How do I pick faster?

[eddievanzant]

So, I was wondering if anyone has any tips that I haven't already heard. I think I'm already pretty fast, but I'm still not as fast as I need to be.

angle the pick
don't angle the pick
use thin picks
use thick picks
use your wrist
use your elbow
economy pick
alternate pick
use light strings
use heavy strings
play clean
play with gain
pick really light
pick really heavy
anchor
don't anchor

none of these really seem to be good or bad, as they contradict each other. Practising all of these things will help. Learning to pick with every one of these variations will make you a little bit better.

However, I have found some things that have no contrary, that learning to do these things simply makes your picking faster.

learn to tremolo triplets (DOWN up down UP down up, 123123)
when picking on the inside of two strings, use a slight whipping motion
when picking on the outside, after picking the last note on a string, just let the pick continue on its path past the next string and then immediately move in the other direction.

I would really like to be as fast as Paul Gilbert or John Petrucci, and I don't believe it is very difficult, I just think that there's something I'm not doing, or something I'm not doing correctly. My 'technique' has no flaws. I'm just not as fast as them.

My biggest problem is constant string changing. I've been stuck at about 7 notes per second since I began playing TEN years ago. My tremolo is way faster, so if something is at least two notes per string, or no constant string changing, I can play it pretty fast. But if it has constant string changing, I'm stuck at 7 notes per second.

Does anyone have any tips to help me speed up my string changing?

[bkdavidson]

For technique exercises, if you haven't picked up John Petrucci's 'Rock Discipline' and Carl Culpepper's 'Terrifying Technique,' that's the first stop. For string changing, play four notes per string and maintain strict alternate picking. Do this starting on a downstroke, then do it again starting with an upstroke. You can also just isolate picking outside the strings with any kind of study you make up yourself, just make sure it changes string every note and you maintain an outside picking pattern.

I don't know what your practice regimen is or what people have told you, but it's important not to just go for broke everyday. For working on speed, either take a day off between sessions and go for broke, or do a 3 day rotation. Day one is painfully slow and you keep an eye on all the technical aspects of your playing, day two is at a moderate tempo to get some motion to the good technique, and day three you go for broke.

As far as the contradictory advice, are you asking which is right and which is wrong? Some of those are "six of one, half a dozen of the other," but some are right or wrong.

[Drumbler]

To pick faster play quicker.

[cutnstuf]

Frank Gambale has some good stuff out on speed picking.

[derek]

Like any athletic pursuit, speedy picking/playing requires lots of drills aimed at getting that down. Already some good resources mentioned, so my only addition is to not see it as a musical thing, but as technical/athletic training, just like a sprinter, soccer, or basketball player would approach it.

When you think about it that way, a) you realize speed is merely an athletic/technique issue, and can be increased with work, and b) since it is, you need to put in LOTS of time working on specific drills to develop it. Since increases in speed come slow, you will probably need to find ways of recording and measuring your progress, as it is easy to get frustrated at the lack of rapid improvement. Good luck.

[Drumbler]

If I work really hard can I run a 4.3 sec 40 yarder?

The NFL is waiting.

(Just kidding.)

[Aristotle]

While SOME speed can be learned, there are limits. We are not all as quick as Bruce Lee. You have to get by on what you have. The Ventures seem to have sold a few records.

[JohnW400]

There is a 'picking' school of thought that uses a stiff wrist getting all the motion fron the forearm. This is tough to do. I tried it for years.

I believe that different types of passages in music call for different techniques.

The stiff wrist approach works good on somethings but big string skips isn't one of them.

I would recommend taking a bit of advice from all the posters here and try to to come up with something that feels comfortable to you. Then apply it to different musical 'movements'

For example , try flat picking Recuerdos del Alhambra. It's basically holding a chord in place and doing string skipping and tremelo picking. Another is the Villa Lobos Etude 1.

Still more would be the second guitar part from Birds of Fire and Inner Mounting flame. The string skipping there is pretty hard. And the pieces are uptempo.

The last one , and a killer for me are in the Bach partita for Violin in E. It has 2 passages that just kill your picking hand. they are 16ths at 120 and the picking is a repetitive figure that is on strings 2 1 2 3 and works it's way to 2 1 2 4.

These should give you a cramp or two

[derek]

Originally Posted by Drumbler

If I work really hard can I run a 4.3 sec 40 yarder?

The NFL is waiting.

(Just kidding.)

Hehe. Well, there are going to be some physically limits for anyone pursuing an athletic activity. If you are 5'5", chances are, you won't be dunking a basketball anytime real soon.

However, with playing faster, how does one know what their limits are unless they really dive into it and give it lots of time? Limits in speed playing aren't quite as apparent as your limits in the 40.

