Steve Stine Guitar Podcast
If you are passionate about playing the guitar, but often find yourself short on practice time, or frequently on-the-go and in need of musical inspiration, then the Steve Stine Guitar Podcast can help you improve your skills and stay motivated. Join Steve Stine as he chats with fellow musicians and educators, and shares valuable guitar lessons to help you learn new songs, grasp music theory, and create your own solos. Whether you are an experienced guitarist or just starting out, this podcast is perfect for you.
Steve Stine Guitar Podcast
Why Are You Still Playing Slow? The Mindset of Speed Picking Part 1
The pursuit of lightning-fast guitar playing often leads down a path filled with frustration and plateaus. What if the secret isn't in how fast you can move your fingers, but in understanding the subtle mechanics that make true speed possible?
In this deep-dive exploration of speed picking, we shatter common misconceptions about developing velocity on the guitar. The truth? You're only as fast as your slowest element. Whether it's finger strength limitations, pick angle issues, or string-crossing challenges, these hidden bottlenecks are what prevent most guitarists from achieving their speed goals.
The psychological dimension of practice is equally critical. Some days will feel amazing while others feel like regression—a reality every guitarist must embrace rather than fight against. We provide a framework for maintaining consistency through both types of days, separating maintenance-level practice from advancement-focused training.
Beyond theory, we explore practical concepts like "getting your ya-ya's out" through raw practice, the critical importance of tremolo picking development, and why three-note-per-string patterns have become the gold standard for speed development. These spread fingerings create symmetrical patterns that allow both hands to find synchronicity at higher tempos than traditional scale positions permit.
Perhaps most valuable is our exploration of the subtle technical nuances—pick depth, pick weight, hand positioning, and guitar setup—that transform good technique into exceptional speed. These seemingly small details often make the difference between hitting a wall and breaking through to new levels of playing.
Ready to transform your approach to speed? This episode provides the roadmap that will change not just how you practice, but how you think about the mechanics of fast playing forever.
Be sure to watch for the video on the GuitarZoom YouTube channel to see these examples in action!!!
Links:
Check out the GuitarZoom Academy:
https://academy.guitarzoom.com/
- Steve’s Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/stinemus...
- GuitarZoom Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarz0...
- Songs Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarSo... .
Okay, so let's dive in specifically and talk about speed picking using what we call three note per string patterns. Okay, now, first of all, in order to do this, I need to just discuss a little bit with you issues that people have. Number one strength of fingers. Okay, and throughout the picking booster course, you're learning about legato and strengthening your fingers and stuff like that, and it is crucial Because if want to learn how to pick fast, always remind yourself that you're only as fast as your slowest element. So if you have a particular finger or a grouping of fingers that is always struggling, um, because they're not strong enough, or whatever it might be, that's going to be an issue and that's just the reality of it. Okay, it doesn't matter, you could pick super fast and that's great, but if this hand can't keep up, there's going to be a problem. Right, if this hand is super fast but this hand can't keep up, again that's going to be a problem. So you're always going to be as fast as the slowest elements. So independence and strength in your fingers is something that you want to make sure that you're working on, and there's a lot of really great legato exercises and things like that you can do to develop and maintain and enhance that strength. Okay, speed, obviously. Through that strength becomes the availability of being able to play faster, and we're going to talk about all kinds of different levels of fast Okay. But the other part is stamina being able to do something for a longer period of time, not just short bursts, although that's okay, but over time we want to develop the ability of being able to do something fast for a longer period of time, which we're going to talk about. And then we've got synchronization, okay, the ability of both hands being able to find that medium space in which they both can coexist and work together. Okay, and again, you can keep working on this and elevating it by understanding.
Steve:What is it that I need to increase ability, my skill set, right? Do I need to make my picking faster, cleaner, more articulate, dynamically, whatever it might be? Or is it that my fretting hand excuse me needs to develop some more strength through legato exercises, through finger independence, all of those kinds of things? What is it that I need? Because, in reality, when you're doing speed picking, you're mostly doing what we call three note per string patterns, which means you're dealing with one, two and four as a combination and one, three and four as a combination, and it's the one three and four that tends to give people the most problem. So, again, all the practice in the world of this can synchronize more, but ultimately what's going to really make a benefit is being able to isolate that problem and develop the strength and the speed and the stamina of said finger or groups of fingers, if that makes sense. And then a little bit different idea of an issue that someone might have as you get into this is going to be string changing, switching strings. So once you start developing this idea, being able to connect it to the next adjacent string, and so on as we keep going through it.
