Nice meeting you on here Ben...=)

i guess Im asking randomly but does any of you know a trick to log back into an instagram account?? I was stupid forgot the password. I appreciate any help you can offer me!

@Lennox Dakari Instablaster =)

@Thiago Joshua i really appreciate your reply. I found the site through google and I'm in the hacking process now. Looks like it's gonna take quite some time so I will get back to you later when my account password hopefully is recovered.

@Thiago Joshua It did the trick and I now got access to my account again. I am so happy:D Thank you so much, you saved my ass :D

Brandon Ichavez "Bend the rules", or just... more rules we didn't know about? Take your pick! Glad to hear you're enjoying our stuff.

***** Nice one.

+Troy Grady man, this albert lee portion has really help. I come from the school of Paul Gilbert and after a few years, add the eric johnson style to my playing. adding this part into the mix helps in a number of ways, I found that the bouncing part that came from EJs style can kind of throw you out of the speed because of the negative tendencies of that style. add this to it kind of gets you the positive of the EJ style with the correction of what he was missing from albert lee. It would be cool to see a few chapters for Jason Becker's playing. He does a combo of string tracking by having his pinky on the guitar. the interesting part is it, for the most part is downward pick slanting when he ascends a scale type of thing. but for those monster picked parts he does descending he changes to two way pick slanting and it wouldn't be uncommon for him to change into a 5-6 string sweep with sort of a rotation of his palm

Dooality I'm from Long Island - it's mandatory! If you can't manage at least two tracks from "The Stranger" or "Turnstiles", they make you move to Jersey.

***** Back when you were mostly wearing long sleeves in your videos, I figured maybe you were concealing full-sleeve Billy Joel themed tattoos.

Martino's fluency is unvelievable, it would be very interesting to se how he can do it

please do this troy

Definitely. I'm still hoping for that lesson

Joe Walker Hi Joe! In the 50 or so of these clips I've tabbed out, the same hybrid fingerings and patterns arise constantly. But there doesn't appear to be any obvious efficiency concern mainly because Albert's crosspicking approach is already capable of handling any sequence of pickstrokes per string if he wants. The tendencies that he has -- like using downstrokes while ascending, and slides to force those -- seem to be mainly idiosyncratic and/or musical in nature. Out of all the possibilities that exist, you have to narrow that down somehow if you're going to navigate the fretboard, and it makes sense that he'd develop a sort of standardized vocabulary if only for the purpose of memorization / improv.

I'm pretty sure they evolve together, and each one influences the other. Check out the latest Andy Wood mandolin clip, where he talks about rearranging picking and fretting patterns by feel. Yes, great players do actively throw away perfectly good licks if they picking or fretting doesn't feel correct. There's nothing "forced" about it, I would argue it's the most natural way.

@@troygrady Like Chet would organize both his chord voicings and picking patterns to suit the intended melody of the songs.

+Aizen I agree that you have to put in time to develop the left hand, but I don't think that's why Troy focuses on picking. A more likely answer is the fact that there is no mystery to left hand technique. The "how" of left hand technique is well understood. "Correct" left hand technique is published and is out there to be learned by motivated students. Troy is addressing the fact that up until now, picking instruction has been dominated by vacuous advice to "find what feels right, and just keep practicing", without any insight into what it is that elite players have discovered that the rest of us haven't. What was "obvious" to you or your teacher is not obvious to everyone. To the lucky few, those things may come naturally, or they may have had a self-aware and communicative teacher. But for others, Troy's observations can save them years (or even a lifetime) of banging their head against a wall without getting results. For those of us who have been playing for many years, it's easy to forget that for people who are still learning, even fast alternate picking on a single string does not come naturally to everyone. And even for those who do get the knack for fast picking on one string, they don't necessarily understand how they are getting the result and how they can consistently and accurately move it from string to string. If Troy can ease the road for people, how is that a bad thing?

+severalpaperclips and isn't that what I said? lol I'm not saying is a bad thing, but I have seen other people ask him why he doesn't focus on the left hand, and like I said, this is because there is no secret about it, the reason most people cannot shred, is not because their picking technique sucks, is because their left hand is not strong/fast enough to synchronize with their right hand picking, their left hand lags behind. These teachers focus on the picking technique because is the easiest thing to fix, while the left hand, there is nothing they can say or do, and it is only you have to put in the work to develop it to match your picking speed. Many of us can pick really fast, in that sense, I'm already shredding without hitting any notes, problem comes when you want to play notes, the left hands need to be at the same level as the right. Believe it or not, troy and every single guitar players, always switch to tremolo picking, or a version of alternate mixed with tremolo whenever they play fast, and by using tremolo picking with open strings, is basically the same speed as them, problem comes when you want to add notes

+severalpaperclips If I pick only open strings, I can play as fast troy does, or very close, the difference? is that his left hand is developed enough to match, and probably even surpass his picking speed, me on the other hand, since my left hand lags behind, i cannot hit the notes at the same speed as my picking does, and that is the main problem, also the left hand is the most important one imo, because this is what produces the notes, the melodies, if you dont train your left hand correctly, you can develop tendonitis, carpa tunnel, etc, many people overtrain their left hand, and develop these problem without even knowing they have them, hence why improvement slows down

