Help improving speed and accuracy

[Twitch]

I still feel the best right hand exercise is some good chugga chugga. Three parts: constant alternate picking, clean triplets, and the various gallops. After that, then switch strings from the e to the a and back and forth. Your right hand will become firm and precise in its picking after that, then work on syncing both hands together.Gotta get a rhythm before you go solo. Lol

[Twitch]

For some good various gallop practice, I recommend learning various tracks off Metallicas AJFA, older Pantera. The gallop is a seemingly lost art in todays metal though. Triplets get heavy use in newer metal, pretty much any band who screams more than sings will employ triplets quite heavily. Constant alternate picking is self explanatory I think.

[Twitch]

For some pinky exercise, play some extended power chords. Use your standard 5th power chord shape and reach your pinky up 2 frets on the octave string of the chord shape. Having your pinky fret the bigger strings cleanly stretched out like that will greatly increase its strength.

[Cliff]

Hey Twitch - thanks for the tips. In the meantime, I've been practicing the meedley-meedlies:

As always, all criticism and advice appreciated.

[VitaminG]

go Cliff! Mate, you're execution & timing have come along in leaps & bounds. Pat yourself on the back

[BenoA]

go Cliff! Mate, you're execution & timing have come along in leaps & bounds. Pat yourself on the back

+1 Cliff!!! Congratz and good job!

[micha]

Awesome!! You made great progress Cliff, well done!

[Cliff]

Thanks guys - I appreciate the encouragement
It's still not perfect, but it's getting there.

[ginsambo]

Hey Cliff, maybe you can give me some advice. When I am relaxed and don't think about it I can pick ascending runs and ascending patterns really easily and cleanly. When I stop and think about what I just did, my neural networks crash and I can't. Yet I am always able to do descending runs and patterns, whether I think about it or not or when stressed out...whatever. Seeing how you are the master of self improvement, I thought you might have some advice. It's annoying the feck outta me cause I know it's all in the mind.

[Cliff]

Hey Cliff, maybe you can give me some advice. When I am relaxed and don't think about it I can pick ascending runs and ascending patterns really easily and cleanly. When I stop and think about what I just did, my neural networks crash and I can't. Yet I am always able to do descending runs and patterns, whether I think about it or not or when stressed out...whatever. Seeing how you are the master of self improvement, I thought you might have some advice. It's annoying the feck outta me cause I know it's all in the mind.

Hey Ginsambo - I'm very flattered you ask. Based on what you've said in the past, you're way ahead of me, so I feel a bit daft giving advice, but I'll describe what works for me.

I've been practicing from the Stetina book for well over a year now, but recently I discovered this site:

http://www.thewizardofshred.com/index/how-to-develop-insane-shredding-skills

It's not for everyone's taste - the guy talks a lot about being in the right frame of mind, etc - but I particularly like it because he keeps on emphasising that you don't need talent to learn good/fast technique. I find that reassuring.

Anyway, the key practice point he talks about is what he calls 'the metronome game'. Stetina describes something very similar, but this guy goes into more specifics which I found helpful. The basic idea is: choose a lick you want to work on, then establish a top speed where you can play it comfortably and accurately. You then choose a metronome step (more on this in a second), and drop down from your measured speed by 10 steps. You practice the lick at this new speed, then go up one increment at a time, and so on. In an ideal world, you'll exceed your previous best speed. Next time you do it, you start 10 steps down from your previous best. If you don't, you either increase the number of repetitions you make at each step, or you increase the step size. Another possibility is that the technique you've been practicing isn't going to work at higher speeds - I've wasted a lot of time with this one.

He makes a number of points: choose a lick that's really short, no more than 16 notes; practice it a lot of times (he suggest 50 reps, but I find it easier to just practice for one or two minutes) before going up a step on the metronome; spend most of your practice time at a speed where it's comfortable, and only a small fraction where you're pushing yourself; be sure that the technique your practicing slowly is the same as you're using when you get to top speed. If it's not, this might mean you're slipping into a bad habit as you increase the speed.

You're training your muscle memory here, and it sounds like yours might already be trained. It doesn't sound surprising that you can't do it if you overthink it. I think once you reach a certain speed, things are happening too fast for you to be aware of each finger motion - instead, you have to think in terms of bigger blocks, like groups of four or six or whatever, and trust that your fingers will do the right thing - once properly trained - for the intervening notes.

For what it's worth, I've sometimes suspected I have a harder time doing ascending runs compared with descending. So maybe there is something physically more difficult to it? I'd try and be aware of which part of the run is causing you difficulties (for me, I found starting a group of four notes with my pinky on the first, then moving to the next string for the second note was problematic). Once you've found this, this is the bit to practice with the above technique.

