Post by wannaplayblues on Jan 28, 2019 4:58:40 GMT -6
Short Version
Well, I've been working on this for 4 months. It has been a struggle to say the least - and even caused me to contemplate quitting guitar for life (see the Long version for details) - however, I have finally been able to play this piece at full tempo (100bpm) and think it a HUGE personal achievement.
As some of it features 16th notes, that works out at me hitting 400notes per minute for short bursts in the piece. This is the fastest I've ever played IIRC - and feel I'm topping out. Enjoy...
Long Version
So, you want the gory details? Well, it starts at the 0:46 mark. There's a run of 16th notes there that I simply could not pick. I tried 5 different ways to pick it (starting with an 'up'; inside picking; outside picking; etc). Each time I would start at 75bpm and max out at 91bpm, making mistakes. Some evenings I spent an hour trying to work on it and I became rather obsessive about it. I couldn't leave it alone and I got really down about it. Made me feel like I wasn't good enough to continue to play guitar or that I was never going to progress any further.
So, demotivated and contemplating quitting, I did the obvious thing to inject happiness (not) and went shopping for a new guitar - 'cos, you know, a new guitar would solve everything, clearly!
Obviously, it doesn't.
Anyhow, I finally resigned myself to not picking the part but changing it to legato instead. This went a lot better, helped me relax my picking hand more and gave it more of the time it needed. I currently feel I may have topped out on my playing speed. We'll see how it goes going forward.
The guitar I went for is a Cort Zenox Z44. It's mahogany body and neck, but with a beautiful visibile grain neck. It's also TobaccoBurst color. Doing some research, these appear to be limited in availability, most are just white / black. The fixed bridge and humbuckers were the drive, however, it has a push/pull tone dial to split the coils for more strat sound and individual volume controls for each humbucker, which is nice. Love the contours, especially the one on the front for the picking arm (oh, and I clearly needed a new leather strap for it). Enjoy the pic...
). Make your own little exercises from difficult parts of what you're trying to learn and repeat them daily for short periods. It works. I think it has more to do with persistence and consistency than anything else. 
