Is Alt Picking An Athletic Endeavor? Options

[JamesT]

I think I'm gonna have to put my guitar on ebay. I've been taking some time out these days to work on picking and I'm beginning to think I just ain't gonna get there. My latest theory is that after I've learned about a hundred of these fast picking songs, if I play them at "my level" for a year, then I will one day get faster. At least if I don't I will have learned a bunch of tunes in the process.

What do you guys who can already play fast think? Has your picking hand always been able to move as fast as it does today? Or does it take years? I've been focusing heavily on picking for about two years now with little gains. Is picking speed something you have to train for like an olympic swimmer?

See the videos below. I can play clean, but not fast. I just can't seem to get to that next tempo of the backing tracks on these...

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[Ben Higgins]

Hi James, to answer your question.. in a way, yes. You don't have to train ruthlessly like an Olympian would but the thing with picking faster is that, in order to pick faster you have to... pick faster.

Of course, it's not just as easy as doing it in one go.. but playing something perfectly at a slow tempo for aeons will just mean you're good at doing that task. Like pushing down on an accelerator in a car, if we keep our foot on the pedal at 50mph the car won't all of a sudden start gaining speed, we need to input the action to accelerate.

There's 2 main conflicting pieces of advice in guitar playing that I can think of, which can confuse people.

1- Relax... of course, being relaxed as possible during our playing is the ideal goal but taken to its extreme, if we relaxed completely we wouldn't be able to put any effort into anything at all and we wouldn't move In our quest to remain relaxed we can sometimes forget that we still need to put in some physical effort to progress. Our muscles need to work harder to make gains in performance. Recognising this means we have to identify the 2 extremes ..too relaxed and we make no gains at all because we're not pushing anything. We're asking it to keep operating on the same comfort level that it is. Too much effort and we tense up, using too many muscles and too much force. The best way it to make sure you can easily identify the difference between natural muscle fatigue (should have a burning sensation, slightly aching, not too unpleasant) and pain/tension.. if you notice your elbow tighten up and the forearm muscles tightening up and hurting then chances are you're trying to compensate for the lack of wrist speed by using your arm.

2 - Wait until you can play something perfectly all the way through, before moving on and bumping up speed (by as little as 2 to 5bpm) In many ways this advice makes sense but in reality you need to consistently push beyond that speed in order to make gains. If we waited to play something perfectly all the way through for everything you learn before moving up a few bpm we'd all be here until armageddon. I do agree that perfect repetion is the key to learning something so that is why I advocate doing a minimal amount of reps at a higher speed that pushes you. Pick a higher bpm and do a few bursts of it, as clean as you can and as relaxed as you can. This is where each person will have to trust their own instincts and feedback their body gives them. It has to be a combo of pushing yourself at higher speeds and marrying this up to your lower speed repetitions. Somewhere in the middle it, it complements each other and will lead to better speed and stamina.

Also, another thing I recommend is ditch long picking exercises. All these do is use up your time and stamina. Mostly, our hurdles are with a particular motion, for example, crossing from outside of a string to a lower string or something like that. Make the licks smaller so they focus on the area you want to improve instead of working your way through a long lick only to mess up at the problem area. Once you start to feel like you have control over these problem areas then you can work them into longer pieces but until then, you're just wasting stamina and brain power. I personally wish people would stop teaching that way but that's just me..

You might not have seen them but it's worth having a listen to what I talk about in my stamina school video, even if you don't practice the exercise. https://www.guitarmasterclass.net/ls/Stamina-School/

I hope all that makes sense. My ideas on alt picking may not be popular to people who are used to the old school way of doing things but I think it's time the guitar community realised that we're not all built like Yngwie and Paul Gilbert and that humans in general learn better when fousing on small tasks in incremental steps, not tackling massive things in one go.

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