Honestly, shoulder surgery was one of the best things that’s happened to my left hand dexterity in a while.
Try this - wrap some sort of mute around the nut of your guitar (I Prime’d a couple Gruv Gear fretwraps), fire up a backing track, and jam along tapping everything with your fretting hand.
Now, imagine ONLY being able to do that, for about a month. 
Mad respect for not getting depressed and wanting to quit guitar 
I figured it was a great opportunity to re-learn how to pick - that’s why I’m here. 
After seeing your post about these I bought one for my main recording acoustic; it’s a godsend when playing things that are capo’d up.
The funny thing is, normally I think they’re silly and ridiculous, because they’re wildly popular in the djent scene. But, minus one hand and without a really good way to mute unwanted strings… 
The ridiculous thing is the price.
Plenty of pros use something more like these, for one tenth the price (or even cheaper):
https://www.claires.com/ca/black--gray-and-white-scrunchies-163479.html?cgid=2745
To which all I’ll say is Amazon Prime and prescription pain meds.
Such as what? What about how to pick haven’t they explained?
This is very true. I could play very fast legato as soon as I learned 3nps scales. Feels like a very natural movement whereas picking is more inconsistent without correct technique.
One thing I don’t see a lot of people talk about is hand/wrist/thumb position in relation to the left hand. I wound up studying this heavily due to being diagnosed with Focal dystonia five years ago, of which I’ve mostly recovered from. My issue was in my index finger and 3nps fingerings became very difficult to play at moderate to fast speeds. 2nps were much easier, so my ability to do Greg Howe/Michael Romeo style tapping as well as pentatonic shapes literally saved my career… anyway…
I worked primarily with an instructor in Body Mapping (similar to Alexander Technique) named Jerald Harscher, who introduced me to the idea of applying a more violinistic left hand approach than the strict classical “thumb behind the neck always” approach. This puts the neck in a bit of a “cradle” between the thumb and index finger, and the fingers go on more of a diagonal to the frets rather than parallel. It keeps the wrist straighter and the forearm in a more neutral position. The player he told me to pay attention to in regards to a good “hand model” was Yngwie, who he described as having some of the best movements he’s ever seen. He also said this about Tom Quayle after showing him a video. Adapting this approach lead to a huge improvement in my left hand condition.
The irony is that many highly skilled players, despite going back to the “thumb on the back of the neck, fingers parallel” rhetoric, in practice almost never maintain this and do some amount of violinistic technique, especially bluesier players. I have only ever seen one shred instructional where the guitarist advocated explicitly for this violin style left hand approach and that was Borislav Mitic in his video that is available (for free, last I checked) on the www.dc-musicschool.com website. I’d really recommend checking this out as his description is pretty spot on.
I worked with
I mean, for one, they’re only really just getting into cross-picking now, so there’s a lot left to do there alone.
Maybe but I stated a while ago that to pick across the strings one can simply use a succession of TWPS changes. Besides, except for a small minority of cross picking licks, sweeping is a faster, cleaner and easier way to deal with playing arpeggios.
How many heavy metal or even rock licks in general call for string changes with one note per string that can’t simply be swept?
Maybe it’s different for bluegrass players but they comprise such a small portion of the CTC customers that spending too many resources, namely time and money, wouldn’t make good business sense for Troy’s company. I seriously doubt they have enough subscribers who are predominantly bluegrass players to make catering to them too much to be financially prudent. Hell, until CTC started covering playing arpeggios with alternate instead of sweep picking I only knew of one guy who did it - Steve Morse - and everyone I talked to about it replied: “Yeah, that’s Steve Morse’s thing.” In other words, it’s not a vital part of any great rock guitarists arsenal of techniques.
There are tons of licks that occur in rock and metal solos but almost none require to play one note per string at high speeds without the option of using sweeping. So to rock and metal guitarists, it’s a wiser use of their time to try to perfect their two way pick slanting licks and scales, their sweeping, and their legato techniques. Besides doing technique work on those three techniques, the best thing they can do with their time is songwriting and playing gigs
I think what Troy and his company have done to de-mystify how to successfully alternate pick, which was the reason Troy started CTC, is wonderful for people without the intuitiveness to learn it on their own, unlike all the guitar heroes of the 80s who never had something like CTC to rely on when they were learning how to play. Yngwie, Paul Gilbert, Shawn Lane, Satriani and the rest never had anything even similar to CTC and they achieved wonderful success, some of them while still in their teens such as Yngwie and Gilbert. That makes me somewhat annoyed when after Troy has already explained so much, there are people who still ask him for more and more directions on how to do even the simplest of things. I sometimes wonder if those type of people can figure out anything guitar related for themselves!
There is a tremendous amount of satisfaction to be gained in spending the mental and physical effort to figure out some things on their own rather than rely on someone else for all the answers. Not everyone has the talent to become a musician. If one finds himself asking Troy how to do even the simplest of things, after all the things he’s already explained to them, that’s probably a pretty good indication that while they may love music, they probably would be a lot more likely to achieve success by finding something that fits their God given talents better than being a serious musician does.
If people are asking questions it doesn’t mean they know nothing about that topic. In many cases I want to check if my way of doing things is efficient. Maybe someone has discovered a more effortless way etc…
Wow
I think we should avoid discouraging people who are trying to learn.
I’m just going to leave this here for anyone who needs it right now.
