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Collaboration can promote creativity, innovation and cross-skilling. What a bountiful year 2021 has been for good music. Jazz fusion is being rediscovered and rehabilitated by a new generation of players.
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12-10-2021 07:14 AM
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A hundred videos of professional players and not a single one of posters here :-)
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I can get to about 200-220bpm with my fingerstyle picking, but, with plenty of slurs.
Originally Posted by ragman1
Relaxation is the key to speed.
Here is a video of my fingerstyle picking.
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Personally, I don't think speed is necessarily determined by the number of notes actually picked rather than slurred. Nearly all players, even the fastest ones, use slurring because it's a valid sound in the music. But it's probably about how one does it, how often, and what the end result sounds like. Even the most adept pick players don't pick every note.
There are players like Jim Mullen who use slurring at speed because, in his own words, it's just how he does it. He gets right into it here:
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If you learned to play fast lines using a pick, you'll never get that speed and articulation with your fingers. Check out a Tim Lerch video on YouTube called Fingerstyle Fast Bebop; it's about as good as it gets.
However, getting around the limitation can be cool, and I was once roped into a jam sans pick on an old acoustic with high action and managed to pull off a decent solo using just my thumb, which refused to speak to me for a whole week afterwards. Ouch.
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Found it so here you go:
This was smokin
Lot of slurs but in a really rhythmically intentional way.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of fast fingerstyle guys use the thumb and index or thumb middle
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I would tentatively agree with this too. Originally Posted by Peter C
I was a jazz dork in a classical performance major in college so my guitar teacher was always bringing me recordings of guys he liked and I could ALWAYS peg the fingerstyle guys he brought in as fingerstyle. Maybe the first one I wouldn’t have gotten was Matteo Mancuso (though way after I left college). I would’ve probably thought a pick for him, in a blind test. But still, his articulation isn’t very “jazz.”
There is something about a pick for jazz, though of course a lot of great players work around it in their own way.
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Jimmy Ponder from Pittsburgh could play quite fast with just his fingers.
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The OP (from 4 years ago, I just noticed) was enquiring about fingerstyle single line speed and even mentioned Paco De Lucía. Thumb-only is a whole different thing and I know from my own experience that perseverance (and practice time, which not everyone has) can get you a long way, and even some upstroke action is happening. A case in point would be Mr Benson doing his Wes thing.
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Another good reason to start by learning classical technique first? Originally Posted by Peter C
FWIW, I once mentioned some of the speed exercise topics from here on another forum with a good share of advanced classical player members, and they weren't particularly impressed.
In my still limited experience (I'm not interested in becoming a squid, to use a motorcycling term
) the problem with fast fingerstyle using only the fingers is regularity, cleanness (not hitting unwanted strings) and stamina. Cleanness is probably the most difficult to train. Using only thumb and index already makes things easier (possibly with the middle finger, or "p p i" in case of triplets). But often the bottleneck is in inter-hand co-ordination, and for working on that I somethings get out a pick because of the extra complication that adds.
Personally I think that this is due to the right hand requiring too much conscious attention.
Here are 2 exercises I picked up when I started, and of which I still use some to start with every day, getting my right hand back into shape before anything else. I do that on open strings to avoid any tension in or interference from the left hand, and use both free and rest strokes:
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