Your Hand Synchronization SUCKS! This is Why You Suck at Guitar, Lesson 11

you may not even be aware of it but you're sloppy unsynchronized bleh giving thousands of children all over the world people love but sloppy uncoordinated playing like this doesn't just spread disease it's also the leading cause of divorce worldwide if this is what it sounds like but you play guitar maybe suffering from or have synchronization and then no you did this is why you suck a guitar hello kids and welcome to a brand new installment but this is why you suck at guitar here with your biological stepdad Uncle Ben on this episode I'd like to talk with you guys about hand synchronization because here and you play like this is pissing me off you got to get those mitts and sync if you ever want to get chicks and make money with your guitar playing let me break this down for you kids doesn't matter how quickly you can vibrate your arm hand over here while you wiggle your hand fingers over on this guy if they're not wiggling and vibrating exactly in sync with each other it's the left hand is saying six notes the picking hand should also be saying six notes and they should be doing it at exactly the same time we've got to show you some tips and tricks for mental and physical organization to get both of those hands back on the right track you'll leave this lesson was a better understanding of rhythmic subdivision as well as some great tips and tricks to get your hands and synch with each other no matter if you're playing lead or rhythm guitar if not I will give you your money back now before we start getting hot and heavy with each other let me put something out there one of the big themes you're going to catch through this lesson is making sure that both hands are in agreement with each other about how many notes are being played and getting them totally on the same page as each other that's the basic idea now I'm not saying that that's a rule and they always have to be in sync with each other sometimes it can be really cool if the right hand is totally out running the left hand and just kind of trim low picking wildly through phrase we've heard Eddie Van Halen do that a million times another really cool example is the ending phrase of the bark at the moon guitar solo by Jake Ely the two hands are definitely not in sync with each other on that lick the right game is really outrunning the left but it sounds really cool it gives us this frantic kind of running off the track sort of sound obviously that sounds awesome and that's a cool color to have on your musical palette when you need it but if the only way you know how to play fast is by sounding like you're kind of out of control and just setting this hand to like frappe and kind of vibrating through the notes like that probably need to re-examine your playing a little bit but rest easy Virginia that's exactly what we're here to do throughout this lesson I'm going to be using a couple of different rhythmic subdivisions as sort of guidelines and like to share those with you guys and get you kind of school on that stuff learning about rhythmic subdivisions is really really really important for the same reasons that is probably important for a carpenter to learn about stuff like inches and half inches and stuff like that if you're building something and you want to fit together tight you should probably know the units of measurement that you're using a beat is a whole lot like an inch you know an inch can be a standalone unit of measurement or I can split it up into a whole bunch of other smaller subdivisions like two half inches of the same ten inch four quarter inches of the same as an inch and so on in music we can take a beat and play it as is we're start dividing it up a number of different ways those are our units of measurement as musicians now considering that most of these hand synchronization problems happen at high speed I'd like to take a second here to talk about the two most commonly used metric subdivisions that are used at really high speed tempos sixteenth notes and sixteenth note triplets those are terms I'm going to be using this entire lesson so might as well school you on them a great way to understand any rhythmic subdivision is to relate it to a song that you know and in the case of sixteenth notes in other words four notes cross beat a good way to understand that is to imagine the intro of I of the Titor by survivor or bootylicious by Beyonce if that's more your thing if the basic beat of the song is like this at 100 bpm what you need to do is imagine how the intro of I the tiger would sound over that that's basic four notes across every single beat that's going by that's a great way to understand sixteenth notes if the basic pulse of the song is like this 130 bpm what you need to do to understand the sixteenth note field is imagine that you're in a cover band and that you're worthless drummer is taking a bunch of speed before you set and is playing I the tiger way too fast and you have to keep up with them it's not this the other time field we're going to talk about our sixteenth note triplets which means spacing six notes across every beat this is really popular munch the shrapnel shred crap you know the best way to understand what a