Man, my fingers could never move like that! Often when I see very technical playing, I admire the technique, but find the actual sound uninteresting.
Here I think the song is great (perhaps a bit overlong), and (I suspect) physiologically impossible for me to play. My hands can’t do that!
Are my eyes deceiving me? Are those easy patterns to fret? I feel like a dinosaur trying to comprehend a fighter jet watching that.
Obviously I can’t be bothered to practice at the moment, but let’s ignore that for the timebeing. Practice is for future me to worry about
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It's actually a lot easier than it looks. It's basically using a root octave or fifth with the fretting hand and hitting the third and higher fifth with the picking hand and then picking out snatches of chord and melody with both. If you know all the notes all over the fretboard you can pick out chord shapes quite easily with the picking hand and play bits of melody with the picking hand
Nothing she is doing is complicated when you break it down to the simple sections it is. It just takes a lot of time to practice it to get it as fluid as that.
https://youtu.be/eFBqyywZu3o
fantastic player though, and nicely melodic too.
It's complex of course (or it is to me despite @Danny1969's explanation!). And there are some really big and precise jumps around the fretboard which look very daunting. BUT her fingers aren't actually moving that fast, most of the time, so it does look physically possible.#
It's watching really speedy stuff which makes me think no, I could never do that in a million years. Even then, some players seem to have such economy of motion that my ears tell me they're playing millions of notes but it looks like their hands are hardly moving. Sweep picking looks easy but it's so fucking difficult.
I don't have sausage fingers or banana hands, I guess mine are a bit closer to spiders or facehuggers. Smallish facehuggers. Smallish, very very slow facehuggers.
(*# Of course, the truth is I can't actually play anything that anyone demonstrates on YouTube, not even the most pedestrian blues-rock.)
The other half is practice of course. She's playing a Jackson - nice big frets and a low action help a lot. I can do this on my Tele but not on my les paul (which has medium jumbos instead of my preferred enormous frets!).
Cramped shapes are much harder!
Posture has never been something I thought about until recently. I need to revisit it (or take lessons again), it does seem to be key to unlocking an extra bit of headroom when playing.
My hand span is very small, but I can comfortably take an F5add9 chords (low e, a and d strings fretted as 1,3,5 respectively) and add an extension to the g, b or high e string. It's a bit of a stretch, but doable. Conversely, my friend with huge hands can't comfortably play the add9 chord. Without the extension, it's quite a comfortable shape that doesn't require brilliant posture. The same shape is used in Message in a Bottle to great effect (at least, that's how I play it).
He doesn't practice them, which is the main reason. He could probably much more easily play complex chords if he spent a bit of time practising them but he tends not to.