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I see this curve more like gears on a car, once you imprinted the mechanics in your muscle memory, you should push until you reach a plateau, and from there work at progressive speeds to overcome it.
I see what you're saying though.
After many years of trying to improve my alternate picking without making any real progress I've been looking at it much more closely recently and I do believe I'm now making progress. The thing is though I've had to take ideas from 3 or 4 different sources to really make any headway.
Just of the top of my head I've looked at
Pick slanting - thanks to Troy Grady (I've actually paid for the Pick Slanting Primer pack which I'm working through albeit slowly - definitely worth the $55 if, like me, you need more explicit explanations than a lot of his youtube videos give)
Chunking/Synchronisation - mainly thanks to Troy Grady but Claus Levin deserves a mention as well as it's one of his videos that got me to really link the two together
Burst playing - thanks to @DLM for this one as he was kind enough to send me a copy of a Shaun Baxter article that discussed this amongst a couple of other ideas.
Effective metronome use - I think this possible goes back to a Guthrie Govan book I've got but the Shaun Baxter article added a bit more to it.
Now any one of these in isolation has never really yielded results for me yet applying all the above ideas to my practice routine over the last month or so has resulted in noticeable improvement.
It'd be great to see someone produce something with a real, in depth explanation of all of the above (as well as any ideas I've missed/haven't come across yet). I guess some people will be able to piece it all together themselves or maybe some just don't come across the same hurdles as I have but certainly for me there's been quite a bit more to it than practice slowly and gradually increase the speed.
My point, if I had one, was that a lot of the material out there seems geared towards focusing one one aspect of the technique. The most popular seems to be the start slow and speed up with various repeating patterns and this has never really worked for me. You really need to go digging to find different approaches (or be fortunate enough that some kind soul points you towards it). I don't know if its that some have greater aptitude for it and therefore need less direction but it seems that, from the number of times the subject comes up, there's something lacking in the standard advice.
That said, Troy Grady's pick slant primer has a lot of information and, getting back to the OP, the Yngwie parts are a great starting point (and I'm not even a huge fan). Even if you don't pay for the course there a lot of hints in the free videos on YouTube.
But maybe I could research it and make a course on Alternate picking only that would push it even further and cover all the angles, do you think people would buy it ?
Paul Gilbert isn't an edge picker - he's a primary upward pick slanter. Marty Friedman isn't an edge picker either, he's a primary downward pickslanter.
@RedRabbit - I would strongly advise sticking to one way pick slanting for starting out. I did try to learn two way pick slanting, but found it very difficult and my movements ended up very string hoppy and this was slowing me down. I'm a natural upward pick slanter, so I'm sticking with that and using pull offs when changing strings on certain phrases.
@bingefeller
I meant this:
I thought Grady had coined the term "edge picking" for that? I.E. Leading-edge picking (Gilbert now) and trailing-edge picking? Going by which edge of the pick first hits the string?Leading edge, to the best of my understanding from Troy’s teachings, would be when someone holds their pick like Benson but the top part of the pick you are seeing in that picture is the part that would hit the strings first on a downstroke. I can’t think of any player who plays like this.
Troy describes regular edge picking as the angle that guys like Gilbert, Moore put on the pick to get a better tone. Paul talks about putting an angle on the pick on the Get Out Of My Yard DVD lesson segment.
I keep thinking of doing an update post to show exactly what I'm working on and what progress I'm making but i) it'd be a long post and needs the tab to explain things properly - neither is a problem but I need to find the time ii) while it isn't all Troy Grady stuff, a lot of it is I'm not hugely keen on putting up anything which I've got from his paid content.
The second point is what's really stopping me posting anything in great detail which is why I've recommended the OP search out Troy's stuff on YouTube.
@Bingefeller I've found something explaining this on Troy's site:
https://troygrady.com/2015/01/08/the-difference-between-pickslanting-and-edge-picking/
So essentially, basically everyone uses "edge picking" to some degree, and it doesn't have anything to do with "pick slanting".
My point was merely that elite players have successfully rebuilt their picking technique in quite radical ways. Yet the technique aspects they moved away from were successfully used by others. Lane was a trailing-edge picker, and Gilbert was crazy about his technique.
I've tried the traditional way but it just feels so wrong to me, so it's nice to know there is some merit doing it this way. Thanks for that link, was very interesting.