I want to play a song that is too hard for me

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  • DLM said:
    DLM said:

    Despite my great admiration for @BigJon, Troy will tell you: playing slower and building up won't always get you where you wanna be. You need to identify the problems and work on them in great detail.

    Very true, but If you are not familiar with the technique, I would advise training very slow at first to build your mechanical ability from the ground up, I just don't think your metronome should decide when to change gears.

    @AxeInsight When learning anything new, one is going to have to start super slow to avoid "baking in" mistakes. Dave Kilminster would say: Start much slower than you think you need to start. *Much* slower.

    But the metronome doesn't decide when to change gears. You use the metronome to help yourself move up through the gears.

    @DLM I understand, maybe I didn't express myself correctly, what I'm reffering to is that I often see people saying stuff like: "I increase the metronome by 5 bpm every week", which seems strange to me because the learning curve is not steady and linear (at least it isn't for me) so I don't believe it fits your learning curve well enough to change the metronome speed like clockwork.

    I see this curve more like gears on a car, once you imprinted the mechanics in your muscle memory, you should push until you reach a plateau, and from there work at progressive speeds to overcome it.

    I see what you're saying though.
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  • DLMDLM Frets: 2513
    @AxeInsight Yeah, I've seen people say that, too. Not a realistic approach physiologically. Maybe I'll have to do a YouTube video in place of typing screens of TL;DNR text. :scream: I don't know of a video with the stuff I've seen in copyrighted materials explained all in one place, and I'm not about to post a pile of scans.
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  • RedRabbitRedRabbit Frets: 483
    DLM said:
    I don't know of a video with the stuff I've seen in copyrighted materials explained all in one place, and I'm not about to post a pile of scans.
    This is an interest point actually (or it is too me at least).

    After many years of trying to improve my alternate picking without making any real progress I've been looking at it much more closely recently and I do believe I'm now making progress.  The thing is though I've had to take ideas from 3 or 4 different sources to really make any headway.

    Just of the top of my head I've looked at

    Pick slanting - thanks to Troy Grady (I've actually paid for the Pick Slanting Primer pack which I'm working through albeit slowly - definitely worth the $55 if, like me, you need more explicit explanations than a lot of his youtube videos give)

    Chunking/Synchronisation - mainly thanks to Troy Grady but Claus Levin deserves a mention as well as it's one of his videos that got me to really link the two together

    Burst playing - thanks to @DLM for this one as he was kind enough to send me a copy of a Shaun Baxter article that discussed this amongst a couple of other ideas.

    Effective metronome use - I think this possible goes back to a Guthrie Govan book I've got but the Shaun Baxter article added a bit more to it.


    Now any one of these in isolation has never really yielded results for me yet applying all the above ideas to my practice routine over the last month or so has resulted in noticeable improvement.

    It'd be great to see someone produce something with a real, in depth explanation of all of the above (as well as any ideas I've missed/haven't come across yet).  I guess some people will be able to piece it all together themselves or maybe some just don't come across the same hurdles as I have but certainly for me there's been quite a bit more to it than practice slowly and gradually increase the speed.
     
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  • DLMDLM Frets: 2513
    @RedRabbit Everyone has different needs, I think. I've just watched Ben Eller's latest FAQU video, and he too agreed that there are so many folks getting great results with widely diverse techniques that you need to find something that kinda works and work on and with that. A lot. That said, there are certain "schools" that work, and Troy Grady does a great job of teaching several of those and explaining how they all work. One can, like Paul Gilbert, move between schools (he changed from edge-picking with the back of the pick to using the front), but there are plenty of great players using the approach he left behind (Benson/Friedman).
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  • RedRabbitRedRabbit Frets: 483
    Oh definitely.  I didn't mean suggest that I'd stumbled across the "one true method".

    My point, if I had one, was that a lot of the material out there seems geared towards focusing one one aspect of the technique. The most popular seems to be the start slow and speed up with various repeating patterns and this has never really worked for me. You really need to go digging to find different approaches (or be fortunate enough that some kind soul points you towards it).  I don't know if its that some have greater aptitude for it and therefore need less direction but it seems that, from the number of times the subject comes up, there's something lacking in the standard advice. 

    That said, Troy Grady's pick slant primer has a lot of information and, getting back to the OP, the Yngwie parts are a great starting point (and I'm not even a huge fan).  Even if you don't pay for the course there a lot of hints in the free videos on YouTube.
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  • RedRabbit said:

    It'd be great to see someone produce something with a real, in depth explanation of all of the above (as well as any ideas I've missed/haven't come across yet).  I guess some people will be able to piece it all together themselves or maybe some just don't come across the same hurdles as I have but certainly for me there's been quite a bit more to it than practice slowly and gradually increase the speed.
     
    @RedRabbit ;This is indeed a very wide subject, ironically, the concepts you implemented in your playing (with the exception of the metronome one, are part of the online course I made (as far as I can tell).

