • Side note: even the best “crosspickers” (e.g. Andy Wood) tend to default to single escape when they play at their fastest. Therefore, it appears they still have a single-escape foundation underneath all their fancy double-escape patterns :D.
  • Side Note 2: Molly Tuttle may be an outlier here as IIRC she is double-escaping pretty much every pickstroke in her interview!

That being said, if a player is interested in double escape stuff (Tumeni Notes, banjo rolls & whatnot), they should definitely pursue that too!

EDIT: @Maboroshi this just gave me a weird idea. I know you spent quite a lot of time experimenting with single-string tremolos and single-escape licks. Since you still feel stuck, why not go wild and try something like a fast banjo roll? Again, in this case forget about accuracy, you just want to try and do a very rough version of the motion at tempo. Even if you don’t get a clean banjo roll out of this, I wonder if this might give you the opportunity to experiment with a wider range of motion (since you have to cover multiple strings). Do I remember correctly that your tremolo motion stayed very close to the string at all times, and eventually would get stuck on it?

EDIT2: another option along the same lines (wider range of motion) is to try and do a 2-string tremolo (basically a mini-strum).

Let me know what you think!

By the way, the discussion of advantages / disadvantages of different tempos for “learning double escape” is definitely an interesting one, we can create a separate thread for that :slight_smile: [I’ll do it later unless someone opens it first]

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#38

What kind of tempo would you start at for the banjo rolls?

When I’ve done rolls or similar 1nps patterns before I kept hitting the adjacent strings and it was more of a mini strumming motion centred on the string I was actually trying to hit. I’ll give it a go when I can play again though (arm started hurting about a week ago and I want to make sure it’s 100% better before I practice).

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#39

Oh no I hope you recover soon!

For this experiment I wouldn’t even use a metronome, and also I would not worry about hitting wrong strings. I was thinking of these examples (banjo rolls and multi-string tremolos) as a way to “trick yourself” into making slightly bigger picking motions, to see if that helps resolving the “start-stop” issue.

If you end up nailing a banjo roll as a side-effect, I wouldn’t complain :smiley:

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#40

No luck with the banjo rolls or 2 string tremolos. I’ve been at it for several weeks, trying different patterns, pick grips, anchor points, etc. The result is always something like this:

Same start/stop problem, I can’t get through the strings and my arm locks up from wrist to shoulder.