sixteenth a triplet sounds like is to imagine how your girlfriend scribes Dream Theater it's just a bunch of immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately has six syllables in it so if you take a beat like this at 90 BPM and if you could say medial immediately in between every beat needle immediately immediately immediately immediately you're understanding how it sounds to place six notes across every single beat immediately release now I'll put it out there those are not by any means the only fast time feels there's guys like in Van Alstyne who regularly plays like seven notes across a B Joe Satriani legato stuff he'll play weird stuff like nine notes across the beat and 11 and stuff like that but the sixteenth note four across would be and 16th a triplet six across a beat are probably the most sort of generic shreddy time feels that you can get a hold of really useful for any style of rhythm or lead guitar play so that's why putting those out there so now that you got yourself a little learning in rhythmic subdivision let's talk about the real secret of getting your hands in sync which is a little mental organizational technique called chunking chunking is a mental organizational technique where you take a big long string of data or in our case a big long string of notes instead of worrying about every single one is going by really only concern yourself with one of them and let the rest of them fall into place naturally at low speeds chunking isn't really necessary because your brain is fast enough to keep up with every note that's going by so in other words if I was playing five six seven eight like a little chromatic thing on the low E string here it's pretty easy if the beat is going like this to concentrate on every single look and go high six seven but high speeds it gets really hard to coordinate your brain in your hand to cooperate that way and go doesn't really work that way that's where chunking comes into play and becomes a really necessary means to organize really fast strings of information into whether your brain and your hands can understand you've probably already used chunking in your lifetime to teach yourself a lot of stuff but just not been aware of it because we've never used that term before chunking is how you probably learn how to do the alphabet you didn't learn the alphabet by learning the first letter is a second letter is B the third letter is C and so on you learned it by going ABCD efg hijk LMNOP WXYZ again you organized that huge stream of information into worrying really just about the first letter of each of those little chunks ABCD efg hijk and so on if you're concentrating on every single letter that went by probably been too much for your little brain to handle when you put it into chunks it's a lot easier to manage and as guitar players we can use chunking to get our right hand thinking in terms of blocks of information rather than individual notes going by really high speeds as well as our left hand I use chunking all the time in order to keep my picking hands straight whenever I'm playing really smoke and fast thrash-metal rhythm guitar stuff I think about that guitar solo section in the song battery by Metallica it's all on e and it's straight sixteenth notes at about 180 BPM which is fast as to the untrained ear it might just sound like really fast low E string action so they just end up picking like the absolute Dickens but not really keeping time now to somebody who knows what they're doing a little bit better what you'd understand is that this is the tempo well the low E string is going by in sixteenth notes again I have the tiger think about super mega fast I the tiger you start to understand that it four notes going by across every single beat it sounds sound like this at those kinds of speeds that's really just too fast for your brain and your arm hands to reliably go what you see forward to be born from one of them but at a really high pace reliably and solidly you'll end up getting lost somewhere in there so what I start doing it as higher tempos is taking that group of four notes that's going across every beat and only worrying about the very first one as long as you understand rhythmic subdivision in this case sixteenth notes I've the tiger four across a beat whatever the rest of those evidence the other three that I'm not even worrying about will fall into place naturally let me demonstrate what I'm talking about here by setting the metronome at about 135 now even at that speed that's too much for my brain and my hands here too reliable to go and not slide off the tracks at some point it's really tough to keep up with so what you start doing when you chunk that information is to take each of those little bites of knowledge which is you form and really only concern all of your efforts mentally and physically on one in other words the note that starts every one of those chunks out make sure that guy is in line and everything else applauding place naturally as long as you understand you're not just playing fast you're playing sixteenth notes for across the beat you know so in other words whenever I hear this and I'm playing those fast sixteenth notes along to it I'm not going which is you punch me more good I'll slip if I