The 'wizard of shred' suggests taking 30 minutes sessions where you work on up to three licks (all similar, so you reinforce the same skills, but three rather than one to help overcome monotony). I found when I was trying to nail the exact hand position, degree of finger motion etc, that I'd use larger metronome increments (4 bpm up to 120bpm, then 6 after that - a single click on a clockwork metronome). But in order to really increase speed, I found I was spending too much time at the slower speeds. Once I was confident my fingers were doing the right thing, I started using increments of 2 and ultimately 1 bpm.

Bit long-winded, but I hope this gives you some ideas.

Edit: I should mention that I used this technique to practice one bar out of each of the two licks I posted most recently. Even though I only practiced those two bars (for 10 days straight, with lots of groups of 15-30 minutes in each), I found that what I'd learnt transferred to other things I wanted to play (such as the remainder of the licks).

[ginsambo]

Yeah my left hand is fine with it. I think maybe some of it is that I grew up with Gibson string spacing - so when I play nearer the neck it comes easier. Also, I never set with a goal in my head to be a shredder. Going down no probs but ascending I run into difficulty when picking up by the bridge. Funny though as when it's a link I have no probs with executing it, when it is the climax of the solo I find I concentrate too much on it and my right hand gets out of seq with the strings and starts picking air. Anyway, I find tone the best motivator and at the mo I am lacking it as my DSL50 head is stuck on the red channel with no reverb and the effect loop out of action. Great for dry crunchy riffage but hard to get any depth or richness to you soloing tones with such a brittle and flat sound so motivation is a down as frankly it sounds like ass. Even well executed. I hate assessing my technique to be honest and just like to plug and play, but with the amp that is pretty hard at the mo, as you have to keep adjusting it to get some half decent tones out of the thing, so probably a good time to refine my skills - a bad workman blames his tools and all that.

I will look that up while I'm waiting for the time or the money to get the thing fixed, probably just some cold solder joints. I'm not bad, just not consistent enough for my liking. It's just a skill to refine, seeing how you've been refining your skills with results and probably taking your own technique apart, thought I'd ask! As I say, with the amp, it's just about impossible to get any tonal variation with pup combinations or picking near the neck or bridge at the mo, it really is that bad and the preamp starts distorting even more sometimes. Thanks Cliff I will look that up and get metronomic in the meantime.

[javert]

Hey Cliff. Good to see that you're still going at it and improving!

[Cliff]

Thanks man! It's been a long time - two years counting the time before I started this thread.

[javert]

Wow, yeah, it's been that long already. Time is really flying by! And I haven't been to California for several years now. I used to go every year for about 6 years in a row. Hope to make it next year.

BTW, I recall that I shared a song my band made in here some time ago when we discussed sweep picking, so perhaps you'll find some of our new stuff interesting. You can hear it on our homepage at http://www.fearsunfolding.com/music. We'll release a new version of that old song you heard soon too with drums played by our new drummer.

[Cliff]

Thanks Javert - that sounds great. Love your guitar playing. I particularly like the tone you get in the solo for the first one.

I thought I'd give an update on this 'metronome game' thing. I'm in the middle of another ten day intensive practice period. This time I'm trying to improve me legato. I'm working on exercises 9 and 10 from Stetina's book. To make things more interesting, I've added a position shift, so I play 6 notes at the fifth fret, shift up to the 7th and play 6 notes, shift back down to the fifth and repeat. My third lick is something I found on Youtube by 'the wizard of shred'. It also involves a position shift, and has a nice harmonic minor resolution thing going on.

So I started last Thursday, and by Sunday night (most of my progress is at weekends, since I don't have much time or energy to practice hard in the evenings) I was feeling pretty good, playing slightly over 10 notes a sec at my peak. But on Monday I realized the position shift was causing me problems - it was taking too long, so consequently I was playing a hurried group of six... pause and shift, followed by another hurried group of six. Since then I slowed down and tried to make the shift as brisk as possible.

But then I noticed my fingers weren't aligned quite how I wanted. So I slowed down, adjusted the fingers positions, then started to speed up again.

Anyway, now it's Friday and I can barely play 8 notes a sec .

The thing is, I'm not too bothered. For one thing, I think my technique is way better than it was a week ago, and the notes are sounding much clearer. For another, I'm learning to find and correct my own mistakes, and this is probably more valuable in the long run than being able to play a handful of licks quickly.

Nevertheless, I hope to be well past that 10-note-per sec barrier come Sunday evening. Hopefully I'll have a video of my progress shortly afterwards.