• Wait, so you're saying that master shredders don't even know how they play so fast?
• If this is so important, why haven't I heard about anything like this before?
• I don't buy it. There are no secrets. The only way to develop great technique is by practicing for years with a metronome.
• Ok, that's not what I meant. What I meant is that there is no short cut for playing slowly and cleanly and building up your speed gradually over time.
• Then why does metronome practice produce results for some people?
• So metronomes suck then.
• Ok fine. What is the code?

Yes. And if you find that hard to believe, let's talk about baseball. A New York Times article on December 29, 2004, discussing the potential trade of all-star pitcher Randy Johnson to the Yankees, had this to say about the development of Johnson's pitching technique: When you can throw a ball 95mph, it's just not always possible to know what your various body parts are doing during the split second between wind-up and release. This is why pro pitchers employ a small army of pitching coaches to continually monitor and refine what they call pitching mechanics -- what musicians would call form. Similarly, a good deal of what master musicians do, they do instinctively. The fact that they may be unaware of certain aspects of their form is only reasonable given the speeds they achieve. For example, Rusty Cooley can play literally 15-20 notes per second completely clean, across the strings, using alternate picking. That's .05-.07 of a second per note. Not a whole lot of time. You can put your face a few inches from his picking hand, as I've done, and with the naked eye literally all you'll see is a blur. After stepping through his licks hundreds of times with high-speed video, we both discovered, unquestionably, that there are motions he's making that he was unaware of previously.


In traditional music pedagogy there's this weird macho culture of not questioning what your teacher tells you, even when it's wrong. If you can't play it, then it's your fault, and you need to practice more. There is also an odd reverse psychology where students will staunchly defend traditional teachings have not actually worked for them. I think this is because, at some level, they're afraid that the hours they've invested in a particular practice regime might have been wasted. The internet only multiplies these effects. As a result, bad advice is very rarely tested and corrected. Everyone is left out in the cold except the athletic geniuses, who have that magical ability to figure out complex biomechanical things on their own, even without clear instruction. It's more than a little unfair to expect that of the rest of us. But just because you and I may not be one of these rare unicorns doesn't mean we can't learn by copying what they do. It takes a Newton to discover calculus, and a smart high school kid to pass a test on it.


If it were really that straightforward, don't you think there'd be more Michael Angelos running around? A couple of things should stick out in your mind immediately as red flags:

