Willjay's NPS Clocking Project

General Music Discussion
#1

The following is the pre-eminent list of the highest speeds at which the fastest and/or most famous fast guitarists have been clocked at when using their fastest alternate picking licks or runs. This list was compiled by a man who goes by Willjay who has devoted tremendous numbers of hours slowing down clips of guitar players when using alternate picking. I copied Willjay’slst from another forum on the internet, a forum that seems to be near dead for lack of activity in recent years although it was once extremely active and had hundreds of subscribers. This man’s work in compiling the statistics he did in his notes per second clocking project that none other than Guitar World magazine published these results! it is the one and only list of its kind Guitar World has ever published which only adds to the prestige of the list and of course, of the competency Willjay demonstrated in creating this list with excruciating hours of work listening over and over to slowed don clips of the playing f these various guitarists, checking to make sure the nots these guitarists alternate picked in these examples were accurate and clean.

Here it is:

I often get asked for an actual list of results from my NPS Clocking Project for alternate picking, so today i’ve typed out a list of my results from clocking over 50 of the fastest known guitarists.

I’ve split them into groups of speed, just to make it a bit easier to read.

As you’ll see, there are several people that are around the same speed, though i have made noteable comments for a lot of them, because as is obvious to me now, they aren’t all necessarily on the same level of picking skill JUST because they pick at the same speed, there are other factors involved also (eg. level of accuracy, difficulty of shapes/patterns involved).

I’ve also seperated the “Spasmic Arm Vibration” picking, from the normal picking. You may notice that Rusty Cooley is in both lists, that is because he changes how he picks after a certain speed (from controlled picking, to arm vibration picking).

This is the only list of it’s kind i’ve seen anywhere on the net that is fully scientific, where i can back up every single speed claim with audio evidence in the form of 1 second clips that i have created for each artist, and clocked them myself.

Anyway… here ya go :

  • Shawn Lane - 18 nps

  • Danny Joe Carter - 17 nps (not note for note accurate/coordinated at that speed)

  • Todd Duane - 16.5 - 17 nps (very accurate)

  • Marcus Paus - 16 -17 nps (inaccurate, tremelo picking)

  • Rusty Cooley - 16 nps

  • John McLaughlin - 16 nps (very accurate…on acoustic!!!)

  • Michael Angelo Batio - 16 nps (very accurate)

  • Joel Rivard - 16 nps (very accurate)

  • Tony Macalpine - 16 nps (very accurate)

  • Guthrie Govan - 16 nps

  • Rick Graham - 16 nps

  • Theodore Ziras - 16 nps (alternate picks accurate up to around 16 nps, after that he starts to switch to missing out pickstrokes/economy picking)

  • Chris Impellitteri - 16 nps (16 nps in his early years…these days more around 14-15 nps)

  • Conrad Simon - 15 nps (very accurate)

  • John Petrucci - 15 nps (can be very accurate when not simply “tremelo picking”)

  • Yngwie Malmsteen - 15 nps

  • Paul Gilbert - 15 nps (very accurate)

  • Al Di Meola - 15 nps (very accurate)

  • Jorge Strunz - 15 nps (very accurate)

  • Jason Becker - 15 nps (can be very accurate)

  • Vinnie Moore - 15 nps (very accurate)

  • John Norum - 15 nps

  • Michael Romeo - 15 nps

  • Ron Thal - 15 nps

  • Jeremy Barnes - 15 nps

  • John Sykes - 15 nps

  • Mario Parga - 15 nps (not very accurate, mostly tremelo picking)

  • Paco DeLucia - 14 -15 nps

  • Kee Marcello - 14 nps (very accurate)

  • Milan Polak - 14 nps

  • Bob Zabek - 14 nps

  • Matthew Mills - 14 nps

  • Nuno Bettencourt - 14 nps

  • George Bellas - 14 nps

  • Stephan Forte - 14 nps

  • Toshi Iseda - 14 nps

  • Mark Tremonti - 14 nps

  • German Schauss - 14 nps (quite inaccurate)

  • Buckethead - 13.5 nps

  • Jeff Loomis - 13.5 nps

  • Tony Smotherman - 13 nps

  • Steve Vai - 13 -14 nps (mostly around 13 nps)

