Speed Picking Do Or Fail - 4 things you must focus on

welcome to four essential things that you must focus on in order to get results when you're practicing alternate picking at least if you want to get to the highest level and everyone can if you don't have these four things in your focus at all times you will not get to anywhere near expert level you will stay at intermediate so this is really crucial the first thing is simply how you move your pick and you cannot see this you cannot decipher this by looking at close-up slow-motion videos and then say oh this is what he's doing because this is so minute this is not this is about how you actually use your muscles and if you're doing it right the string shifting will be much easier than if you're not doing it right when i say write i just mean most efficiently right most productively right so what is it well some people pick up and down like this it's basically an axe movement right they try to do it with their hand and then they go up and down like that some people actually use their fingers so the picking motion is controlled by the muscles of their fingers and in the underarm here and both of these uh the the thing with the fingers gives you weird uh fatigue in your arm most people who who started using that technique really hate it because they have to revert to something else because this doesn't work in the long run if you use your fingers and you can you might want to comment underneath if you have anything to say about what i'm saying in this video that'll be interesting the other technique while you're using your whole arm basically you have this axe movement or you try to use your hand to do the axe movement it's also quite ineffective and accuracy you know playing playing silent alternate picking where you're not ready is really and then going for the [Music] it's harder because you're using such a big uh part of the body so the details gets left out but when you're using the pendulum picking technique which is uh which is what i recommend it's a totally different story see when you're using your arm you have to do like this try to do that right now just like that right or with your hand do the axe movement that's really hard to get any even motion here right and also if you use your fingers it's even harder how do you get an even motion using your fingers like that but if you use the pendulum technique which is basically relaxing your fingers and holding the pick between the thumb and the first finger and then rolling it like that so instead of doing this you go like that and see it's like the even the the remaining fingers here they work as kind of a pendulum so it becomes easier to go back and forth rhythmically in with timing and also you get this kind of circular motion don't you where if you imagine the string is right here then you're picking the string and then leaving it so you're going out from it right which makes it really cool if you imagine this being two strings let me see if i can do it here this being two strings so if you're picking like this with a circular motion here with your pendulum hand then if i want to go from string to string i pick this string and i go out and i go in again naturally right so when you're picking with the ax movement up and down like that it's really hard to shift strings because you have to use a pendulum movement to get to the next string otherwise you're going to hit it on your way there right if you have the axe movement and you want to this is an upstroke and this is the downstroke you have to move away from the strings and then in again but that already happens with pendulum movement and it's more even it's easier to get even and it's easier to go from string to string john mclaughlin paul gilbert aldi miola all pendulum picks but you cannot see it because it once you go from this which is really easy to see what i'm doing here right and i go down here and i place my pc bone which is where the pinky goes down then you have the hand and then right where it becomes the wrist you have kind of a hard spot there if you take that and place it approximately where the low e string meets the bridge and then you do your pendulum movement when i go when i go really small movements here from there and i go you have a loose connection here when i go from this you can see the pendulum there right once i anchor my hand i still do the pendulum movement it's the same muscles then you cannot see the pendulum anymore see this is pendulum this is the axe movement and the hand this is pendulum pendulum now this is axe movement [Music] see now my my arm is activated pendulum right and and the pendulum even though i'm anchoring my hand and you cannot see the pendulum movement it's what muscles am i using when i'm doing it so please start holding your finger or your pick between the thumb and the index and then have your practice this motion also you can practice without your guitar do the accents which is something we're going to talk about later and then you can go around like strumming right whatever you do just as an example what do you do if you're strumming like this let me see if i can get some sound here while you're using ah this needs some tuning here but you're using that kind of axe movement when you're strumming right right and you forgot to tune your guitar and then suddenly you want to do a spanish kind of what if i what do i do naturally intuitively if i want to go from can i can use my hand like that right or i can go [Music] right as soon as i want to go faster than this try it out yourself when you're when you're strumming see if you can do this right that's also what happens when flamingo players do the the thing with them right it's a pendulum thing because it's easier to get that even movement so you can do an even movement just by going like that because you have the weight of the fingers waving back and forth like that if you try to do that with your arm it's a different place different story so that's the first rule do pick with a pendulum movement and also when you can't see what you're doing because the the movements are so small ask yourself is this the feeling or is this the feeling of this right so the next thing is when i started out learning how to alternate pig i was just picking right i was just going along i learned okay alternate picking is picking up it now so that's what i did i picked up a noun but this kind of jumpy thing is not what we want because that's not what we do when we play fast we cannot take this very far because the the movements are simply too too strong or too big also when we're phrasing this is cool we want big movements because then we can really influence the tone the note that we're playing but when we're playing fast we have to use small movements