    But maybe I could research it and make a course on Alternate picking only that would push it even further and cover all the angles, do you think people would buy it ?
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  • DLM said:
    @RedRabbit Everyone has different needs, I think. I've just watched Ben Eller's latest FAQU video, and he too agreed that there are so many folks getting great results with widely diverse techniques that you need to find something that kinda works and work on and with that. A lot. That said, there are certain "schools" that work, and Troy Grady does a great job of teaching several of those and explaining how they all work. One can, like Paul Gilbert, move between schools (he changed from edge-picking with the back of the pick to using the front), but there are plenty of great players using the approach he left behind (Benson/Friedman).


    Paul Gilbert isn't an edge picker - he's a primary upward pick slanter.  Marty Friedman isn't an edge picker either, he's a primary downward pickslanter.


    @RedRabbit - I would strongly advise sticking to one way pick slanting for starting out.  I did try to learn two way pick slanting, but found it very difficult and my movements ended up very string hoppy and this was slowing me down.  I'm a natural upward pick slanter, so I'm sticking with that and using pull offs when changing strings on certain phrases. 

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  • DLMDLM Frets: 2513

    @bingefeller

    I meant this:

    DLM said:

    Oooh @Bingefeller, I didn't realise you were a Benson-style picker!

    Dan mentions many other players who use this grip.

    I thought Grady had coined the term "edge picking" for that? I.E. Leading-edge picking (Gilbert now) and trailing-edge picking? Going by which edge of the pick first hits the string?
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  • DLM said:

    @bingefeller

    I meant this:

    DLM said:

    Oooh @Bingefeller, I didn't realise you were a Benson-style picker!

    Dan mentions many other players who use this grip.

    I thought Grady had coined the term "edge picking" for that? I.E. Leading-edge picking (Gilbert now) and trailing-edge picking? Going by which edge of the pick first hits the string?
    Yes Gilbert used trailing edge picking on the first Racer X album, but it then started to hurt his thumb so he changed to regular style picking.  

    Leading edge, to the best of my understanding from Troy’s teachings, would be when someone holds their pick like Benson but the top part of the pick you are seeing in that picture is the part that would hit the strings first on a downstroke.  I can’t think of any player who plays like this.  

    Troy describes regular edge picking as the angle that guys like Gilbert, Moore put on the pick to get a better tone.  Paul talks about putting an angle on the pick on the Get Out Of My Yard DVD lesson segment.  
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  • RedRabbitRedRabbit Frets: 483

    @RedRabbit - I would strongly advise sticking to one way pick slanting for starting out.  I did try to learn two way pick slanting, but found it very difficult and my movements ended up very string hoppy and this was slowing me down.  I'm a natural upward pick slanter, so I'm sticking with that and using pull offs when changing strings on certain phrases. 

    Yeah, I'm focussing on downward pick slanting until I've made some significant progress. It's more or less my natural picking position (I think I've mentioned elsewhere that I tend to flatten the pick and then move towards an upwards slant as I move down (in pitch) through the strings).  I'm also working on sweep picking as its something I've just never looked at before and have noticed a natural tendency to change the pick slant depending on the direction I'm sweeping in so I'll probably look into two way pick slanting at some point but definitely not until I'm really happy with downward pick slanting. 

    I keep thinking of doing an update post to show exactly what I'm working on and what progress I'm making but i) it'd be a long post and needs the tab to explain things properly - neither is a problem but I need to find the time ii) while it isn't all Troy Grady stuff, a lot of it is I'm not hugely keen on putting up anything which I've got from his paid content.

    The second point is what's really stopping me posting anything in great detail which is why I've recommended the OP search out Troy's stuff on YouTube.
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  • DLMDLM Frets: 2513

    @Bingefeller I've found something explaining this on Troy's site:

    https://troygrady.com/2015/01/08/the-difference-between-pickslanting-and-edge-picking/

    So essentially, basically everyone uses "edge picking" to some degree, and it doesn't have anything to do with "pick slanting".

    My point was merely that elite players have successfully rebuilt their picking technique in quite radical ways. Yet the technique aspects they moved away from were successfully used by others. Lane was a trailing-edge picker, and Gilbert was crazy about his technique.

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  • nick79nick79 Frets: 252
    DLM said:

    @bingefeller

    I meant this:

    DLM said:

    Oooh @Bingefeller, I didn't realise you were a Benson-style picker!

    Dan mentions many other players who use this grip.

    I thought Grady had coined the term "edge picking" for that? I.E. Leading-edge picking (Gilbert now) and trailing-edge picking? Going by which edge of the pick first hits the string?
    That's how i've always held a pick, i had no lessons to start with and i guess that way just felt more natural to me. I've often thought  i was doing it wrong (pretty much every guitarist i've watched holds it the 'proper' way, but i have noticed some pro's holding it that way, James Hetfield being one i believe.

    I've tried the traditional way but it just feels so wrong to me, so it's nice to know there is some merit doing it this way. Thanks for that link, was very interesting. 
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