  • Neil Zaza - 13 nps (i’m sure he can pick quicker than this… i just don’t have many good quality recordings)

  • Joe Stump - 13 nps (though he does gain more speed with certain runs by economy picking)

  • Greg Howe - 13 nps

  • Steve Morse - 13 nps

  • Randy Rhoads - 13 nps

  • Zakk Wylde - 13 nps

  • The Great Kat - 13 nps (…of very inaccurate tremelo picking on 1 string)

  • Joey Taffola - 12 nps (very accurate)

Here are some speeds i’ve clocked for people using `Spasmic Arm Vibration" picking :

  • Odracir (Michael Angelo forum) - 27 - 28 nps (Spasmic arm vibration picking on 1 note)
  • Shredmikael (John Petrucci forum) - 20 nps (Spasmic arm vibration “tremelo” picking; is 16 years old)
  • Tiago Della Vega - 18 - 20 nps (picks up to this speed with spasmic arm vibrations, left and right hands never match up, and often fingers more notes than he picks)
  • Francesco Fareri - 18 nps (…of uncoordinated, inaccurate, arm vibration picking on 1 string)
  • Rusty Cooley - 16.5 - 17 nps (up to this speed when using the vibrating arm picking method, which loses some accuracy)

Hope this helps a bit! :wink:

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#2

Hi @Acecrusher,

I am familiar with Willjay’s list, I was a member on a few forums he was active on. I respect his work, I know he was as careful and thorough as he could be.

I think his criteria he used was a little unreasonable. For a fast picking lick to qualify for Willjay’s list, it had to be played with strict alternate picking and last for at least one second. For Willjay, the term “notes per second” meant the number of notes he counted in an audio snippet exactly one second long.

For this reason, the majority of licks clocked were single string tremolo licks or cyclic patterns. This effectively disqualifies many players who do not play these types of lines, or would not choose to play them for that long.

Personally, I think the term “notes per second” would more correctly describe a rate. If a player can play a 12 note phrase as 16th note triplets at 180 as part of a solo, I have no problem saying that they can play at 18 notes per second, but this wouldn’t qualify as 18 nps on Willjay’s list.

It also not surprising that many of the fastest strict alternate picking licks he clocked were one-way pickslanting licks (ascending/descending 6s, etc). I accept that Shawn Lane could pick descending 6s at 18 nps, but I think it’s unreasonable to directly compare that to Steve Morse crosspicking string skipping arpeggio patterns at 14 nps.

There are other Shawn Lane licks that Willjay has claimed qualify and are at about 18 nps, including some demonstrated on Power Licks/Power Solos. Having analysed the video of these licks in Transcribe!, some of these licks do not appear to me to meet his criteria, either by not being entirely picked or by involving an economical string change.

Finally, for those who don’t know, Willjay is the man behind the MyShawnLaneVideos channel on YouTube. He also used to upload Shawn Lane bootlegs to MegaUpload and distribute them on various forums. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that maybe Shawn was oversampled. This wouldn’t discount Shawn’s speed, but it means Willjay was likely exposed to Shawn’s fastest playing. It’s possible that another player was recorded playing as fast, but that Willjay was unaware of the recording.

I think Willjay’s criteria heavily favoured his favourite player, though I don’t believe this was intentional.

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#3

The problem I have with categorizing speed this way is that it does not account for the complexity of playing. Like stated, being able to play tremolo picked 16ths on one string and one single note on say tempo 150, is something radically different than being able to pick 16th note alternate picked 4 string arpeggios at that same speed.

It’s like completely different universes.

The only way you could compare speeds is if you take an agreed upon pattern, riff or lick and all players would play it with the exact same technique.

For example, the Master of Puppets riff is a very good example. If you can downpick this riff cleanly and accurately at a higher tempo than an other player and you are able to pick it at 220bpm while he maxes out at 180bpm, congratulations! You just proved you are faster.

You can do the same for a certain Yngwie lick or the Glass Prison arpeggios.

You can see this clearly with the Tornado of Souls solo that has been played by 4 different players (all very technically accomplished) at Megadeth. They all play acceptable versions, but no one comes close to Marty’s expression, control and accuracy at these speeds (16ths and above at 170-190bpm), although Kiko comes in a very close second.

