Help improving speed and accuracy

[Trem]

Thanks Twitch, and Cliff.
Well, at that point i was pretty out of steam, but before i shut it down i thought i should take the same advice i gave and record and play over something. Real Blues stuff is out of my element, I've just never listened to much of it. I couldn't play a Stevie Ray shuffle riff to save my life. Talk about a right hand.

To me this was like a situation say where maybe you are in mixed company and someone finds out you play, and then all of a sudden they hand you a Tele! and plug you into an old Fender reverb That's sweatin balls time, .. To me anyway, lol. Not like you'd wanna bust out some Slayer riffage or something ya know, they might not be so in to it, lol. So about that time your saying to yourself, well "self" whatcha got?

So yeah in keeping with the struggles defined in the thread, I figure i let it blow and see what i got as if that just happened. It sure is the best way to hear yourself and what your able to do right there and then. That let me know right away what i need work on. Just plain more of that kind of practice number one, Phrasing and a need to create licks for my libraries to pull from. I run short especially in pentatonic stuff after a bit. The nature of it seems very boxy, even when spreading it out across the board it feels like "didn't i just do that?". My vibrato made me cringe in spots, but it really suffered cause my fingers were totally pummeled by then, it was painful. The strings on that guitar are a mix of an 11's and 12's set. It hurts to bend them fuckers, they are about 2 years old too I change em when one breaks, or when they rust off, whichever comes first, hah.

[Cliff]

Improvising is hard; improvising in a style you're not used to is extra hard. Trem, I think it sounds cool - there's some really nice licks in there. For mine, although I improvised, I worked out a handful of licks that I wanted to include, then threw them in there in more or less random order, strung through with some pretty repetitive pentatonic bullshit. Played it through three or four times and kept the best one. In retrospect, I'm pretty embarrassed. But like you say, it's a learning experience. For some reason, I find it easier to improvise in slower, minor blues than the fast upbeat stuff. If you were doing something more in the rock/metal genre, would you still improvise, or do those solos tend to be more composed? I've never had much success with improvising rock stuff.
Shredinator, thanks for the advice! Last night I tried the left-hand technique you suggested, and I have a few questions if you don't mind. So the basic idea is to keep the flat of the palm parallel with the length of the neck, which in turn means the wrist is no twisted? There's still a degree of freedom left: when playing on the higher pitched strings, do you bend the hand sharply upwards at the wrist, or try and keep the bit of the palm where it meets the fingers close to the neck? I read somewhere the second of these options was good, but it seems to involve a lot of curl on the fingers, assuming you're trying to play on your finger tips. The string crossing exercise I'm working on involves a pentatonic at the 12th fret. As Stetina writes it, he uses the first finger on the 12th fret, then the third finger on the 15th for top E and B, and the same for the intervening 14th fret notes, but the pinky for the 15th fret on the bass E string. I find by keeping the hand more parallel as you suggest, there's a bit of awkwardness to changing the third finger from 14th to 15th as I go back up the scale - it almost feels more natural to use the pinky - ie keep a one-to-one correspondence between fingers and frets, despite the wider stretch available. Any thoughts? Also, this technique seems problematic when playing the scales close to the headstock - it seems that at this point you more or less have to twist your wrist to make it work.
And finally, any advice you can give about string skipping would be greatly appreciated. At the moment it sometimes works for me, sometimes doesn't, and I haven't pinned down what I'm doing differently between the two.

[Trem]

No need to be embarrassed at all Cliff your jam was great, it was better than mine for a lot of reasons. Your riff was great, you pulled out a lot of licks that had structure and it all flowed together and had build ups, + it had a cool honky tonk vibe (though i know how you feel, and i think most people do) I think half the time it's why no one listens to other peoples posts on the net, cause it's like aw fek not another 16 year old shred master that reminds me how much practice i need, lol, even better when it's a 14 year old girl, lol. Humiliation! * in Quake III announcer voice)
As far as improvising, well i pretty much improvise everything first, then if there's some cool parts that i think worked i will keep them and build around them. I enjoy the spontaneity in just playing off the vibe of the moment because it has a, i don't know, an urgency to it. A lot of the time it turns out that within the first few times improvising the best things come out, and that's what i will end up pulling parts from.

[Cliff]

To answer one of my own questions, it seems that if I keep the palm of my hand close to the neck while playing the scale, the the left hand doesn't need to move at all - it's just a question of moving the fingers, which I think is what you said in the first place Shredinator? (Sorry, sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in.)
Trem, you mentioning the Tele reminded me of something that happened back in 1987 when I was a student in London. Sorry for the derailment, but... I was dating my first serious girlfriend, and she knew a producer who'd worked with Elton John. She was a pretty good singer, into pop, and I was a really crap guitarist, into Van Halen (back then, I *really* sucked, but I was a bit more delusional about my abilities), and we were in a kind of band with a couple of others. We went round this producer's house for the evening. Also there were four of the most perfect people I'd ever seen. It was like two of the guys from Ah-Ha, plus two female counterparts - blonde and just beautiful. I don't recall them speaking all night. I was pretty shy myself, so didn't say much more. The producer played us a track he'd been working on: it was what's now known as a 'mash up' of Another One Bites The Dust and Purple Haze, and the producer kept banging on about how the guitarist's fingers were just like Hendrix's. Then he passed me an old beat-up Tele to play (my mates back up north-east of England from where I came called them 'TeleWankers' - they were all into 80s hair metal, flying Vs etc). The guitar was out of tune and was missing the G string. I was obviously meant to play something. I tried and failed to tune it, then noodled away on some half-arsed Van Halen licks. I found out afterwards that he told me girlfriend that if she ever wanted to get anywhere, she should dump me. I guess, if I'd had an ounce of talent, that might have been my opportunity .