and the note is so short right in a run [Music] right that we cannot phrase we can perhaps you know influence the sound right of of all the notes right but not of each individual note so you have to use very small effective movements it's like a machine so one of the principles i started you know working with uh pretty early actually was to practice what i want to learn magical concept to practice what it is that i actually want to learn and if i want to learn fast alternate picking i don't want to go i want to go [Music] small movements because that's what i want to end up with doing right when i'm playing fast so if it looks like this [Music] right then i want to start with that and just use very small movements but what does that require you to do it requires you to pick in the surface of the string and i'm saying surface if this is the string you know then i'm picking here you know when i'm phrasing i might really dig into it and do all kinds of stuff and pinch harmonics and all kinds of stuff but when i'm practicing picking i just want to graze the string at the top of it i you know if you were to look like this right at the guitar from this angle and you saw your pick digging into the string this is totally down towards the body this is still you can't see this this isn't too far away but this is in the just the surface of the string so now i'm not going any deeper than the string itself so yeah i wouldn't be able to see the pig if i did this right so so that's what you you want to do and that creates miracles for most people because we're used to [Music] but as soon as we go to the surface of the string [Music] and then magically you play super fast no but it just it eases up the the resistance that each pick stroke you know every time you hit the pick you have to push through the string right but when you pick in the surface there's absolutely almost no resistance so that makes it easier for you to control your picking motion but the hard thing is of course that when you're doing this that you might miss the string and that's why people are digging more into the strings that if you if you're just at the surface of it right it takes only a tenth of a millimeter or a thirtieth of an inch right uh to miss the string and to pick too high and that's why we're not doing it basically so in order to be safe we can pick very deep then we know that you know these little differences and it doesn't make that you know that much of a difference but we can't take that to the highest level so we need to start picking with precision and accuracy in at the surface of the string and it forces you to focus on precision because it forces you to really make sure that you have the same picking depth every single time and what does that do the same picking depth gives you the same amount of resistance every time you cross the string wouldn't you say same picking depth same amount of resistance so the brain knows how much it's going to push in order to get through the string or across the string so it can have the same just a smidge of a a a change in the resistance will make you play that note a little bit later which makes the whole thing uneven right wouldn't you say but when we're playing deep in the string we use a lot of force because then we're sure to cross the string i can cross the string you know in the surface or deep it doesn't matter because i'm just powering through right so i'm gonna get across right like doesn't matter my picking depth when i'm using a lot of force then i'm just compensating for the fact that i have zero accuracy which leads us to the last point on my list here but pick in the surface at least when you're not practicing phrasing which is a totally different thing when you're practicing alternate picking [Applause] [Music] right it really is a totally different discipline once you start focusing on that so now uh never ever practice alternate picking without picking in the surface let's move on to the next element [Music] when you're practicing alternate picking if you're not doing this the following thing to focus on you're not practicing alternate picking because alternate picking of course is picking the string right we can agree on that but we have to synchronize the picking motion with the left hand and you can do that at slow levels of speed because the brain can kind of synchronize by itself but as soon as you get to higher levels of speed the synchronization just blur it just goes away because the brain needs a place to focus on and the the the place of that is your accent so when you're playing triplets for instance three notes on one string you want to have the first note out of the three be the loudest which means that you're not only picking in the surface you're picking just a slight bit deeper when you do the accent and then you you pick at the surface again you see the complexity here so you have to pick a little bit deeper which requires you to push a little bit harder through the string which creates a louder note right [Music] and what happens in the brain is that you can you cannot play any single notes uh faster than you can sing them so that's kind of my limit right but that's also the same speed at which your brain can process notes so if you don't have accents then you cannot go beyond that speed with your body because you need control as soon as you lose control it's just going to be tremolo picking with you doing something down here right that doesn't work that's not what we want we want things to be musical so what you do is you you create an accent so now the brain has a way of grouping three notes into one like [Music] one two three one two three one two three and then it goes from playing single notes to just firing off groups of three if you do the accents so it can it can go bad it's like a button right it becomes one thing so like [Music] i'm not processing these six notes it's just a pattern that's what the brain does but it couldn't do that without grouping them into groups of six and the first thing you do is you create an accent for every third note then you can take that so high right because the the third note as i'm playing faster and faster i actually start grouping the notes into six notes instead because the three if i go right i can only process the groups of three as fast as i can sing every third note so it only comes i hope that makes sense so because it becomes something like [Music] right that's pretty fast but if i if i the next level for you is to try and group six notes into one or four notes into one to get more in there to create groups that are even faster right once once you get to the level the highest level of three so practicing with accents guarantees that you will be able to synchronize your hands at higher levels