Steve:Okay, then, the other thing I wanna talk to you about before we get started here is mindset. So when you're trying to learn how to do this, you have to understand that you're gonna have great days and you're gonna have less than ideal days, and the most important thing is this understanding that you can work through those. But the days that aren't ideal, you're gonna have to work through those, but the days that aren't ideal, you're going to have to work through it. Not every day is a great day. Not every day is consistent. It's not like, every day you get better and better. It doesn't happen that way. You've got to be able to work through the ebb and flow of the psychology, of what happens in your mind when you have a great day and then the next day might not be quite as good, but the practice still needs to be consistent.
Steve:Okay, and I always try and tell people there's a difference between practicing to maintain and advanced practicing, or elevated time practicing to offer the ability to elevate Right. At the very least, we need to maintain and if you think about it, it's kind of like being a runner. Okay, I've been a runner my whole life. There's a difference between running every day to maintain and running because I'm preparing for a marathon. It's a different kind of thing. Everything about it, everything about the training is different and with speed picking we have to understand that there's all these small little nuances that we need to become aware of, which we're going to talk about. And then we need to develop all of these little nuances because if something's not clean or something's not clear or something's messy or, you know again, a finger combination is struggling or whatever, we need to be aware of those, identify those and then we need to isolate that and practice that so holistically, we can make the whole thing move forward.
Steve:But depending on the focus that you have, the availability of time that you have and all these sorts of things are also going to determine whether or not you're, at the very least, maintaining, so you can continue doing what you're doing, or you need to elevate and once you get to that elevation point again, you can decide whether it's time to maintain or whether you want to try and keep going. Oftentimes, as you keep trying to keep going, it requires more of your time, more of your concentration, right, all of those kind of things. That's how we get there. The next thing I want you to know is that there's a significant difference between practicing something slow. The next thing I want you to know is that there's a significant difference between practicing something slow and then practicing it fast. You might develop a particular way of being able to pick or finger or do whatever at a slower pace, and once you start moving that metronome up, everything changes, it morphs. The concept is still there, but the execution, the approach, might change drastically and you need to be okay with that. You don't want to just say to yourself well, that's the way I've always done it. That's fine. But that may not work when we move it into the realm as we keep moving faster and faster. So it's just again a mindset. You got to get used to being able to think about that.
Steve:And the other thing I want to mention too is the importance of warming up warming up your mind, warming up your body, getting yourself focused, that sort of thing before you really try and hit a practice regimen for the day. So for me, for instance, I do a pre-practice, which is the first thing I have to do when I get to the studio or when I start warming up or whatever you know at home cup of coffee, whatever it is I'm doing I have to get myself in the right mindset and I've got to get my fingers warmed up and all of those sorts of things before I really hit the training, if you will. And once I get there, you know, then it might be going great, it might not be going great, every day is different. But I have to go through a warm up routine of just getting myself organized. So as we go through these things, you're going to hear me keep talking about really trying to think about what you're doing, how you're doing, why you're doing it that way, and really become hyper aware of every nuance of what you're doing. Not just I'm going to do this as fast as humanly possible for five minutes and then move on to something else, but really becoming aware, because if you want to learn how to do this, you can, but we've got to constantly be doing a mop-up. We've got to clean up behind ourselves all the time. Is this getting better? Is this getting faster? Is this getting cleaner? How's the synchronicity going? We need to think about those things.
Steve:Now, some things to think about, to be mindful of as well, just to get you in the right place is. We've already talked about being clean, okay, well, clean can also mean deadening out the other strings right, keeping the string changes clean, all of these other elements as well that aren't just directly connected to the picking and the moving of the fingers, but making sure that everything sounds clean around the execution of what we're doing. Are the other strings being deadened? Are you getting unwanted noise from that stuff? Think about the pick angle at which you're playing, right, you want to think about where that pick is and again, I can't give you a right or wrong answer. You're either playing flat or you're turning in and turning the pick a little bit. Okay, we also have the availability of turning this way a little bit.
