Increase Your Repertoire of Shredding Skills and Dramatically Up-Level Your Transition Chops
In order to attack this 24-second frenzy of notes… you have to take a hard look at every aspect of your playing:
- your posture,
- your hand placement,
- your wrist position,
- your pick angle,
- how close your fingers are to the fretboard, your body tension,
- and more…
In order to play this up to speed, well enough, consistently, paying attention to all of these details is crucial.
This piece will expose and force you to confront your weaknesses and any aspect of your technique that is inefficient.
I wrote this piece over 5 years ago, and after relearning it, it made me realize all of the many ways in which I’ve been slacking off and have allowed many sloppy habits to creep back into my playing 😅
As such, this raw practice session and demonstration is far from perfect, but you get to see me confront my own weaknesses in real-time.
I’ve included chapter sections in the video so you can skip to whatever sections interest you the most. Skip to 4:07 to cut straight to the meat:
The Video Tutorial and Raw Practice Session
The Tablature
If the embed code above isn’t showing up, click here to access the tablature: https://www.soundslice.com/slices/vYWVc
Here’s the book by Troy Stetina that I reference near the end of the video. This book was a total game-changer for me when I was first getting serious about lead guitar:
The Heroes’ Bane Challenge
Learn this piece.
Play it as best as you can at whatever speed you can.
Film yourself and tag me on IG (@joshuavoiles) and I will shout you out to my fans and following ✌️
Discover The Practice Methodology that Can Lead to a Year’s Worth of Progress in 30 Days…
Discover The Practice Methodology that
Can Lead to a Year’s Worth of Progress in 30 Days…
Discover The Practice Methodology that
Can Lead to a Year’s Worth of Progress in 30 Days…
Additional Extemporaneous Commentary About Chunking Complex Patterns of Movement into the Equivalent of A Single Motion
This concept is a bit counterintuitive to grasp at first glance (hence my suboptimal articulation about the phenomenon in the video)… but it’s incredibly powerful.
You can effectively transform an entire series of motions into a single motion and repeat that anywhere and everywhere on the neck.
And it requires the same amount of energy and conscious attention as plucking a single note on a single string.
If you start to spot the patterns of repeated motions that masters the world over use, and start to practice these patterns as one fluid motion, and one chunk of information to process and replicate… you can up-level your repertoire rapidly.
You’re able to hold a sizable amount of “note data” in your unconsciously competent memory at once, and it’s readily-accessible at all times, on a “natural noodling” level.
If you obsess over this pursuit for even a short period of time (say, a week, but ideally a month)… you can transform your abilities on a level that will make it look like you mastered something impossible virtually overnight.
Should You Be Better at the Guitar than You Currently Are?
I’m 68. I’ve been playing for 50 years. My hands do what they do almost automatically which makes it’s really difficult to play 3 notes on a string and down/down pick to the next sting, etc. My fingers don’t want to do that! I’m primarily a Blues player, so I’ve not needed monster speed whether it be shredding/sweeping/tapping. However, one can get a bit bored playing basically the same stuff for decades. I’ve wanted to “dress up” my playing. Make it more “snazzy” in spurts, put some wow factor in it. I also know that people are born with a different amount of fast twitch fibers in their muscles than other people are. Shawn Lane, Michael Batio, Guthrie Govan, Buckethead, Yngvie, yes they practice but they have an inherent natural ability to move their fingers that quickly. Just like sports; some runners just can plain run faster than others and some guys can throw a baseball at 98 MPH and most can’t. My fingers can only move so quickly, so that leaves ‘tricks’/techniques like sweeping to sound faster than you are. I’m not sure I can get the hang of those techniques.