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Do you have an example of a really tricky bit?
Play a simple passage...16th notes at 100bpm...can you play it reliably and cleanly in the following ways:
- alternate picked
- double-picked notes (so the passage is twice as long, fretting hand moving half as much, all 16th notes still)
- change the rhythm to four 8th notes followed by four 16th notes, etc (passage takes twice as long)
- change the rhythm to skip, i.e. dotted 8th + 16th + dotted 8th + 16th, etc (passage takes twice as long)
- reverse the skip rhythm, i.e. 16th + dotted 8th + 16th + dotted 8th, etc
- as many hammer-ons/pull-offs as possible
What's easy, what's hard?The double-picked example is interesting: no matter what pattern you've chosen, you'll always have an even number of notes per string. This makes string-crossing much easier (I'm thinking 'cracking the code' material here).
Being frank, 16th notes at 90bpm is not a tremendous pace so we should be able to improve something!
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Speed and upstrokes are quite difficult and unnatural for me. I generally have processing delays, I think slow and play slow, but also melodically. Just gotta keep working on technique while also remembering to do the parts that you already enjoy as well.
Too much pressure under the fingers? Rest your fingertip on a string in between harmonics nodes, so when you pluck the note is muted, then increase pressure until the note rings out - that's as much pressure as you need.
Another thing that helps for this is to release the finger rather than removing it - relaxing the hand so the finger returns to its position above the string rather than pulling it away - the latter would be increased tension rather than release. So the neutral position for the fingers is just over the string, you introduce tension to apply it to the string, then release the tension to allow the finger to return to the neutral position.
That probably seems mad. It isn't, but it probably seems so.
The other thing is that the position of the guitar should be such that when the hand is in the neutral position the whole arm should be relaxed. A certain amount of tension is necessary to hold it there, but any more than that is going to get in the way of the playing. In order to get faster you need to get more relaxed. I found that increasing the energy to the arm to get over the tension increased the tension, which required more energy... until the arm locked up, or at least the business end did.