Steve:Now there's all kinds of things that we can learn about and read about of all these different specifics on pick angles, and I think that's wonderful. I'm not going to get all crazy with that stuff right now. What I want you to do is, when you start learning how to practice, the things we're going to talk about is I want you to explore pick angle and pick direction, okay, and start thinking about how does it work when you're on one string. What feels most comfortable when you start trying to connect to the next string that string connection, which is gonna be really important. How does it feel then? Do we need to readjust a little bit to make that smoother as we go across there? So those are things I want you to think about as we do this. The other thing is pick depth, not just the angle this way or the angle this way, but how far you're pushing the guitar pick into the string, where you might be doing some strumming and stuff and you're really digging in to get an aggressive sound, but when it comes to speed picking, you might need to learn how to just graze that string to get over it. So these are things we want to think about.
Steve:We also want to think about the guitar pick itself. The size of the guitar pick, right. The thickness of the guitar pick Do these things make a difference For me? I want a really sharp point on my guitar pick. Okay, not ridiculous, right, I don't need it to be like a pin, okay, I just need it to be sharp.
Steve:If it's really dull, if it's, you know, like a jazz style pick and it's really rounded on the edge, I'm not going to get any attack off that string, right, it's going to sound. However, it's not going to have that attack that I want. So I want the pick to be sharp. The point I want the pick to be heavy because I want to be in control of the pick and as it moves through the string. If the pick is really really, really, really light, for instance, every time I try and pick, the pick's going to bend and that's just going to take me more time trying to get through this guitar string. So the thicker that guitar pick becomes, the more the pick is forcing itself across that string and then I can decide with pick depth, how far in or out I need to be to get the attack that I'm looking for and the speed that.
Steve:I'm looking for speed, that I'm going to be. If I start pushing in too far, it's going to get stuck. If I'm using a really light pick, it's going to bend and I'm going to get stuck. So I have to think about those kind of things. I'm not going to tell you how big the pick needs to be. I'm not going to tell you how thick the pick needs to be. I need you to think about that and figure out what works best for you. Now I can give you recommendations of things, but ultimately you need to figure out what works best with your execution, with the way that you play.
Steve:So, finally, before we get started here, just be aware of every nuance. Okay, be aware of everything. Be aware of the way you're sitting, the way you're holding the guitar, the relaxed state of your body, from your neck on down. Are you focused? Are you thinking about something else? Right, are you trying too hard? Are you not finding that comfort zone?
Steve:Okay, we're going to talk about different levels of practice in terms of whether or not we're actually trying something just to hammer out as rough and raw as it is, hammering it out to start making some sort of connection. And then there's preciseness, clarity, right. That's a different practice than just hammering it out, trying to, you know, make something out of nothing and start developing it from a raw perspective, versus really refining it. Okay, versus practicing at incredibly fast speeds, as opposed to always starting down here and working our way up. We can actually learn how to start up here and work our way down. So there's lots of different ways that we can do that, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is you got to be honest with yourself. Okay, messy is messy, but messy can be cleaned up. Okay, we can refine that. So, be aware, be honest about your playing.
Steve:If you're struggling with something, find answers, find out why. Find out if it's okay right now that it's not as good as you want it to be, but you're on the right track. That's what you need to do, all right. So the first thing I would recommend is that you get used to what's called tremolo picking. Now, in the picking booster course, it does talk about this. All right, so you can always go back and review there too.
Steve:But the big thing with tremolo picking is you're just trying to isolate a string and you're trying to explore your palm, muting your pick, attack, pick angle, pick depth, all that kind of stuff. And you're not limited by what you're doing with your fretting hand, because it's not even part of the equation. So you're just trying to work on how does my neck feel, how does my shoulder feel, right, all the way down as I play, right? So I have an unlimited amount of time to just be hitting this string with an alternate picking approach down and up picking. Do I need more work on my alternate picking? Am I attacking the string both with the down and the up with the same kind of dynamic? Okay?
Steve:So, as much as you might think, well, you know, think to yourself. You know, I remember learning. Again, always remember there's a difference between renting and owning. Don't rent ideas when it comes to your skill level, your confidence. Don't rent it, you have to own it, okay. So when you're trying to learn something like this, don't say, oh, I've done alternate picking or I've done tremolo picking.
Steve:I want you to be honest with yourself and really dial in in your mind, in your body, your ability to be able to execute this technique of tremolo picking. See if I dig deeper, see how it gets thicker and maybe a little bit messier. Now I'm not saying that that can be bad. Depends on what I'm doing. But I do want to be aware that, depending on how deep the pick goes into the string, it changes the tone. Right, it makes it fatter as I dig deeper into it. Okay, which is gonna slow me down. It's gonna make each note instead of being this big, it's gonna make each note this big, so they might start getting really close to each other. If I back off, each note becomes thinner. Therefore, I can hear a little more space in between each one. I can also explore where I need to be, this direction as I play. Where do I need to be to get the best kind of sound that I'm looking for?
