Help improving speed and accuracy

[Cliff]

Yeah, I did wonder why there was a section on building speed *after* the bit about playing Flight Of The Bumblee at 164bpm. I mean, after that, how much more speed do you need?
But seriously, thanks for the advice. On the left-hand section, playing slowly, for the pull-offs I'm making a conscious effort to actually pull a little with the finger that's lifting away. But I'm not sure this really works at faster speeds. I find my fingers have to barely touch the fingerboard to keep up. Do people just lift there fingers directly off at this speed and rely on amp gain to get a decent sound when doing legato, or should there still be a very quick pulling motion?

[horns666]

CLIFF...WTF...Suck them titties!!!

I give you credit for your restraint by practicing slowly. I learned all my solos/patterns/riffs as fast as I possibly can, or desired tempo and cleaned things up from there. I couldn't slow them down if I wanted to.

OH..BTW try playing that in a legato style..or pick/legato hybrid. That'll pick up speed , and it sounds cool..I think. Ever since forever, I tied a sock or whatever around the neck to keep the open strings quiet or just reached over, grabbing the neck with my picking hand while I hammered and pulled off each note in a scale/pattern. Soley playing with my fretting hand. Once I got the speed to my satisfaction ..I would introduce the pick. I had a "Kleen-Axe" string dampener on one of my strats back in the day. They're great for any kind of heavy tapping really. I'm sure that sounds unorthodox/backwards, but it's something that worked for me as far as speed goes. I drove my wife nuts for 25 years and will continue to do so....AT ANY VOLUME I DAMN WELL PLEASE!!

...and...ummm suck those titties...I mean really suggums!!!

[Twitch]

When I do tapping, and I only do it for sport, I never do it in any of our songs with either band, I mute the strings above(physically) with the inside of my wrist of my picking hand and the lower strings(again, physically) with the fingers not being used on my fretting hand, or the part of my palm where my fingers meet my palm. I only tap when I get bored, Ive not been able to find a good place to fit it in in any of my original music, in addition, Im most comfortable tapping with my index finger primarily which makes switching BACK to the pick a pita. Going from picking to tapping is smooth but going back has always been rough for me.

[Trem]

Could you elaborate on this? I'm realizing now I also need to concentrate on this aspect, and I want to get it right before devoting too many hours learning a new bad habit.
Are you saying you more less keep your hand at a fixed position and just rotate at the wrist to get to different strings? I'd be worried that this might make it difficult to pick fast when the wrist is at rotated at the extremes. I've been trying to work by using my elbow and shoulder to move my hand across the strings, so the pick angle stays constant with the strings. In theory, a side benefit will be I'm picking closer to the neck on the top E and closer to the bridge at the bottom E, which is how I'd like the tone to be. This works fine at 80-100bpm or so, but I'm not sure how it's going to work out once I try and go faster. I'm also not sure if it's practical if I'm skipping between strings with only one or two notes on each.

(I remember YYZ - sounds very tricky!)

Watch a bunch of different really good players and notice how they all do it differently. One extreme example is Marty Friedman - he looks like he has polio when he picks, and he rips it up. Eddie kind of has a loose and free wild hand - which i cannot do, i try it and i just lose all centering. I personally pick best anchored and muted. However it kind of limits me on some types of licks where it looks like the wild free approach works well for others.

I'd say if you were starting from scratch, then as a teacher i would try and teach the most "proper" right hand technique, as in wrist just so, motion just so - but a player that has been playing for a long time a certain way and seem to be able to pull off most of what they are trying to do and it works then, just keep doing what your doing and maybe add some pointers for cleaning it up. Imo it's all about finding the most comfortable and natural way your hand wants to do it and work on fine tuning that. Otherwise your fighting against yourself kinda - old dog new tricks kinda thing.

Some good "picking" teachers i've seen which may or may not work for everyone but good to watch and get ideas from are Michael Angelo ( he describes well how he picks they way he does well, weather you like his playing or not he teaches the mechanics well, and another is Frank Gambale - (it's another level there) but yeah he rips it and has some stuff i remember seeing years back where he explains his picking really well. But check out Micheal Angelo's picking one i think it's a good universal approach for anyone, and i personally don't follow it really well, lol. I do what he says Not do to and use a little bit of movement in my pick fingers instead of a more from the wrist rapid fire motion.

Someone else might say forget that, re learn it - don't keep doing it that way, learn it "proper" start all over - i guess that could be valid as well - but i know i never will restart from scratch like that i just know i wouldn't keep it up, not gonna lie. Basically practice your strengths. Steve Vai said that and i kind of agree, he basically said he didn't practice the shit he wasn't good at, he just hammered away at what he was good at. I agree with that in the extent that, some things all of us are not going to be able to do, or do well. So let someone else do it who finds it natural. If you don't hear notes at 220 bpm in your head all day long, you probably aren't going to ever really be the guy playing 220 bpm notes all day long, no matter how much you practice at it.