[saponsky]

as a BIG John Petrucci fan myself, my definitive advice is to try economy picking. You said that your problem is when string skipping, economy picking solves this. I can play fast enough 'paradigm shift style' with alternate picking but with economy picking I can play even faster. But it requires a LOT OF PRACTICE.

[Scrybe]

it can be worth practicing both with high gain and also clean, for slightly different reasons - playing clean ensures you play each note fully as you'll hear it more easily if your tone is weak on certain notes, but playing with high gain can help you hear unwanted string noise as it gets worse with the gain added in. so doing the same exercise twice, once clean then once with gain, can be a benefit to improving general technique.

[Sailor]

I, personally, can only tolerate a very small amount of fast picking. I like to play fast but I would rather not listen to too much "fast picking"....

Sailor

[eddievanzant]

thanks for the replies everybody

i wasn't really asking which ones were right, i was just making an observation that most tips about picking have a tip opposite to it. Personally, I don't think any of them are wrong. For example, learning to play well with thin picks, and also learning to play with thick picks, will both improve your playing. I have about a dozen different types of picks, made out of different materials, and different shapes and thicknesses, and learning to play with all of them has really helped.

Learning to play with the pick angled down, and also learning to pick angled up like Benson, will both help. The point is actually to do both. In fact, I can play with like five different hand positions, using different muscles, different picks, anchoring, and not anchoring, and even though I still have my main position (palm resting on bridge, pick angled up, two finger grip, no anchoring), learning to do other stuff is great.

It just seems that no matter how much better I get, whenever I just play one note per string, on two adjacent strings, just back and forth, whether it is inside or outside picking, it will not go any faster than eight notes per second. It's really amazing how unable I have been to improve this lol

I have noticed that I'm a little faster if I'm really warnmed up, like I just did a lot of all down strumming.

I also don't tend to listen to very many fast playing. It's like I spend all my time working on something that I seriously don't want to do more than three percent of the time. I want to write solos that *might* have one or two fast phrases, and I want to write riffs and fills that might have a few fast notes within them.

[Aristotle]

Originally Posted by JohnW400

I believe that different types of passages in music call for different techniques.

Bingo!

[TommyD]

Use a metronome. Play the bridge from "One Note Samba", for example. (it's good because it goes across 3 strings) and increase the metronome speed one notch at a time making certain that execution is perfect before jacking up the metronome. Then attack "Fascinating Rhythm" the same way.
It's the old, tried-and-true method that never fails. Every instrumentalist is advised to use this method. Guitarists are no exception.
I don't think that selecting and playing a certain number of notes per string is a good idea. That's not making music, it's learning a mechanical movement which may or may not obtain in real-life playing of written music or extemporaneous playing.
T/

[princeplanet]

Puts on Devil's advocate hat.... If you need to ask, then it is not coming natural to you and you may be better suited to seek forwarding your skills in other ways as you may never be as quick as you'd like. Fact of life- people simply have different twitch reflexes. I never had difficulty with speed and when I read of other players who are known for their "quickness", they seem also to have not had to struggle for it.

Personally, what I do struggle at is quickness of mind . Learning to think quicker than comes natural is the real bitch, imho....

[billkath]

I've always thought that "lack of speed" is always due to the arm (or various bits on the arm, elbow,wrist or hand joints and muscles) being tense. Kind of like on the cartoons, where you see someone winding their arm up to give someone a punch? You're thinking of being fast, so you are getting your arm tense for your burst of speed. You need to completely relax. How do you do that? You're going to have to force yourself to relax, and that comes from recognising the tension is there. Maybe a visit to the hypnotist would help? The kind of hypnotist that helps you stop smoking? This REALLY can help-it's not voodoo.

[eddievanzant]

hahaha well i don't think it has much to do with me tensing up, i just think i'm doing it wrong. Although, I guess it could be that everyone does have their own limit when it comes to this, but I doubt it. I can down pick as fast as I can outside pick on two strings, so I think it's just some technical problem.

When I have to play something that requires me to move in and out of the strings with every note (eg. two notes on adjacent strings back and forth), this is basically how I do it: I twitch my wrist up for the downstroke, and I twist my wrist up for the upstroke. Is there any other way?

[itsall4you]

The main obstacle on plectrum guitar for speed as you say is string skipping.

For this reason, a lot of fast players play horizontally across the neck not vertically. By changing the fingering string skipping can be made a lot easier. Speed only comes when BOTH of your hands are working together. It will help working on your right hand picking, but really you need to look at it as a whole.

My 2 cents

[eddievanzant]

Yeah I agree. I actually fret with my thumb as well, and not above the neck, but below the neck. It lets me do some really cool things and makes everything easier. I just want to be better at constant string crossing because it gives you a unique sound.

[Aristotle]

I've always thought that "lack of speed" is always due to the arm (or various bits on the arm, elbow,wrist or hand joints and muscles) being tense.