Steve:I want to be aware of that as I'm playing so tremolo picking, just grabbing your guitar throughout the day, whenever it might be, it doesn't have to. Again, you might need to warm up, as we talked about. Right, just grab the guitar and you start doing this, and it's not just how fast can I go? And then I'm done. Am I making a connection? Am I sensing any irregularities? Are my dynamics off a little bit? How does it feel? Am I loose? Am I tight?
Steve:You got to become aware of these hyper aware of these things. See, and that's a prime example as I slow down, the technique completely changes, my approach completely changes. I'm picking wide all this kind of stuff because I've got to play slower. When I'm playing faster, everything comes. It's not that the action isn't different. Of course I'm picking down and up, but the specifics of how I'm doing it changes drastically from playing super slow to playing super fast. And I need to become aware of that. If I'm not used to playing fast, I'm used to playing slower. I've got to get used to playing faster and the differences in feeling between doing it slower and doing it faster. So right now I'm not worried about a metronome, I'm not bringing that into the equation. Right now I'm just practicing in a raw state, I like to call it. I'm just trying to get used to how things feel. Now, a lot of that is going to develop your ability of being able to pick cleanly, accurately, quickly all of those kinds of things, Focusing on the things we are talking about, not just watching it as a Netflix video and spending two minutes and then going back to something else, but focusing, hyper-focusing, zooming in with a magnifying glass what is working, what isn't working, what feels good, what doesn't feel good, what sounds good, what doesn't sound good Small, tiny, minor adjustments that you could do to develop that speed picking, that tremolo picking the other part is legato exercises and, again, between the picking booster and the technique course and all these different kinds of things that you can do that we have here.
Steve:You've got to develop those. If you're struggling with your third and your pinky, which most people do, you need to work on that and I'm not going to spend any time talking about it right now because you can study the rest of this picking booster course has got stuff like that in there. But you need to be aware because most people struggle with these two fingers. Well, let's be honest, if you struggle with these two fingers in any level, right, that's as fast as you're going to get. That's going to be your limitation, that's your bottleneck. So, developing this is developing independence in certain areas and then, as you continue to do that, you start trying to bring them together. But they're still only going to be as fast as whatever your slowest issue is, whatever the slowest element is. So you need to keep that in mind.
Steve:So there's not a day that goes by I don't work on picking and I don't work on most certainly work on legato stuff with my fingers, keeping them strong, keeping them fast, working on the independence. All of those kinds of things are absolutely crucial. All right, so we're going to do a little practice that I call getting your ya-ya's out, and there's a million different ways that you can do this. This is a raw practice to see where things are before we start moving into the actual rudimentary elements of the three note per string stuff. So the first thing I would do, for instance, is I would take and create a four note per string pattern. So I might do something like this where I go to let's just say I go to the seventh fret of the fourth string.
Steve:I'm going to turn off my reverb.
Steve:Now what I'm trying to do is I'm not going Because it's just chaos. Okay, what I'm doing is a group of four, and then I'm stopping and then doing a group of four again, and then I'm stopping and doing a group of four. In that, stopping and doing another group of four. It doesn't need to become a repetitive pattern. Rhythmically, we as musicians are always drawn to that. The problem here is I'm not focusing on that. What I'm focusing on is the execution, in a raw sense, of these four notes, and what I want to really think about is how are they connecting? How does it sound, how does it feel Now, as I'm doing this? This was crazy to me because when I was younger, I'd never even thought about this. It wasn't until I'm older. I got older.