EVH at 1:13 the wild hand thing stated above

Marty Friedman - i don't even know how he can play guitar at all like that

Then there's this guy - And i'd say do whatever he's doin

[Cliff]

Horns: I want to do the legato stuff as well - I think it sounds cool too, but I was hoping to nail the picking approach first. I used to do all my scales with hammer-ons and pull-offs, but the timing wasn't there, neither was the smooth tone. If nothing else, I hope I get better timing out of all this practice, even if I don't get any faster. The rest of your advice, I'm taking straight to heart
Twitch: yeah, I can tap some, but don't take as much care as you to mute the other strings, and I've never been able to string it together with anything else to actually make it sound like a piece of music. Hopefully, once I can play the notes well, I can think more about which ones to play in which order.
Trem: thanks for the advice and the videos - very interesting to compare them directly, especially Friedman, who I've never watched before (I know, heresy, but I never got into the Megadeth/Metallica thing). Friedman seems to use a right-hand position recommended by Tuck Andreas, similar to Benson and Santana, but it looks like his pick itself is turned 180 degrees or so from the way they hold it. I tried this briefly, and found it worked reasonably well, but it seems so unnatural at first, I bet it takes ages to master. (I read somewhere Benson originally developed this cause he used to practice in cramped conditions in cars/vans on the way to gigs, and it was the best he could do in the tight space.)
I know what you're saying about working to your strengths, but I'm just not very happy with my current technique at all, and I'm not sure if there *are* any strengths, so I'm going to continue with the brand new approach for a bit longer - it's not like I'm throwing too much away . Of course, I'm ultimately very lazy, which is why I'm in this mess in the first place, so I'm wondering how long I can keep at it. Also, I think I need to take your earlier advice and be sure to play some actual music from time to time and have some fun.

[BenoA]

I'm now concentrating on the right-hand part. I spend most of my time on the very first exercise here - just plucking the open strings and fretting one note out of very four. The advice he gives is to reach top speed, then drop down by 20bpm, then increase by 2, drop by 1, until you reach top speed again. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now, and I've gone from 16th notes 60-80 to 150-170. Admittedly, it's a little flaky at 170, but up to 165 it feels good and solid to me.

Exercise #25???

Man, I wish I could play it up to that BPM... Back to my metronome!

[BenoA]

OK Cliff... You made me do it.

While the kids were in the pool, I was watching them, metronome on one side, Stetina's book on the other and worked on that #25 and pages 18-19 exercises. So I spend around 1h30 on this.

With #25 and following Stetina's formula for increasing bpm I reached 137... So tomorrow and during the upcoming weeks, I'll keep working on this.

Awesome thread, thanks for posting this.

[RacerX]

I have Stetina's book also (gathering dust somewhere in my living room) but I'll be danged if I'm gonna do homework assigned by y'all!

[BenoA]

Mine too was full of dust. As is the Petrucci's DVD that I should also give a look at...

[javert]

I had to look up exercise 25. I made notes in the margin as I progressed and I can see that I stopped when I hit 200 BPM on that one. I doubt I could pick up a guitar and do that now

The picking exercises that gave me the most grief were 51-55. Some I could pick really fast, others I basically couldn't do at all. They really made me realize that I was stuck in certain picking patterns when changing strings.

[Cliff]

200? Wow!
And way to go BenoA!
I had another go at exercise 25 last night, after having given it a break the previous evening while I concentrated on my left hand. Well, I could barely do 150bpm. I took a break, then came back, and I was struggling at 140. Took another break, found myself struggling at 130. Went to bed feeling very pissed off. I'm beginning to wonder if I wasn't listening properly when I thought I'd reached 165...

[MetalDaze]

Going to bed sometimes works for me! This might be total hogwash, but when I'm burned out practicing something and leave it alone for a day, I come back at it better than before. It's almost like my brain processes what I was trying to do offline and gets a little better at it while I'm resting.

[javert]

Yeah, sometimes it's better just to relax and put the guitar away. That said, I'm not good at actually doing it. Sometimes I get hell bent on making something work and keep going, yet it seems that it only gets worse It becomes a mind game at that point...

[BenoA]

Tonite, I struggle to reach 136 bpm for exercise #25 but I made it. I'm keeping track of all of this on paper.

And also started working further to page 24 for exercises 51-55 as javert suggested. Anyway, according to Stetina I could move forward as I had reached over 132 bpm for ex #25 (see bottom of page 19 in his book).

Anyway, ex #51-55 made me feel like I was re-learning the instrument. I mainly concentrated on 51 to 53 for tonite. Very slowly and will move up from there.

I also noticed that the way I hold the pick has changed and makes me have a better control of it. I think someone mentionned it earlier in this thread but now I hold the pick the same way no matter playing slow or faster (I think it is a good thing).

I have to add that I traded my regular picks for Jazz III (did that a couple of weeks ago, see another thread I had started in this forum).

That thread has stimulated me. I'll be trying putting around 1h30 every day in the coming weeks only on those plain exercises. Anyway, I kicked the singer out of our band and we're looking for a new front man, so until then, I'll put my guitar time into my technique.

Thanks Cliff for starting this thread!

[Twitch]

Wow, a lot of work can go down the drain after even the slightest nerve injury. I hit my elbow real hard about a month ago in the joint and my arm was numb feeling for days. Didnt think much of it until now a month later and I still cant down pick as fast and as long as I used to be able to do before the incident. At this point, I hope its a matter of rehab and not permanent. It SUPER frustrating, knowing you could do it before and you cant now. Its really making the studio work a real drag. After so many tries of certain songs, my arm goes out and I have to settle for the more moderately paced tracks to do. The real pisser is that it has affected my alternate picking NONE WHATSOEVER. WTF??

To better explain my issue, its like a fatigue that comes on that cant be overcome like normal fatigue can. I send the impulses to my hand and some of them just get ignored by the nerve no matter how hard I try to make my hand do its thing. Once it starts, thats end game for the night. Again, its really irritating and it scares the hell out of me. I used to take a little pride in my down picking ability, now theres a chance it will never be what it was.