+Aizen I think we're mostly on the same page, but I disagree in some ways. I think that many "intermediate" guitarists, especially those influenced from the Clapton and Van Halen school, get very impressive results with a pulloff/legato heavy technique, and never figure out string crossing mechanics for alternate picking, even if they can tremolo pick well. Through my high school days, it seemed much more common for intermediate guitarists to have a well-developed left hand, but for the nuances of fast alternate picking to remain elusive. Maybe it's a generational thing, and younger players today are doing more fast alternate picked string-crossing arpeggio shapes and open string rhythm parts. But coming up in the 80s, there were lots of guys "cheating" with legato to try and fake their way through fluid alternate picked parts that seemed impossible. What I'm saying is from the experience of myself and players I grew up around, it seems the things Troy is explaining are the things that we were looking for back then, but couldn't find in any of the magazines or videos. And there are probably differences depending on what level the player has reached. For players who have reached a plateau in the Clapton/Van Halen school, Troy's advice can open up a whole new style. I also think there's another kind of plateau where the left hand development stagnates because the player is not interested in legato-heavy music, and they lack the alternate picking ability to "push" the left hand to work to higher speed in alternate picked licks. Keeping with your weight-lifting analogy, strong alternate picking technique is like having a strong back: if you don't have that, your ability to work other body parts to their limit may be compromised. The people who are content to maximize their Clapton/Van Halen chops are like the guys who spend lots of time doing bicep curls and pectoral machine, but don't want to try deadlift or cleans because they think the technique is too complicated. ;-) Troy's picking ideas are like showing people that the technique is not so impossible, you just have to understand what it is. Sure, you still need to put in the work, but Troy gives a roadmap that many people are missing. In my first response, I thought you were dismissing the usefulness of Troy's picking advice, but from your second reply I think that's not what you were saying. Rather, I think we can agree Troy's picking advice is only one part of the puzzle, but an important part. ;-)

Ironically, I never knew about downward and upward pick slanting, edge picking, string hopping, only to realize I was already doing them for years, is like over the years you naturally figure it out on your own, although, the one thing I didn't know was how to overcome string hopping, I knew something wrong was going on, but I didn't what it was, his videos revealed to me that you need to finish always on an upstroke. I somehow developed some speed despite string hopping. Now, I'm practicing with economy picking for 3 notes per strings. My main problem is the left hand though, is not fast enough to catch up to my picking speed.

Takami Steve Morse's technique is essentially full-time crosspicking. But it starts to take on the look of 2wps the faster he goes. The curve never goes away, but the slanting becomes more obvious, and yes, some swiping enters the picture. It's a complicated world out there!

Rusty Shackleford There seems to be quite a mix in the various comments on Troy's videos. I get the impression that downward pickslanting is the more common "natural" pick slant, but either way, it's certainly something I *look* for now when I watch impressive players or instructional videos. And since many (all?) other instructional videos up to now have pretty much ignored the topic of pick slant, it now becomes a bit of an interesting anthropological exercise to go back and re-interpret advice and exercises from various instructional videos now that we're better equipped to understand the implicit "pick slanting context" of various instructors.

Rusty Shackleford Noticed pretty much the same thing myself, I seem to drift into an resting upward slant when my hand is most relaxed and I'm not paying too much attention to what I'm doing. Having said that, it tends to be downward for the lower strings and also seems to change depending on the direction of the run, pick angle and how thick the pick I'm using is. I think Troy had mentioned that Vinnie Moore favoured upward slanting, although I may be mistaken about this.

Jbf Music Lessons "Having said that, it tends to be downward for the lower strings and also seems to change depending on the direction of the run, pick angle and how thick the pick I'm using is." - Ah, that makes sense. I think I do that as well. I guess based on my hand position, I'm reaching further for certain strings.

severalpaperclips I agree. I really notice it in John Petrucci's older videos.

Rusty Shackleford Yeah, it's the sort of thing where if you overthink it too much it will actually start to hinder your playing. I noticed this myself and found when I'm not thinking too hard about it I tend to play better, because I'm trusting that my muscle memory will kick in. Obviously it was a lot of work to relearn/adjust my picking technique in the first place and in all fairness this is still an ongoing process for me.

+Leo Comerford Not really familiar with these guys, but to be clear, when I say "crosspicking", I specifically mean "curved alternate pickstroke". This is more specific than the traditional usage, which typically just means picked arpeggios by any method of individual pickstrokes, including repeated pickstrokes, which is not what Albert or Steve do (for the most part), and not as fast or efficient.

who is that guy?

Hi! You've posted this comment on a number of our videos, but when you do that, they get marked as spam and we delete them. Once is enough. Anyway, the short answer to your question is that we have no immediate plans for printed instructional material. Even in the '80s, reading a book about audio was always less instructive than actually hearing it. And now we can see it too, in terms of the necessary hand movements. It's a new world out there and it's way better than it used to be!

Okay I see your point