and it simply is a prerequisite for playing fast period because if you don't group if you don't do the accents you're wasting your time basically you're not practicing alternate picking you're just wasting your time to do the accents and make sure they're in there and it will enable you to play faster than than you would even believe at this point perhaps let's look at the final element that you must focus on in order to get to the highest level [Music] next thing is perhaps the most important it it is to counteract the intuitive way of practicing which is the worst way of practicing when it comes to picking if we want to build speed we have to focus on accuracy i'll repeat that if we want to build speed we have to focus on accuracy see when i started out i used to practice and practice and practice and i used to see if i could push my tempo up right so i was playing something [Music] and i used to practice just at the highest level i could i played as fast as i could while remaining in some amount of control and then i just practice and practice try to push the upper limit of what i could do and i used i lost synchronization i did some inaccuracies when i was speaking so i pulled back a little and then i pushed and pushed and pushed and i did that for about a half a year and then i just discovered how lousy a technique i had there must there had to be a better way and i didn't become much faster and the speed i gained was just like crammed up and and insecure i felt insecure when i was playing so what is the best technique well it is to practice and listen for the sentence practice at a level where you can remain in 1 000 control playing with zero mistakes zero and zero insecurities while getting everything right and remaining totally relaxed what is that tempo so if you play six notes up that was a long sentence by the way if you play these six notes i bet i mean fifth seventh and ninth fret on the d and the g string or you just play three notes on one string [Music] what is the highest tempo and i'm gonna repeat it in which you can remain in complete control make zero mistakes and i mean zero mistakes right and being totally relaxed as you practice what is that tempo and my guess is it's below 50 of your top speed of what you consider to be your top speed maybe it's even lower see if you want let's say you've got a top speed of whatever right let's say it's that right and you want to improve that instead of being and practicing at this speed you have a performance speed which is your top speed and you can do that it sounds pretty great right and you can perform you can do that something with that when you make music and then you have a practice speed and your practice speed is way lower than your performance speed when you practice at your practice speed then you go back and say okay i want to improve my top speed so let's play what i just played uh a thousand times let's play a thousand triplets one two three four five six seven and you can just you know uh you play at your the tempo with which you can remain in complete control and get everything right and make zero mistakes and then you just you know look at the clock and say how many repetitions am i doing in 30 seconds and then you can times that up and say okay i have to practice for one hour or two hours or three hours to get my thousand repetitions right do thousand repetitions then return to your performance speed and just play also in piggy like you would and i guarantee that you will feel an added sense of control when you do it and you'll have improved your top speed see i i used to work with people who were you know in front of the camera like i am now and they used to say i got this lick i want to teach this lick and they played the league and they couldn't get it down he's just trying you know and just making mistake upon mistake and the worse they did the worst they did right the more they tried the the so you could take a break right you could say yo take a break and try again but i didn't do that i said play it the same link that you want to play at 50 percent the speed that you're trying to play it now and do that 10 times just 10 times in every single case when they returned and we you know started the camera they were fine right they played the freaking lick that they wanted to play with no mistakes at that performance level see the brain does a weird thing that it thinks because we got a monkey brain right at least the deeper levels right so it thinks that hey i have to play something fast so i practice fast that is the worst mistake you can make instead return to just like us like a meditation you focus on all the elements of picking in the surface doing the pendulum thing having your hand in the right place and then you just go thousands of repetitions right and then you go back and test your max speed see how comfortable it feels see the feel the added control but you have performance speed and you have practice speed there is not a thing in between practice with zero mistakes zero mistakes and stay at that tempo and then test to see what happened to your performance speed and always go back and say i wanna do a thousand repetitions or i wanna do this i'm gonna watch a 90 minute movie right why just go and it's a boring movie uh i'm watching it with my mom who likes these movies so but i can watch it because now i'm practicing as i do it right and you just keep on doing that and then you return after that you crank up the amp and then you go after 90 minutes of repeating at the you know in total control doing these things where you get everything right i promise you you will feel feel an added sense of control and that added sense of control when you play fast is an increase in speed because now you can push it up now you can play even faster and be sloppy like you did before but now your your max sloppy tempo is faster right so i hope all of this was beneficial to you and if it was don't forget to comment on anything i said in this video any everything is welcome and subscribe to this channel and go download our free course on alternate picking by clicking the link in the description and i hope to see you in the next video you

Channel: guitarmastery

Views: 89,684

Keywords: guitar lesson scales, scales, fretboard patterns, scale shapes, how to learn guitar scales, Klaus guitar, Klaus Levin guitar, Claus guitar, claus levin, learn guitar solo, learn guitar jam, guitar repetition, shred guitar, guitar solo tutorial, shred, how to improvise, Rock, guitar jam, Slow Rock Ballad, C-blues, alternate picking, speed picking, guitar lesson, guitar speed, how to play fast guitar, guitar lessons, guitar picking, fast guitar picking, guitar control

Id: eOj3tcA2Mdo

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022