do that I'm really just worrying about going one one making sure that my ass is down picking that note really well and really hard right there on one every single time two three and four will fall into place naturally as long as I concentrate on chunking all that information down to one single note here's a cool trick that you can do too in order to keep your picking hand a little bit more in time whenever you plant through really fast chunks of information if every single stroke that you're playing it feels identical like this it can be really easy to get lost and not know if you're on one or two or three or four whatever in there it's easy to start getting all puzzled up but if you emphasize the first note of that chunk by kind of tossing your pick into it a little bit harder maybe making a little bit bigger motion you'll stay on track I'll hold heck of a lot better so in other words instead of trying to play like this where every note feels exactly the same it's easy to get lost in that try to really toss yourself into that one a little bit harder every single time you can hear and see that my picking aunt is coming down on that one one one one a little harder every single time that just keeps me even more aligned with that downbeat it also sounds really good because you're emphasizing the downbeat a little bit harder every single time and as a quick side note I bet most of you metal rhythm players are already using chunking to an extent whenever you play gallops across a beat in other words when a beat is going by this and you play gallops over it like this I bet you're not concentrating on all three notes that are going by you concentrate on nailing that very first note of the gala right there in the downbeat every single time right because again the second third notes are going to fall into place as long as that first one is right there in the downbeat every single time that's chunking you're probably already doing it so in summary if you're having a really hard time keeping your rhythm and you're totally on track whenever you're playing a really fast rhythm guitar part take a step back and analyze that rhythm first odds are it's either bootylicious sixteenth notes or there's me immediately sixteenth note triplets organize it mentally into chunks of four chunks of six or whatever and concern all of your mental and physical effort on a on the very first note of that chunk every single time and the rest will fall into place pretty easily we can also use chunking to get our left hand completely in sync and in line with that downbeat every single time instead of worrying about every note that's whizzing by you know a really good way to demonstrate that is by playing a simple five six seven eight chromatic exercise across every single string that's a spider I nearly just died on camera I'm really glad I was rolling for that so in other words whenever I'm playing that at really high speeds I'm not worried about trying to go 5 6 7 8 5 6 7 times except there's no way that you can do that reliably especially at high speeds that's only at 120 all that I'm really concentrating on is nailing that very first note of the chunk and the other ones will fall into place just fine the first note of the chunk in this case is that five the one that lands under the pointer finger on each new string so in other words I'm not worried about this 5:17 classic setting constant is no way to stay in time with that I'm just worried about it going by 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 making sure this guy is landing right there on the mark every single time the evidence will fall into place so give an example of how left hand chunking feels over some 16th note triplets in other words immediately me Lily's let's take a classic Paul Gilbert Lincoln kind of analyze how I would chunk that out of my brain here's a nun plan on the a-string I'm playing seven low E string I play 10 8 7 8 10 and that's it that's 6 notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 and I'm gonna play that phrase one time over every single beat so if I was playing that lick across a beat of 100 bpm what I would need to do is imagine I immediately Middle East get me in that 16th note 6 across the beats or at a time feel immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately and then I'd play it and it sounds something like this so again whenever I play that am i concentrating on going which is you buy some cosmetics really fast hell no there's no way that your brain and your hands can interface fast enough to reliable to do that all of them concentrating on is the very first note of that chunk the one that lands right here the seventh fret a string with my pointer finger on the downbeat it's like I've given this guy a curfew and he absolutely has to be back and ready to play on that day every single time I'm not worrying about two three four five six I'm worrying about one one one making sure that guy snaps down on that Demma beat every single time and as long as you know how to you know play the phrase okay you've got it memorized the rest of the notes will fall into place naturally another really important thing to check for your whenever you're trying to get your fingers really in sync with each other