You know, when I hear Steve Vai say, if you want to be successful, focus on your strength, I’m really tempted to just dump bothering with sweep picking and focus on something else like string skipping. Heck that’s what Paul Gilbert does and it serves him pretty well. Though he has an advantage over me: humongous fingers, so that’s that argument out of the window. In all seriousness, I don’t really know what my strengths are. Sure there are some types of techniques I can practice more easily than others but that’s not to say that it’s because I’m better at that technique than this technique, and if you want to be as wide a portfolio in your fingers as you need to play that music that’s dying to come out, you have to get all the trump cards.
As it happens, I’m getting a pretty good feeling about using Guitar Pro as an aide to my routine. Yesterday, I did an arpeggios exercise and it went down pretty well. This may be because it involved barring the cords with the ring finger which is somehow easier than using the index finger the way I was struggling a couple of weeks back. But really having this loop constantly going that you can leave at any time and rejoin when you’re ready is just what I needed.
In fact, I’m sure I spend more time on one particular tempo than I did when using the track on the CD. In a way that means more time spent on technique practice but in essence this could be anything. I could decide to practice an AC/DC riff and just loop it until I get it, don’t worry, I won’t shook you all night long just yet 😉 Now today’s dreaded sweep picking exercise went down much better than I feared. Sure I didn’t get past 56bpm but I wasn’t expecting to even get that fast considering I was going for 8 groups of sextuplets within 2 bars. That’s 48 notes to play in total, not impossible obviously but one needs to have a pretty good grasp of the technique to pull that off. What I did notice though is new sore areas on my finger tips due to repeated play, almost as if it forces me to use an area of my finger I wasn’t really using before. Or you know, it could just be the repetition that was reaching its break point.
The point though is that I was feeling more confident and prepared to play that sweep picking exercise and I could even afford the luxury of focusing on not letting the notes ring too much. Ironically I noticed I was playing the F# diminished arpeggio wrong all those weeks, oops, but it took me almost no time to re-adjust which is telling me something.
I don’t know, maybe I’m having too high hopes but for now I’m enjoying the apparent progress 😀