Hello, i was practicing the The Call of Ktulu solo, and theres one lick that is very long and with very fast speedpicking.

And i couldnt play that part to correct speed, so ive been practicing speedpicking lately.

but lets say, that that lick is in "Tempo = 140", does that mean i have to be able to practice those kind of licks with the metronome up to 140 BPM to get it right?

the part of the solo im talking about is the 2nd passage after the Pull-Off + Bending part.

thanks in advance.

if the tempo is 140 then the bpm depends on the notes.. if it is whole notes then the bpm is 140 but if it is quarternotes then the tempo would be 140x 4. but you can put the bpm at 140 and just play 4 notes in between each beat its the same deal

umm i dont understand lol...can you explain it better please...

okay ill expand a bit. So your metronome will play 140 bpm if it is set to 140bpm:) This is the tempo of the peice but there are many different notes that can be played at this tempo. Whole Notes which is 1 bpm In guitar terms if you are playing whole notes then it is 1 note per beat so u would pick 1 note for every click on the metronome. But then there are half notes. A half note means that there are 2 notes per beat. Therefore you would pick twice every click on the metronome. If you wished to be picking once every click then you could simply raise the pace of the metronome to 280. But since you are keeping the tempo at 140 every click you would pick twice for a half note. In a solo the tempo might be 140 but you may be using half notes/ tripletes, quarter notes, eight notes sixteenth notes or even 32nd notes. the amount of picking you have to do between each click on the metronome is dependent on the notes that are being played and the tempo. So Lets say you wanted to practice this piece at half the speed it is now. To keep the notes at the same spacing you would drop the tempo (bpm on the metronome to 70) then you would have to compensate with your picking but you would still use the same number of picks between each beat. This will keep the solo sounding the same but slower.. i hope this helps.. my discriptions are sometimes a little fuzzy. Basically
if the solo is at regular speed 140 then a whole note is 1 pick half note is 2 quarter is 4 eighth is 8
If you slow it down to 70 then the picking is exactly the same for each beat. Then you can slowly speed it up untill you are picking the same at a faster tempo.
if you move it up to 120 on the metronome you will still pick once a beat twice or whatever the type of note.

i see now. Thanks Smikey.

That's not entirely accurate, what it should be is: quarter notes are one note per beat, eighth notes two, sixteen four. Of course this also means a half note is two beats and a whole note is four beats.