making sure that your left hand isn't feeding your right hand a bunch of for most of us our rhythm lies dominantly in our right hand that's what we think of being the rhythm and right the left hand will just kind of sit on a chord meanwhile our right hand is the one being active and strumming out a rhythm and everything so for a lot of us our left hands end up a little bit stunted in expressing rhythm as well as a right hand does and if this guy is not on time and this guy's perfectly on time it's still amounts to complete the left hand has to have perfect timing just as well as this guy does here's a great way to check and see how good your left hand timing is take your right hand and dampen out the strings up here by the note of the guitar I'm not mashing or anything like that I'm just dampening so that the strings are dead doesn't won't have any open string toys now from there put a metronome on and try to practice any of your favorite you know scalar or chromatic exercises with the left hand exclusively and see if that guy's rhythm is spot-on or if it sounds like I'm going to do that five six seven eight chromatic exercise we did earlier here with our eye of the tiger feel Decker took a definite ducka ducka ducka check-in to see if my left hand is totally in sync and landing of those down beats right where it should now again as I play this I am chunking again I'm only worrying about this as I play through that sequence making sure my pointer finger lands on that new string on fret 5 every single chunk I'm trying to worry about all four of those notes to just know when you do it simply put no matter how good this kind of sense of time is if this guy sense the time isn't equally as good it's gonna sound terrible it's also a really great exercise to do to check out how good your hammer-ons and pull-offs are as well if they can really carry you through without even a single pick stroke to make a set of hammer-ons and pull-offs work really good exercise for anything but most importantly a great way to see if your left hand has as good a rhythm as you think it does when you start getting really comforting thought is about chunking with both hands it's really great because what you can do is play really fast shred and runs like what I just played there and only concern yourself was the very first pick stroke of a chunk as well as the first finger placement of a chunk and you don't really concentrate on much else other than nailing those notes really freaking well and everything else will fall into place so for example let's say I was playing through a really fast lick in an a major scale like what I was doing a second ago this is going to be a three note per string thing here's a scale pattern from low to high we go 5 7 9 5 7 9 6 7 9 6 7 9 7 9 10 7 9 10 now let's say we want to take those 3 note phrases and turn them into sixes melee melee is right by playing each strings notes twice so you play five seven nine five seven nine five seven nine five seven times six seven so on now whenever I'm playing that at really high speeds I'm not concentrating on all six notes on the string I'm concentrating on nailing the very first one only that one that one that one that one and that one whenever you start thinking that way instead of trying to worry about every single note that's going by you can really tie both hands together and say you guys have to nail this note right on that downbeat every single time the rest of the notes will fall into place on their own as long as you worry about getting that guy right there with both hands every single time again that's sixteenth note triplets at 110 beats per minute that's 660 oh it's a minute 11 per second have you want to dice it up and the only way that I could possibly play that fast and stay in sync is by chunking with both hands when you play fast you're chunking with both hands moral of the story so there you go kids a couple of the secrets of getting your two armed hands completely in sync with your mind brain to make really six ready steps aren't happening on that instrument guitar of yours follow these words of wisdom and you too will be able to make friends and influence others thank you guys so much for watching be sure to like this video and subscribe to my You Tube channel also follow me on Instagram and the Twitter active in elder guitars keep up with my antics over there also if you're ever interested in booking some one-on-one Skype lessons with me where we can talk about learning the fretboard and theory and all that other good stuff drop me an email Ben eller guitars at gmail.com we'll talk about rates and times and all that other good stuff to get you learned thanks again good luck and happy shredding

Channel: Ben Eller

Views: 1,513,746

Keywords: this, is, why, you, suck, at, guitar, lesson, lessons, ben, eller, uncle, 11, your, hand, sync, synchronization, sucks, timing, left, right, picking, fretting, time, rhythm, fast, shred, shredding, how, to, play, arpeggios, sweeps, arpeggio, sweeping, tapping, strumming, alternate, economy, paul, gilbert, ygnwie, malmsteen, troy, grady, cracking, the, code, chunking, pick, slanting, volcano, neck, finish, whitechapel

Id: i_UJU1Yb1jM

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2016