[Santuzzo]

Originally Posted by JJ Rodriguez

It's not picking the trem picking notes that fast that's an issue for me, but working the left hand to be accurate at those tempos. Speed picking is easy, syncing up your left and right hand is the tricky part. I can pick more than fast enough trem picking, it's when you get me to do shit like that chromatic exercise in Rock Discipline that I start fucking up

Oh, yeah, that's still a completely different issue, I agree. But I was just saying, for me the issue already starts at my tremolo picking speed.

Bit then again, I think, I can tremolo pick at 160BPM, and if I managed to get my left hand in synch to that, it would be pretty wicked fast !

[Naren]

Originally Posted by DDDorian

+1 to pretty much all the advice in this thread. It sounds so cliche, but speed really is a byproduct of accuracy and control. The best way to develop speed is to work on something (be it a riff, exercise, whatever) at a tempo just above what you would consider your comfort speed. Be brutally honest about your progress, and don't touch the metronome until you can pick away for a considerable stretch at your chosen tempo with perfect accuracy; stamina is just as big a factor as technique, especially for more aggressive riffing, so being able to keep a steady stream of 16th notes at, say, 180bpm for five minutes at a stretch will make the transition to faster tempos much easier to negotiate. If you have the means, record yourself playing these exercises and listen back to them every week or so. It's easy to be overly critical (or forgiving, for that matter) but the tape won't lie, so you might find that in a week you've actually become tighter and more precise than you gave yourself credit for. Good luck

Stamina is probably a bigger problem for me than anything else. I'm sure I could do 16th notes at 160bpm for 5 minutes. 16th notes at 180bpm for five minutes would undoubtably be very painful. I'm sure I couldn't do 16th notes at 200bpm (or any higher) for five minutes.

I've noticed my smoothness and accuracy getting better through practice, but I haven't really noticed my stamina getting much better. The 16th notes at 220bpm part of the song I've been referring to is only like 1 minute long and then it drops down to mostly 8th notes at around 180bpm (with a 16th note and quarter note thrown around in there), but I still am having trouble with primarily stamina. My accuracy is still not perfect, but I'd say it's maybe 90% accurate with the metronome now, which means I'm on the way to where I want to be.

More practice, I guess.

Originally Posted by Jongpil Yun

Whatever you god damned bastard, 16ths at 220bpm? Get the fuck out of here, you motherfucking fuckface fuck.





















I'm jealous

You do realize that I'm not referring to lead guitar, right? I'm primarily a rhythm guitarist who plays solos and lead guitar occasionally. I'm referring to very fast tremolo-picked rhythm guitar stuff on the 4 lowest strings of the 7-string guitar.

My left hand is nowhere near fast enough to do lead guitar involving 16th notes at 220bpm. I'd have trouble playing a solo with 8th notes at 220bpm. Most of my solos are more medium speed. I'm definitely not a shredder.

[Jongpil Yun]

Yeah, I know what you're saying, but I can only play at about 160bpm now getting 4 consistent notes per click, regardless of left hand movement. I can do 16ths at 112bpm doing 4/3nps scales and such fine, but my maximum tremolo picking ability is nowhere near yours. Then throw in stuff like powerchords alternating with tremolo picking on different strings and I'm screwed.

[Maniacal]

The best thing I found to do is treat your right hand training like a workout.

3 sets of 180 second 16th note bursts with a 30 second rest between each set.
The next time you do it, increase the bpm by 1.

Then for speed - 30 second "reps" playing a bar of 8ths followed by a bar of 16th at a fairly demanding tempo. Have a 30 second rest then increase the bpm by 2 each set. Even though I am into my Holdsworth and Henderson big time I still really want a really good picking hand. Treat it like a sport and always try and push the tempo.
By training like this I am stuck at 260, which is fast enough for most things.
I cant seem to get it any faster simply because I find it very difficult to remain relaxed at such high tempos. Accenting every 8 rather than every 4 has certainly made things a lot easier.

I managed to get the Petrucci chromatic exercise at 240bpm which was good for me. But I dont think exercises like that are especially good for coordinating the 2 hands anyway.

Being relaxed is the key to playing fast on guitar and drums. And in fact any instrument.

Jon

[_detox]

I also suffer from inaccurate fast picking.

I'm pretty sure that not all my picking comes from the wrist, which is probably a bad thing. If you take like the breakdown in Future Breed Machine by Meshuggah or Black Label by Lamb of God (which if anyone has noticed, are the SAME rhythms..), I get tired really quickly. I feel like I'm picking too aggressively or something. When you pick a pattern like that, does your arm near your wrist move as well as your wrist? Mine does.

So I'm going to try this burst method to see if that will help convert me to wrist picking.

And also, I hold my pick with my index and thumb, but I have my other fingers closed up into a "fist." Not extremely tight, but it's just become more comfortable for me.. Is this a bad habit?

[Maniacal]

The burst method is great for increasing speed with the left and right hands.

However, it sounds like you might be playing with tension?
If you try and play something that you cant play fairly easily your body is going to tighten up and fatigue.
Sounds like endurance is the problem, not speed.

My arm moves slightly when I approach higher tempos, but I am still picking from the wrist.
I think wrist picking is the best way of playing, I havent seen any arm pickers play tech DM riffs. String skipping seems to be very tricky with the arm...and muting at the same time?? I dont think so.

