Wouldn't be playing like this without CTC.. Thanks!

Technique Critique
#1

First thing - I’m not a shredder…I’m a blues/rock guy who occasionally dabbles with modes and likes to play fast sometimes.

I love to play though, music for me is a daily ritual that helps keep me sane(ish) and happy :slight_smile:

My style at this stage is a mess of different stuff from random hybrid picking, to alternate, economy and legato. I don’t have a ‘system’ at all at this stage… Personally I feel I play better when I switch that off and just go for stuff.

I do however follow CTC for quite a while now, I’ve bought many of the packs (and the t-shirt!) and have enjoyed all enormously. Each one I watch gives me new inspiration and a new bag of tricks to play around with. Through it I’ve learned that the Yngwie/EJ style seems to fit me much better than the Pettrucci/Morse style… I prefer to listen to the former kind of players so that’s likely a factor : ) I do work on the strict alternate picking stuff though, I find it a great warm up to get my hands synced better.

Anyhoo… I just wanted to say thanks and show some of my noodlings, you can’t see my picking action that clearly until almost near the end but I hope it’s enjoyable in any case… as I said I’m not precise about what I do but I love playing and recently, thanks to the CTC exercises, I occasionally surprise myself… which is pretty nice when you’ve been playing as long as I have.

Keep up the great work!

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#2

That’s some tasty playing! Also some interesting movements in there, particularly the medium speed multi-string stuff, some of which looks like crosspicking to me. If you do any more of these, point the headstock at the camera so we can get a better look at what’s going on with your movements. Either way nice work.

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#3

Thanks! I’ll make some time in the next couple of days to post some more ‘forensic’ clips and will post them here :slight_smile:

#4

Nice playing dude! So clean and clear and you dont seem to be using much gain.

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#5

Thanks! I play with the volume pot a lot, and roll it back for the slower stuff to ease off the gain for a bit more dynamics/less string noise.

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#6

Oh yeah, there’s something I like about playing with a higher gain sound, but having the volume rolled back to give you a sparkly clean sound rather than just trying to achieve the same sound with your volume up full.

#7

For sure! For my taste I always like a bit of grit, even on ‘clean’ sounds, just seems to give a nice compression and I like how you can get many different tones by playing harder/softer or plucking some notes with fingers etc.

#8

OK… here’s a video showing various things I work on, most are from CTC apart from the first and last things I play which I like to think are my own inventions : )
I guess the camera angle could be better for some of them but right at the end I remembered to angle more towards it to show the pick better.

One thing I notice about the ascending diminished 4s one - it seems to me I do more two way slanting on it vs the descending version and it always feels a bit more ‘work’ ascending for some reason… and I need to start with an upstroke to make it work for me (I prefer inside picking)

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#9

This clip is awesome! So many good things in here. The first maj7 lick is a great example of Albert Lee-style crosspicking, and the last lick, the skippy pentatonic patterns, you’ve merged some two-way pickslanting into that movement. You’ve got the hang of those “extensiony” downstrokes. Are you specifically practicing that movement or did it just evolve that way for you?

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#10

Thanks. It was fun to put together!

The first maj7 lick was a melodic/motif idea I got from listening to some soundtracks I like, it was an attempt to emulate the looped string parts you hear in some scores and the alternate picking/cross picking approach seemed to give it the most consistent rhythm which was something I wanted it to have.

The skippy pentatonic pattern at the end is kinda funny I guess. I was just looking for a way to get a fresh (to my ears anyway) sound from the good old pentatonic box, it’s influenced by listening to a score from a game I really like I think. When I came up with it first the left hand fingering seemed quite challenging so I really focused on that to begin with. It was only when that started coming together I looked at what my right hand was doing and realized it was an interesting picking exercise too : )
So I guess I’d say that just evolved but I’m sure working on the other stuff (the skippy thing is the newest in my bag of tricks) set up my right hand to be able to handle it.

#11

Your crosspicking movement is great and definitely worth continuing to work on. The occasional mis-targeted pickstrokes and airball pickstrokes you’re seeing are actually good signs. Under the camera, beginner errors are random and usually cause entire phrases to turn into sloppyness. But targeting and airball errors typically only affect specific notes or string changes. They are “better” errors, if you can imagine that. This is a sign you’re actually doing the movement right.

If you can become more aware of the movement by feel, this may help your ability to trigger the individual components of it deliberately (downstroke vs upstroke), and tighten up the accuracy. You might try exaggerating the movement slightly, with a slightly more aggressive pick attack (either more force, more pick, or both). You might try a slightly slower or slightly faster tempo. Basically you’re stress testing it as many different ways as you can, to find out where it breaks, and if it feels different when it does, so you can better identify when it is correct. This is not traditional practice but it’s a practice skill I think all of us “self teachers” need to learn to do, and to teach students to do when they’re still learning basic physical skills.

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#12

Many thanks Troy, that’s very helpful and gives me some good pointers as to what to focus on, much appreciated.