These note per second lists are therefor pretty meaningless, because the players don’t play the same licks or pieces, let alone with an agreed upon technique.

If I were to take any value out of this, it would be:
take a player that dazzles you, speedwise, but especially musically, and try to learn from him.

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#4

I think Willjay had an ulterior motive of sorts for his list: He was hoping to find someone faster than Shawn and then challenge Shawn to beat him. But, really by the time the list was completed Shawn had passed away. It’s sad really.

It would have been interesting to compare someone like Shawn to a guy like Arthur Rhames and some of the new generation of mega-fast players.

It’s weird to call someone who can play 20+ notes per second “slow compared to xyz” but I think we’ll get there eventually. And then remember the Adam Neely video where he showed that speeding notes up to the point where you hear a continuous tone rather than discrete note events (something he references as the inter-onset interval) means there’s a certain finite point where too much speed eliminates discrete note events and actually creates what sounds like a frequency.

Adam explores it partially here:

And goes way out here:

Fascinating stuff.

#5

Honestly unless you’re running a Mythbusters type science show I can’t imagine why anyone would want this. Shawn already had as much speed as you can realistically hear in a musical situation. Honestly to me the super fast pattern based stuff was the least interesting stuff Shawn played. I find it strange that a lot of his biggest fans seem to be so focused on the ‘fast’ aspect of what he did.

When he slowed down to “normal” fast and wrote somewhat more varied lines for his own compositions, I think that’s when he rally found his voice.

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#6

I think treating music like a contest in that way is really sad.

#7

Troy is right -some of Shawn’s most expressive, emotive and indeed most appealing music are his tender melancholy ballads, “Epilogue for Lisa” from the Powers of Ten record,

The “Death Theme”:

“Once Upon a Time In The West”:

“Aga of the Ladies”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l5sEvC0SpY

Those are emotive and lovely pieces of music. But what got Shawn his notoriety amongst the guitar community of course was obviously his massive chops.

I’m sure Shawn didn’t care that he was the fastest kid on the block, he just loved music and wanted to do the kind of music that spoke to his heart, some of which was mind bogglingly fast.

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#8

Not viewing it as a contest, and more concerned with accuracy of the focused sample, I guess I’m okay with that. Agnostic of players in question, I find it interesting to see the ranges captured by his method of evaluation. I think the CtC crowd would offer a chance to crowd source more of this data, cataloged by more than just “alternate picking” or “Spasmic Arm Vibration.” Good stuff.

#9

No doubt, I love the ultra melodic compositions. I love the compositions in general. But I was actually thinking about the stuff he played that was still technique-y enough to be impressive to people who like that kind of playing, but where there was melodic diversity involved, like the section in one of the REH videos when he walks through the solo to “Get You Back”. Still very Shawn-like, with tons of speed and some of his signature patterns and stuff. But it’s not just the patterns played at warp speed. There’s a little playing through the changes going on, and also licks that don’t tend to come up when he’s freestyling, maybe because he wrote them for that specific use in the tune. That’s where I think the originality starts to poke through the blaze a little better.

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#10

I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed this.

I think you need to change MAB from very accurate to ‘inhumanly’ accurate.

1 Like
#11

Yeah, I think the NPS competition doesn’t transfer into amazing playing. Some of the most extraordinarily difficult sounding songs are well below 200 bpm 16th. But they are played so super clean… that they sound unreal. Players like Rick Graham and Eric Johnson are examples of this. They really turn heads when they play.

#12

I’m amazed buckethead tops out at 13.5 NPS. That 200 BPM 16th right?

Not that I’m saying that 200 bpm is slow… but I thought he was a near-hyper picker.

#13

Considering @Tom_Gilroy 's description of the selection criteria, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions about where anyone tops out based on this list.

#14

Thanks. I read through that… and I see what @Tom_Gilroy is saying. I think it kinda goes to show that it’s next to impossible for one person to come up with an ‘unbiased’ view of almost anything.

And that’s awesome that Steve Morse can string skip at 13 nps. That is freaken tough to do.

#15

Where did you see Micheal Angelo Batio play that fast? Can you please show any videos?