Steve:But when you're practicing this, there are times when you might need to take, for instance, your picking hand and slow it down just a hair to find that synchronization, even though your picking hand can go faster and you keep wanting this to catch up and to do the speed of your picking hand. There are times that you just have to slow down your picking hand a little bit to find that synchronicity and then you go oh, there, it is right and, yeah, I want to be faster. I want to get that. Oh yeah, absolutely. But I need to find that Now, in practicing what I'm doing right now, I want to do this in a very raw get your ya-ya's out. I want to do it in a really raw way Because what I want to come to the surface here is where are the limitations that I'm experiencing and I'm hearing, and I'm being honest about this with myself. So, as I'm doing this, for instance, I'll do the best I can with this. So, let's say, I was doing this and I'm playing and I go uh, okay, but what I actually wind up hearing is that which happens a lot to guitar players so the third finger is being too slow and so, ultimately, when I speed this up, you're not hearing this finger. You're hearing and you become aware of that. Now you have two choices Either you can just slide by that and go I just want to impress my friends or you can say, boy, there's a problem there which is going to lead to a bigger problem down the road, so I should probably fix this, okay. So that's where you start trying to figure out well, what do I need to do? Do I need to do more legato exercises to develop that. And of course, I'm going to keep doing this raw practice because I want to keep trying to get that third finger to make contact before the pinky comes in, right. I'm not using a metronome, I'm raw practicing getting my ya-ya's out right and I'm just trying to get this to line up. Do I need to relax a little bit with my picking hand? Do I need to play softer or move the pick out a little bit? Or what do I need to do? Or slow down or whatever? You'll notice I'm palm muting because I like to be able to hear everything. If I go, sometimes it gets a little noisy, depends on what strings I'm on, but sometimes I like to palm mute it.
Steve:Okay, now all of this is also leading to the discussion of the comfortability. We already talked about the pick, but we also need to talk about the comfortability of the guitar, especially the guitar neck and the strings, and it's uber important when you're playing and it doesn't matter what style of music you like to play. Comfortable guitar obviously would be very important. If you're a marathoner and you're wearing shoes that are three sizes too small for you, that's not going to work If you're wearing shoes that are three sizes too big for you, that's not going to work right. You've got to find the right fit, and so you know all the way around with guitar playing.
Steve:But certainly when you're practicing stuff like this, you need to make sure that that guitar neck feels good, those guitar strings feel good, the guitar is set up properly for your kind of playing, your attack. All of those things make a difference. You know, if my strings are going to be this far away from the neck, it's going to be really hard to do this. Logically, if the strings are closer to the neck, it's going to be easier for me to do this. Now, if they get too close, I might run into issues because maybe I'm a really heavy-handed player and I need to have those strings, you know, a little bit further away. Okay, listen, that's fine. You need to find what works for you, just like being heavy-handed. Some people are really heavy-handed when they play and some people are really gentle when they play. There's not one that's better than the other. You know, steve Ray Vaughan was very heavy-handed. Joe Cetriani is not.
Steve:It's not right or wrong or black and white, it's what are you? What do you need to do. What do you want to do? And how do you adjust the guitar to fit who you are? Those are things that you need to ask yourself.
Steve:All right, so, moving back into the four note thing. So I'm becoming aware of my shortcomings and what's working. I've got my guitar tone dialed in, I got my guitar, everything's feeling good. So here I am, doing the thing. It doesn't matter what string, it doesn't matter what fret. As a matter of fact, I do want to try this on different strings, because I might be able to hear some of those inconsistencies better on a higher register or a higher string or something you know. So it's again. It's not always how fast I'm going, it's. Can these two meet in the middle? Can they find each other and work this out? And what are the problems?
Steve:Now, once you've got that kind of developed, the next thing I would strongly start doing is start working on connecting to the next string. This is profound. So it's not just oh, we're going to do it on two strings. Yeah, we are, but the movement of the pick from one string to the next is a big hang up for guitar players because it takes time to get used to. When you're on one string, everything's small. When you need to move to another string, you gotta connect, you gotta shift down. So there's a larger motion with your hand and with the pick to connect to the next string.
Steve:So I don't want to worry about connecting to the next string until I've got my ya-ya's worked out on these first four notes. I've got to work on that. Being honest, no, that's not good enough. That's really messy. I've got to try and figure out why it's messy. This hand's going too fast, this hand's struggling with whatever. The pick is really noisy when I'm picking. It's really messy. I have way too much distortion on my amplifier. I have way too much distortion on my amplifier, whatever it might be. We need to work these out Because as we keep moving toward the actual techniques of speed picking, you know the skill set that we need to do that. We've already worked out these other problems by the time we get there. Otherwise we're gonna get there and we're still gonna have the same problems.