[Naren]

Originally Posted by Maniacal

The best thing I found to do is treat your right hand training like a workout.

3 sets of 180 second 16th note bursts with a 30 second rest between each set.
The next time you do it, increase the bpm by 1.

Then for speed - 30 second "reps" playing a bar of 8ths followed by a bar of 16th at a fairly demanding tempo. Have a 30 second rest then increase the bpm by 2 each set. Even though I am into my Holdsworth and Henderson big time I still really want a really good picking hand. Treat it like a sport and always try and push the tempo.
By training like this I am stuck at 260, which is fast enough for most things.
I cant seem to get it any faster simply because I find it very difficult to remain relaxed at such high tempos. Accenting every 8 rather than every 4 has certainly made things a lot easier.

I managed to get the Petrucci chromatic exercise at 240bpm which was good for me. But I dont think exercises like that are especially good for coordinating the 2 hands anyway.

Being relaxed is the key to playing fast on guitar and drums. And in fact any instrument.

Jon

Thanks. That's some great advice. I'll try this as well. Last night when I was practicing, I had to keep stopping to massage my hands because they started to ache so much.

And you are so right about being relaxed. I noticed that if I played certain riffs I was having trouble with - relaxed, I could play them much more naturally and smoothly.

240bpm is beyond my level. I'm pushing it at 220. 260 is unimaginable for me.

But, through my practice, I've realized that my main problem isn't so much speed as it is stamina/endurance. Any advice on how to build that? Just through consistent practice?

Originally Posted by Maniacal

My arm moves slightly when I approach higher tempos, but I am still picking from the wrist.
I think wrist picking is the best way of playing, I havent seen any arm pickers play tech DM riffs. String skipping seems to be very tricky with the arm...and muting at the same time?? I dont think so.

Same here. For slower stuff like 120bpm riffing, you could pick with the arm, I guess. But, once you get up higher, picking with the arm would completely disable a lot of the stuff that you do.

I have another song in my band which is 16th notes tremolo picked at 160bpm. I've never had any trouble whatsoever playing it, but if I tried doing it with my arm, I'd fail. I mean, the riffs involve string skipping with 16th notes at 160bpm and then it goes into a non-tremolo picked part with palm muting after that. I can't imagine trying that arm picking style. I naturally adopted wrist picking because arm picking just didn't work.

[Santuzzo]

For me elbow/arm picking is the only way I can get some reasonable speeds with tremolo picking.......
Tried wrist for so long (I'm talking something like 10+ years), but hardly any result, it was like

And when I switched to elbow, like I said, all of a sudden I could pick so much faster, I'm still nowhere near insane speeds, but I have seen immediate improvements, so for me it seems to work !
I have seen Vinnie Moore pick like that, and he certainly is one of the top alternate pickers !
Funny thing is, which I found out later, he is also a lefty playing righty.

[DDDorian]

Originally Posted by Naren

But, through my practice, I've realized that my main problem isn't so much speed as it is stamina/endurance. Any advice on how to build that? Just through consistent practice?

I'd say the pain you're experiencing is coming from the amount of effort you're putting in in order to keep up with the higher tempos. Through simple repetition you could build up to speed, but every time you increase the tempo you'll experience the same sort of pain as you're not refining your technique, just building muscle. If you go back to what you might consider an excessively slow tempo and really work on minimising the tension and movement of your picking hand for extended stretches until your new economised technique become second nature, then the strain you experience when trying faster tempos will be lessened and in turn you'll be able to progress much faster.

Also, make sure to practice this technique with left-hand patterns, not just chugging on one note, or you'll end up out of sync. I'm in the opposite boat in that my left hand is way faster than my right. It's hard work to sync my hands back up as I can never really be sure if I'm picking a note on time or if I'm just hammering, especially when it comes to string-skipping stuff. Right now I'm working with something I took from a Mike Amott lesson in a guitar magazine, which is a Carcass-style string-skipping riff, and looks something like this:



which could also be economy-picked (that's how Amott prefers to play it). Because it is a thirteen-note pattern, you end up using opposite pickstrokes when it loops around, giving the exercise a bit of extra mileage. I also practice it like this:



Picking in threes adds an extra challenge because when you cross strings you're alternately starting on up- and down-strokes, and like before, it swaps over when the pattern loops around. Enjoy!

[Naren]

Thanks again for the advice. Building muscle, eh? Then I guess I'll have to work on that too.

Left hand has never been a problem. Don't think I really need to work on that. There is an exercise that I've been using for about 6-7 years now where I start out on the 1st fret of the lowest string and play all four fingers string-skipping to the highest string, move up a fret and do the same thing backwards, then up a fret and so on until I get to the 17th fret or so. It really helps, specifically because it isn't B-1,2,34 E-1,2,3,4 - but instead is B-1,3,2,4 A-1,3,2,4, E-1,32,4 and so on. There are different variations I do of it, but I'm not really working on the left hand at all right now. While I'm practicing 8th and 16th notes at 200bpm, I do fret with my left hand and switch to different strings, but my left hand is pretty much playing randomly because I'm only truly focusing on my right hand.

If I have to go to a slower speed to build up muscles for endurance, I guess I'll go back to 160bpm and work from there up to 208bpm. Hm...