• Number one is the simple fact that a disproportionately large number of people struggle with the guitar compared to other instruments. Why should legions of dedicated musicians try and fail to develop good picking technique? Can you think of any other popular musical instrument with this kind of limitation? Don't junior high school kids play Mozart on the piano all the time? And don't high school students play Chopin? More generally, does it make any sense that it should take years of additional practice for an experienced rock guitarist to learn to play a simple scale at high speed with picking? This an elementary exercise on other instruments.
• Consider also the issue of the amount of practice time that is supposedly required. It's generally accepted that it takes years to develop accurate picking technique. This sounds logical, were it not for the fact that most famous shredders claim to have developed their techniques quickly rather than slowly. Michael Angelo explains in this forum post that his picking technique developed rapidly after a chance meeting:
  I didn't even know what Alternate picking was. I still have tapes of my playing back then. It was legato, hammer and pull, rapid fire blues riffs. Here is when I changed- I was 15, a Sophomore in High school and every bit the little high school rock star. I was introduced to a guitarist that was exactly my age from a different high school at a party one night. He had taken lessons with Larry Coryell and picked every note using distortion. He played with his band that night and was so incredibly fast and clean. I had never heard anything like it. Instead of being an egomaniac or jealous of him, we talked for a while and I got up on stage and jammed. He couldn't believe that I could keep up with him using a legato style. We became best friends and learned from each other. We would sit at his parents house or my parents house and practice in the living room-not even talking to each other. Just practicing. I worked on Alternate picking for 2 years. I became so good at it that I completely overshadowed my friend.
  In other words, two years from zero to full maturity. Paul Gilbert is on record in an interview with GuitarOne magazine as having made the initial strides in a matter of days. His story is nearly identical to Mike's:
  The right hand picking stuff did not come naturally to me. I'd played for about seven or eight years and really had no significant picking technique, it was all a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs. And what it took was learning to use the metronome - slowing a repeating [passage] down to such a speed where I could do it perfectly, then slowly speeding it up. And it was really inspiring to see that work. I learned a real simple, six-note picking lick on one string, and within a couple weeks I could play it really fast. And the improvement was quick enough where it was exciting for me - knowing that one day I could play it at this speed, and the next day I could play it faster. And I could feel it in my hands; the confidence and authority was building up.
  The fact is, when asked to describe the evolution of their technique, most accomplished players describe a short period of intense study that leads to rapid technical development. They do not describe a protracted period of years during which their technique develops in fits and starts. If we account for differences in natural ability, we'd expect to see evidence of so-called "average" players achieving similar levels of picking skill over longer periods of time. Instead, what we find is a pronounced divide between those with technique and those without. Those with technique appear to learn it relatively quickly, while those without tend to practice for longer periods of time and simply give up. Is the first group infinitely more talented than the second, or are they simply onto something?
• Finally, consider the topic of metronome usage. How many people do you really know who have experienced success with the brute-force method of piling on the metronome hours? Anyone? Of those who do claim results, are they actually clean, accurate players? Or are they simply playing fast with mistakes? The ratio of metronome users to metronome success stories is simply not convincing. In the Paul Gilbert example above, note that he cites performance increases daily, not over the course of an entire playing career. If metronome usage were really powerful enough as a learning tool to produce results in two weeks, Paul would not be the only one with this experience. In fact, many fast players have never even used metronomes -- Rusty Cooley, for example. This suggests that the metronome itself, while a useful tool, is not the linch pin of fast technique. Think about it: Is your speedometer really the root of your fast driving ability? Or is it the application of specific shifting, braking, and steering techniques that allow you to negotiate difficult turns without wiping out? When I took the introductory open-wheel racing course at Skip Barber Racing School, the cars didn't even have speedometers. Sure, we can all drive fast in a straight line. And we can all play a tremolo on one string. But can you play cleanly with a pick across the strings at high speed? That's where specific techniques come into play. The myth of the metronome has been repeated as fact by decades of guitarists at this point, but that doesn't make it true.

Going back to the driving analogy, this is kind of like thinking, well, if I drive around enough, starting out slow, and inching up the speedometer a little bit each day, I'll eventually be fast enough to win Daytona. While there's a kernel of truth to this, it's obviously not the whole story. Of course you should start slowly and get faster as your ability improves. But this begs the question of how. Again, we can all drive fast in a straight line, but we'll fail miserably on a racetrack without a battery of specialized techniques adapted to high-speed driving. Likewise, your tremolo may be in good shape, but translating that to speed across the strings is another story. Put another way, it's not the speed so much as the accuracy. Most of us already move our hands plenty fast enough to be impressive players. The worst thing about the whole "start slow, get faster" mantra is not that it's incorrect, but that it's incomplete. It masquerades as common sense, when in reality it's more of a half-truth.


You know that saying about an infinite number of typing monkeys eventually producing all the works of Shakespeare? If you tell a few million people to practice something a few million times, odds are good that at least some of them will hit upon super efficient ways of doing so. Maybe they got lucky. Or maybe, as is probably the case with master shredders, they have a certain kinesthetic genius that allows them to develop effective ways of moving that aren't apparent to average folk like you and me. In either case, the metronome is simply the catalyst.


Hardly. Playing along with a solid rhythm source is the best way to develop your sense of timing. In Paul Gilbert's third instructional video, Terrifying Guitar Trip, Paul speaks specifically about how much his timing improved by playing with a good drummer. For many of us, the metronomes we used were the songs we played along with as we were learning. Bedroom shredders unite!


You'll have to stay tuned for the answer to that one. In the mean time, I'll be adding some lessons to the site which will presage bits and pieces of the movie in their level of detail and accuracy.