Steve:Okay, so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move in, and I'm aware that I might need to slow down a little bit, because now I'm going to make a connection. So because of this one little bump, this one little change. It changes everything about my practice. When I was just doing four, it felt a certain way. Now I've got to do four plus one, and that plus one is huge because it's this new movement to the next string. Are my four still together? Are they becoming loose? Is it getting muddy? Right, and that's okay, because we're getting our ya-ya's out Again as we start adding this new plus one, this new string in. We're going to start getting used to being able to move up into that.
Steve:So we might start losing these back four a little bit because we're focusing on this. That's okay, but we are going to have to come back and clean this up. So what do we need to do? If we're trying to do all of this way too fast? We shouldn't be trying to make a connection. We should be back on these first four and developing that.
Steve:And if I'm really struggling with a certain finger, I need to back up and really try and work on that. And that is the reality of playing guitar. That's what it is okay. Be okay with it, actually embrace it, because that's how you, that's how you get better at it. You understand the problem and now I'm working on fixing the. Okay, I can still do all these other things in between, but that's going to be the problem. That's what I got to work on.
Steve:So as I do this now I got my four plus one Are all the other strings being quiet? Am I keeping all of that stuff dead? So now I get there and now I could do. But I'm coming from this awkward down that came from the string before the 4 plus 1. So I'm going to have to get used to being able to do four plus one, which connects to the next four. So there's going to be that big shift from string to string that I've got to get used to.
Steve:And again, that's what players miss. They just try and work on this string and then they expect that they can play it across all these other strings. No, you've got to get used to the awkwardness of connecting to the new string and that weird jump that happens in between. And that's okay, there's no hurry, this is what we got to work on. So I've got four, I've got four plus one, and then I've got four plus one that connects to the four. Right, that's what it is. So I've got to work my way back and figure out where the problem is, and then work my way forward again. That's what I gotta keep trying to work on. Okay, so no hurry, I can do this slow, I can do it fast, right, however, it is to try and work these bugs out, but that's what I gotta focus on. So there's the connection.
Steve:To that string, right. And then when I got my 4 plus 4, the 4 plus 1 plus 4. So there's that big jump in there, right there, big jumping. So a lot of times what you're doing is you're just ironing things out. You're just ironing it out. It's. It's rough, hey, it's okay, it's tuesday, right, or whatever. It's rough, hey, it's okay, it's 8 am the morning, whatever. This is.
Steve:What warm-up is is we're just ironing things out, we're just ironing it out. If we do this for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and we're aware and we're working and we're concentrating, we're going to iron it out. That's what we're doing. Okay, that's okay. You could talk to any shredder out there, john Petrucci, and he's going to tell you he does warm-ups Right.
Steve:You've got to get yourself synchronized, your brain, your hands, and some days suck more than others and that's the way it goes, right. But the more you're aware of all of this, the more progress you can make. Now I call that revving like. What you're doing is you're starting like, because people always try and target all six strings and then moving all over the fretboard, which is the worst thing you can do. If you can't play four notes on a string. How are are you going to do all the rest of this If you can't do four plus one? How are you going to do all the rest of this If you can't do four plus one? Connecting to the four part right, two strings, how are you going to connect to the next one and the next one, and the next one and the next one? You're not. It's just going to wind up being a mess.
Steve:Now, as I said before, when it's a mess, it can be cleaned. And that's the crazy thing about speed picking is that it's okay if we're kind of starting from the top side, the messy side, and we keep refining downward, as opposed to the traditional mentality is always we start slow and we work our way up to keep things clean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great, we want to do that. But there's nothing wrong with starting up here and then just cleaning things as we move down too. That's okay, as long as we're cleaning, as long as we're getting things better.
Steve:Like you got to keep just dialing it in, dialing it in, dialing it in. You know what feels awkward. Is there too much distortion? You know you got to slow this hand out a little bit, you know. Whatever Do I need to go back and just do some legato stuff for a while to get my hand in the game, because I'm really struggling today? That's the reality of this. So working with getting your ya-ya's out in a group of four is a really great place to start.
Steve:All right, so now let's start looking at three note per string, which is what people tend to use when they're trying to learn how to speed pick. Okay, we use what's called spread fingerings. So let's explain that for a second. When you're playing, for instance, pentatonic, you're dealing with two note per string pattern, which is great, and again, we can learn how to play those fast too. But where things really start taking off is when you start playing three notes on a string, like a diatonic scale. Now, if you were playing what I refer to as a closed position diatonic scale, you'd be playing something like one, three, four, one, three, four, one, three, and then we we back up and do one, two, four. You know one, two, four, one, three, four. So there's some, there's some movement in there, and then we also have some strings that might not have three notes on them.
