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It's useful for playing the Matrix theme.
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
Definitely not about musicality so much as an exercise to further one technique that can be used to enhance it.
This Thorn video is similar. He goes over a very basic technique exercise which many of us might relate to at the beginning...but check out the section with the Paul Gilbert lick he got into when he was 16. It's at about 5:30 into the vid:
As a test to give a "general overview" of where someone is at with their technique (and I assume you mean overall technique here, as you don't specify), it's not helpful in the slightest. They might be rubbish at picking but very good at lots of other stuff. And as @Barney said it doesn't even begin to cover all the different aspects of alternate picking itself. I think you'd have to expand it quite a lot, and devise similar tests for strumming, tapping, sweeping, muting, fingerpicking, use of dynamics etc etc. (or at least devise tests to cover the techniques a particular student would need in their chosen field/fields of interest i.e. blues, metal, country).
@DLM 's sausage looks tasty though.
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Problem for me is that the OPs responses come across as somewhat condescending, not really something that would make me want to book a lesson tbh.
A level for me. I don't really practise things like this, but I should. It builds dexterity and coordination and speed is handy even if you rarely use it. I'm not into shred styles so don't have that particular motivation for practising things like this but you wouldn't have to spend 8 hours a day to improve, just 15 mins would improve most guitarists technique who don't do mechanical exercises like this.
Or if I look at it another way, I don't play fast for 2 reasons, mostly I don't want to (most of the time) but the overriding reason is I can't. If I could, I occasionally would. I can play the styles I need to, get plenty of work gigging and people seem to like my playing, but I'm past the point now of thinking developing mechanical technique could ever be a bad thing. It doesn't have to be your main focus, but I think it should be everybody's practise routine*
*I don't have a practise routine, I've been playing 25 years and I'm still a lazy, disorganised twiddler.
Much more valuable skills to me would be muting technique, coordination, good strumming, and being able to change between open and barre chords. None of which I can do very well at all!
All of that would allow me to be a lot more musical than playing this at 250bpm!
Sometimes when discussing this, it's sounds to me like people are actually keen to argue that the worse your mechanics are, the more musical you can be
Translates well to electric guitar. Not an etude...but definitely an excellent exercise in which alternate picking would be essential.
I don't understand what the argument is here. The OP didn't say that the test was a be all and end all. Nor did he say that it's a test of musicality.
If I can't do that one passage effectively (to tempo and in the pocket) and I want to develop that technique, then it's an indicator that I'll need to put some work into alternate picking, using other exercises and pieces.
I'm not arguing as such, I'm stating that a four note exercise/test will only give you results for that example. I agree it will in principle translate to other areas, however it isn't a holistic view of technical prowess on an instrument.
I'm all for advancing what we can personally achieve on any instrument, however this exercise is not something I would use to judge ability. It's not very real world playing.
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