What Are Your Weaknesses |
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What Are Your Weaknesses |
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May 5 2008, 10:19 AM |
I have many weaknesses, and the things I should work more on atm are harmony constructions.
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May 6 2008, 02:41 PM |
I have many weaknesses, and the things I should work more on atm are harmony constructions. This is something that alot of guitarists struggle with later in their development, myself included. Its when you start realizing you need to really get into the nuts and bolts of the theory aspect. My friend and I have been working together on solving this slowly over time, what we are doing is finding actual music scores for symphonies, and analyzing the intricate web of harmonies that are taking place between all the instruments. When you start to see the patterns in this way it becomes much easier to create those harmonies on a single instrument because you start to develop a sense of the intervals involved and how they interact with the other instruments your playing with. My recommendation is to try it and see what you can get out of it. Daniel Great topic! Alternate Picking technique for me - cleanliness and speed. My legato is reasonable and has improved a lot over the last year as I find it comes very naturally, and I practice it to the detriment of AP. With AP it is purely about practice time and discipline for me - I believe I have the mechanics right but I am skimping on the time and effort needed to build up speed in a smooth and controlled fashion! This comes back to the intital reason i started this post, we tend to ignore where we are weak. My friend always tells me you make time for whats important to you and the rest falls by the wayside. My advice in your particular case is try mixing up your legato with AP riffs...as an example lets say your doing a 3nps pattern across three strings. Play legato on the first two string and AP the last string. This has several things going for it. First your working on AP while still maintaining your legato technique, your also opening up the possiblity of a different rhythmic sound to your phrasing. And at the same time your starting to work on the basics of hybrid picking. Try this approach and see what you can come up with. Daniel This is a great topic, thanks Daniel!! I have a few weaknesses in my playing that no matter how hard I try I cannot put right, the first is fast runs, if for example I am playing a 3nps sequence, I can play it very well up to a certain speed, then I just freeze and my fingers go into meltdown......I try going over and over it with a metronome at a slow speed, then try building up but it is taking me FOREVER to develop the speed I want, my goal in life is to play a few Malmsteen classics note for note perfect, but I am barely able to play them at anywhere near the right speed, its so frustrating!! Secondly, a mixture of techniques....tapping and legato!! Not combining them, its just that the same problem arises with both techniques, I try and do them.....and playing slow, fine and sounding very clean!! When I speed them up it sounds sloppy and I can often hit wrong notes when tapping!! The speed problem is the most boggling and annoying!! I can play slower stuff perfectly, and with good phrasing and vibrato then once I get up to a difficult speed I just cant seem to do it, I seem to get lost, and no matter how much practice speed is still elusive!!! Any tips or help would be GREATLY appreciated!! Thanks, Iain!! Iain, I certainly agree with how boggling the speed aspect is. Its something i still struggle with. What i have found though in breaking it down it comes down to a few key things. First off i find that in alot of ways the speed issue especially with Alternate picking comes down to a sync issue between left and right hand and not 1 or the other. For instance i can easily pick 32nd notes at 150bpm if i am just on an open string not fretting any notes. I can also hammer on and pull off 32nd notes at 150bpm on a 3 note pattern with just my left hand. When i tried to do both it fell apart. I started to realize that it was indeed a sync problem and not a picking or fretting problem. The other aspect of the speed issue is there seems to be a space at least for me in AP skills at a certain range of BPM. For the longest time when trying to play 16th note triplets for example at 120 to 125 or so BPM i just couldnt get any kind of consistency....lower BPM i had no difficulty with. Nor with playing 32nd notes at that speed. At first i just thought it was my ears playing tricks on me but i actually recorded myself at 120BPM playing alternate picking licks at 32nd notes and slowed it down and listened for inconsistencies but there wasnt any. So why was it falling apart at 120bpm with 16th note trips? I then realized the problem had to do with the syncing between left and right hand, but the sync issue was being caused by my picking hand. I realized that when i was playing the 16th note triplets at that speed i was using more arm motion to pick with then wrist action like when i play faster. Once i realized what was happening i started to physically watch myself when playing with a metronome at that speed and made sure my picking angle and wrist use was consistent thru the speed ranges i could play. Perhaps the same is occuring for you. Without actually seeing you play the difficulty your having is hard to judge but take the time on your own to really analyze what is actually happening when you have that "Meltdown" zone. I think i can safely say that when you reach a certain speed your either tensing up too much so force yourself to relax, or....you are altering something as you approach that speed threshold. If you find out what the trouble is let us know you can probably help someone else here having the exact same trouble. Daniel One of my many weaknesses is that i'm completely and utterly useless with the whammy bar. I just cant operate that thing without it sounding drunk Another one that annoys me is that i cant do sweep-tappings without making a bunch of unwanted noise. Well, my sweeping in general could use some work. As far as either of your problems are concerned i have little advice to give, i completely ignore the whammy bar. The only reason i don't use a hardtail guitar is because i find bending is easier on a guitar with a whammy because the springs will give enough so you don't have to push as hard to reach the pitch you want. My advice on this particular area would be to take que's from people who use the whammy bar with a great deal of precision and try to emulate what you hear. A good place to start imo is with someone like Kiko Loureiro from Angra, he has some excellent whammy usage. Check out this vid, especially the center section of this song is some really awesome whammy work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQL2cLE7HpA...feature=related As far as string noise well....its all a matter of just getting tighter, especially for you Trond. Your rhythm and lead skills are very clean so its just a matter of working it out i guess. Daniel |
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