Steve:So somewhere along the line, somebody started creating this thing called a spread fingering, which is where we play three notes on every string, so we can start developing consistency with the guitar pick and anticipate consistency with the fretting hand, because we're always using the same group of fingers. We're always using one, two and four, or one, three and four. Why? Well, because you're not going to be using one, two and three. That would give you like a you know a bluesy kind of thing or two, three and four, which would be the worst finger combination on the planet. Right, that's not what we're doing. We're using one, three, four and one, two, four, which are the common things that we see.
Steve:So we develop our positions of the fretboard, of the scale, and in a little bit different way. So, for instance, instead of playing, let's just start with something like G major or E minor Same thing, right, if you know your theory. So if I was playing G major, I might do this, right. So I'm playing two notes on this string, three notes on this string, three notes on this string. But if I moved it into a spread fingering, I'd be doing three, five, seven, three, five, seven. So there's synchronicity there. You see, it's the same thing twice. Three, five, seven, three, five, seven.
Steve:Now we call it a spread fingering because I'm playing three, five and seven. It's wider than you might be used to Three, five and seven. Now the struggle you're going to have, if you've never done this before, is whether or not you should be using three with your first finger, five with your ring finger and then seven with your pinky. Now, most people don't do it that way because the stretch between these two fingers is a lot smaller, right, where, if I use my one and three or one to two like this okay, I've got a wider spread and then I've got my pinky Again. It might feel awkward at first because you've never done that before, but I can't tell you which way you have to do it. I'll do it, you know. However, I need to as I'm moving across the fretboard, but if I have my choice, I would be using one, two and four to play that Because the spread, the distance between the fingers, becomes easier if I do Now, in order to do the spread fingering, of course my neck needs to be up a little bit, my wrist needs to be down, like I might need to rethink the way I'm doing this.
Steve:I can't be in a blues, you know stance like this with my thumb over the top. There's no way I'm going to be able to reach that. I got to come down and get that wide reach going. So even that needs to be a topic of discussion, as needed in the placement of the hand properly. Now I don't want to spend an hour talking about that, but I want you to be aware of that because if you've never done that before, that needs some getting used to. So now I've got my G major.
Steve:Instead of doing this, what I'm now doing is this Same notes, but I'm playing 3-5-7-3-5-7. Then I'm going to do the next octave. It would be 4-5-7-4-5-7. So again there's another symmetrical pattern. And then 5-7-8, 5-7-8. So again another symmetrical pattern. So I can get used to not only visualizing the symmetry but the comfortability of playing symmetrically, so I can make things faster.
Steve:Also, because there's three notes on every single string, the pick is going to want to do the same thing over and over and over. It's just going down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, all the way through. Now, of course, the difference would be is that if I was doing this slow motion, I'd be going down, up, down, up, down, up. So every other string starts with an upstroke, because I'm going down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. So I'm training the hand just to do this.
Steve:And the reason that that's beneficial is because we're not always starting. We don't always know if we're starting at a group of three or wherever it might be, or what string or what fret or all these kinds of things. We're just trying to train the guitar pick to just do this, just like when we strum the guitar. We're just trying to train it to do this. We're not trying to train it to do this and then this and then this and all these other things. We're just training it to go.
Steve:I'm running a hundred yard dash. I'm just moving my legs left and right. You know, left leg, right leg as fast as I possibly can to get from point A to point B. I'm not trying to hop and jump and skip and all these other things in between, because it's just going to slow me down. That's what you're learning.
Steve:How to do is just develop this raw element of being able to push through. That's the way this works. So you've got spread fingering and the technique involved in being able to execute that, the comfortability of where your guitar neck needs to be, all that kind of stuff. And you've got the understanding of the reason why you're doing that is to create a common style movement with your fingers, this symmetry that happens and the availability for the guitar pick just to keep moving along, just alternate picking the entire time. But if you dig a little deeper into that, you recognize that if you were really doing this across the fretboard you'd be doing groups of two strings Down up, down up.
Steve:Down up is a group of six. It's two groups of three right With a plus one in between, that connection that we were talking about before with the four notes. Only now we're doing three notes. So the big difference here is that when I do that connection to the next string it's happening on an up strum Right Addams Family. That's what it is. So what we want to do in the next section is we're going to isolate exactly that and start trying to get used to that.