It's that, but it's more complicated. And perhaps, never really studied by "experts."

There is a field of physical therapy called muscle activation. Sometimes "tension" means a muscle not firing in sequence in a complex motion or not firing at all. ESPN did a special on a therapists who specializes in this. Mark Texeira was getting strain in his lower back after just a few minutes of hitting a ball off a batting tee. After treatment, he said he could practice on the tee all day.

While the problem Texeira has was not "speed," per se, the principle of muscles having to fire in sequence probaby applies.

FWIW, I never had as much problem with string skipping as playing "between" the strings. I found 3-1-3-1 with a down-up much easier than 1-2-1-2 wih a down-up.

Advice that helped me included:
1) not wasting motion - don't let the hand or pick move in and out too much, get it as straight up and down as possible, just enough to clear the string; and
2) try to pick up the guitar, and before you practice or play anything else, play your velocity practice piece(s), at the last (highest) practice speed. No warm-up. Kind of muscle memory and trained reflex thing. Just hear it, play it, and don't tense up.

[eddievanzant]

you seem to know a lot about the subject! and i agree that playing outside the strings is less awkward than playing between the strings. If I could just get that type of string cross up to speed I'd be content. Just curious, how fast are you able to play 2-1-2-1 with a down up?

[Eccles]

my piano teacher gave me the following method for working on playing fast passages and it works for me on the guitar also. practice with a metronome at half tempo concentrating on playing the passage with perfect precision and economy of movement. Practice a lot like this, may do the thing 100 times if necessary. then increase the tempo slowly until you can no longer play the passage. At this point alternate your practice between playing slightly slower with accuracy and slightly faster than you can play. do not worry about the mistakes when you do this. you are somehow giving your brain the inputs it needs to sort out how to play the passage at the faster tempo. you will find that one day you mysteriously can play it faster.

[guitarone]

To play fast, get really good at playing slowly with minimal movement. Cross picking also has a way of getting your speed worked up. Watch out for the flying fingers disease too! Just look at Yngwie Malmsteen and see how small movements can help speed performing.

[musicalbodger]

Sorry to be mundane, but it's like everything else in life. Practice, patience, determination and persistence. It will come, said the actress ...

[eddievanzant]

Well when I'm learning new stuff I definitely practice slowly, and obvoioisly doing something right once, slowly, is better than playing sloppy or wrong notes faster a million times; but I'm talking about a basic technique and practicing moving back and forth between two slowly doesn't help when you're already doing it correctly.

Playing with small movents is good advice but it's not like I'm using any more movement than necessary lol

I have however found a few things that have solves my problem. The first is simply being very well warmed up. Doing a thousand upstrokes and a thousand down strokes, or just tremolo picking a strong very hard and fast for a few minutes is good.

The second and third thing, you could say, are not proper technique, nut when combined with muting work nicely. I angle the direction of the pick so the down goes into the strings, and the up goes out, then when I outside pick, the up moves over the next string naturally and the down moves through both strings, with the second one being dead.


D u d u d u d u
x-0-x-0-x-0-x-0-------------------------------
0---0---0---0--------------------------------



now I'm a lot faster and even when I go back to playing it correctly I'm still somewhat faster. Yay haha

[Uli]

The trouble is that speed and technique do not depend on the right hand alone. It's also a matter of right hand/left hand coordination. Therefore, I think the tremolo triplets you've mentioned are a useful exercise.

Just to add another concept as for handling the pick - using the blunt end might speed up your playing a little. Bireli Lagrène does it, f.e.

[franamico]

Hey, how about using more legatos and hammer ons?

However, speed comes with relaxation.
You must practicing relaxing and speed will come naturally

[JoshCollins]

Hey Eddievanzant,

The best method I found was to try different picking exercises, I learnt my chops from shred guys like Paul Gilbert and Yngwie Malmsteen. Might be worth checking out that sort of thing before applying that sort dexterity to Jazz guitar maybe?

[jazzislander]

Originally Posted by Eccles

my piano teacher gave me the following method for working on playing fast passages and it works for me on the guitar also. practice with a metronome at half tempo concentrating on playing the passage with perfect precision and economy of movement. Practice a lot like this, may do the thing 100 times if necessary. then increase the tempo slowly until you can no longer play the passage. At this point alternate your practice between playing slightly slower with accuracy and slightly faster than you can play. do not worry about the mistakes when you do this. you are somehow giving your brain the inputs it needs to sort out how to play the passage at the faster tempo. you will find that one day you mysteriously can play it faster.

It sounds like a good method. But do you start every practice session slowly again? I have this trouble, if I play something 100 times slowly, then it feels really easy to play it fast, but in a band situation I can't play my lick 100 times before I think the problem is, how can I get my licks fast on the first try? Any suggetions?