Paul Gilbert’s idea of “a very long time” certainly differs from mine. The first Racer X album was released when he was 19 years old.
mm I’ll just say that in my opinion sweeping is a good tool however, I personally don’t rely on it, unless that I use it for texture. The thing is that when you sweep the quality of the sound is too legato and sometimes it affects the sound you are going for, and sure a lot of people use it but it’s a little hard to place accents on fast runs ( I’m not saying it is impossible, but if your sweep consists of going down/up through the 6 strings it doesn’t come to naturally, unless you place a hammer-on or change directions, I think) so I can see a lot of more possibilities (’‘sound and texture’’) on 2WPS and crosspicking as far as 1nps licks go, and I think that’s the fascination for some of us that found out about crosspicking (before I got into ctc I never looked at my right hand, whatever came out, came, so it is really interesting to see how country guys, and metal guys approach certain things)
I wonder what the strong conservative classical musicians think of this (and i mean those who don’t really appreciate other genres) hahah I do agree that there has to be some kind of experimentation though, but if the forum is here, I don’t see that asking questions about the simplest thing is bad, especially when troy has made it clear that you do have to make the right movements otherwise it becomes really hard to do certain licks
I think crosspicking is super useful for metal, anything to do with arpeggios but with a slower/more rhythmical feel than sweeping, any kind of fast riffing across multiple strings.
I don’t want to discourage anyone. What I’d like to do is to inspire people to think for themselves. If someone’s been trying to figure something out for a year or two and can’t figure it out, then sure, ask some questions about it to various people and don’t just take one guy’s word for it; take several opinions, weigh them in your own mind and go with what makes the most sense to you. If somebody doesn’t think for himself and just asks how to do every little thing, even if he one day reaches his goal of playing what he wants to, the satisfaction derived is certainly going to be less than had he done more of it on his own, using his own mental effort in applying logic to find the best way to do something and of course having expended the physical effort of having put in all the practice time during which he tried the various ideas he came up with on his own.
That approach develops your mind as well as your physical abilities. It enhances your ability to logically come up with solutions to problems. One day you may find yourself in a quandary with nobody whom you can ask for a quick solution and then you’ll greatly appreciate having developed the ability to solve problems on your own.
You wonder what they think of my statement: Not everyone has the talent to become a musician? I can’t imagine they disagree. Do you think they’d reply: “Anybody can become a good classical musician as long as he’s willing to put forth the necessary effort”? That statement doesn’t hold true in other arts such as painting, it doesn’t hold true in sports, and it doesn’t hold true in intellectual endeavors such as earning a degree in electrical engineering or in physics.
People vary in their natural ability (talent) to learn at a rate which is sufficient to keep up with the workload they are given by their professors in college, to keep up with the other students in art school, or to keep up with the amount of improvement the other guys on their sports team are showing.
If, for example, one aspires to be a baseball player, and no matter how much work he puts into attempting to improve he continues season by season, to fall further and further behind his teammates in ability, eventually one year he’s not going to make the team. It would be doing a disservice to that kid for his father to tell him, “You can achieve anything you want. If you really want to be a pro or at least a semi-pro ballplayer when you grow up, then just work harder than you’re working. You’re already practicing twice as much as anybody else on the team and they just cut you from them. So don’t give up; practice three times more than they do! I’ll send you to a baseball camp where you’ll do nothing but play baseball al summer long. Whatever to takes to kale the team next year, I’ll help you do it.”
That kid is eventually going to find out that there will be other kids at baseball camp who not only practice just as much as he does, but they have more natural ability and that leads to their practice time yielding far more progress than his own practice time yields. You could apply a similar scenario to a kid who is struggling in high school honors English or honors Chemistry or Physics with the hopes of getting into an Ivy League University.
The end result is that no matter how much more time the kid spends practicing baseball than most of his teammates do, and no matter how much more time the kid with the dream of making it into an Ivy League school spends studies every night than his classmates do, eventually they’re both going to reach a point where no amount of extra work is going to make up for his lack of talent for his chosen field of endeavor. It’s going to be very demoralizing to the kid when he ultimately comes to the realization that he simply doesn’t have what it takes to achieve his goal.
It would have been far better if his father had told him early on “If you want to keep playing baseball with your friends just for the fun of it, great, but don’t even think about trying to make a career out of it. If you were the best baseball player you knew, the best for your age in our county or at least our town, I’d tell you that you might have a shot at playing professional baseball one day. It’s just such a competitive field, there are just so many kids who want to do that when they grow up that unless you were the best player you knew, you just don’t have a shot at making it. Even if you were the best player you knew that might not be enough, That’s how competitive a field it is.” The conversation the father of the kid who is studying as hard as he can and barely getting C’s in his high school honor courses curriculum yet still hoping to make it into Harvard or Stanford, would be a conversation that would hopefully go about the same way…
It may sound cruel to the kid at the time to hear the truth from his father but trust me, in the long run, that talk the father should have with his son will avoid heartbreak of a far greater magnitude than whatever disappointment the kid may be feeling now. Not only does the father having an honest talk with his son avoid a tremendous amount of heartbreak later on, it also gives the son time to find something he both likes and has talent for while he’s still young enough to put in the years of practice or studying depending upon what his new field of endeavor is so that he can do it while he’s still young enough to do it.
This discussion went wrong. Lets keep it constructive and on topic.