[Cliff]

Trem - it's very kind of you to say so but, on balance, I think I prefer yours by a mile . For mine, the riff was Stetina's, and the best of the licks were Page's. Embarrassed is a bit of a strong word - I don't so much mind the note choices as the rhythm, if only it were in time it might sound okay...
I agree about the internet, it's a bit of a mixed blessing - plenty of good information, too many kids who can play too well.
I like the improvising approach. I think that's why I've always preferred Van Halen to Steve Vai (this is going back to the Eat 'Em And Smile days, after which I stopped bothering to listen to him). Van Halen may not be as technically good as Via, but there's more groove, there are real songs, and at his best it just sounds like he's putting more oomph into his solos. Same reason I like Jimi Page so much (though some of the bootleg live stuff is awful). And Santana. I think Santana's particularly interesting, because technically he's not that great, but it just sounds fucking beautiful. I can listen to song after song and hear similar licks throughout, but it still sounds fresh.

[KLNowak]

I would definitely recommend Speed Mechanics For Lead Guitar as well. Great book and it has definitely helped me determine my weak spots.

On a side note: Anyone got any tips on getting fasting running diatonic sequences on ONE string? I do a lot of three and sometimes four note per string patterns and I have a much easier time since I can cheat with economy picking. However I have noticed that when I try to move down the neck fast using only one string I suck horrendously.

[Trem]

I have noticed that when I try to move down the neck fast using only one string I suck horrendously.

Me too, it has been the one thing i have been working on since this thread. I don't know i suppose there will come a point where it just clicks and feels right and you can just let go in your mind and get your right hand synced with your left without thinking about it and it will just click. I can do it faster now than before, but attempting hyper speed it's hard to tell if i'm not just blurring the notes. What i'm doing at slower speed is, since there is usually three or four notes in one position till you move or slide down to the next group, i try to concentrate on hitting that next ( base note of the next group, i'll call it) on the beat and focus on it and emphasize it it my mind or slightly emphasize it when picking it and let the notes in between just flow.
Like dunt---dunt---dunt---dunt--- ect.

[Cliff]

Grim mentioned jazz earlier on in this thread. Here's a quick recording I just made of the first verse of Autumn Leaves - I spent a fair bit of time last year trying to learn this, but the chorus got a bit more tricky and difficult to remember . Anyway, gives me a chance to show off the PRS that I got recently.

[Musician78]

That is a nice 20th anni CU24 you have there.

[Cliff]

Thanks - I'm very happy with it.

It's been another quiet Sunday, so here's a couple more vids. The first is Stetina's exercise 54 - one of the cross-picking exercises. I've tried to take on board much of the advice presented here (aside from the bit about nailing it slowly first). I'm quite pleased cause, though far from perfect, this is by far the fastest I've managed it so far:

The fact that my left and right hands aren't quite in synch is making the overall sounds too 'pinkety-plink' I think. Plus there's still some uncontrolled string noise.
This one shows some exercises I've been working on to try and improve my rhythm. All the single-line stuff is 6 notes per beat:

Wait... there's more.... I think I've broken some sort of barrier

But seriously, here's a couple of exercises at 120bpm. There's a lot to go in terms of cleanliness (GarageBand has really messed with the sound on the second exercise), but I'm really happy to have achieved this speed. Never been here before:

[Twitch]

Nice PRiSs.

[micha]

Wow Cliff!
Seems like you really made some progress! You're way cleaner than before.
Returning to picking mode after the tapping parts still seems difficult, but I'm really impressed how quick you changed your way of picking.
It sounds much better and looks a lot less tensed up to me.
Your fretting is cleaner and you're much steadier as well.
Great work! Impressive!

[Cliff]

Thanks Micha . I really appreciate it. And thanks a lot for the picking advice - curling the fingers has definitely worked for me: there *is* a lot less tension, and consequently my wrists don't get tired anywhere nearly as quickly.

Twitch - glad you like the guitar - it's to go with my pipe and slippers as I slip gracefully into middle age .

[javert]

Twitch - glad you like the guitar - it's to go with my pipe and slippers as I slip gracefully into middle age .

lol, good one. That is indeed one sweet looking guitar, congrats! I have been a bit interested in PRS lately too, but they're a bit too much bling for me, I think. Your picking does indeed sound much better now, Cliff.

I also play with my hand closed and have done so for many years. When I was a teenager there were a couple of years where I had several different teachers (this was all with the public music school, so it's not like I fired them, although it is possible the quit because of me), and all of them wanted to change my picking to their liking (and all in different ways). In the end, I respectfully refused explaining that since all of them wanted me to do it in different ways, there was no reason for me to believe it was anything beyond an arbitrary choice.

[Trem]

Wow Cliff, a definite improvement. Keep doing what your doing
That prs sounds nice too, i liked the joe pass piece. Great job on the counterpoint lick.

That breaking the barrier vid had me laughing my ass off, Cup of Cheese! LoL.