Current mood:	pleased
Current music:	dragonforce

Guitar update
I haven't been posting a whole lot about guitar recently, mostly because I haven't been playing a whole lot. I gotta say one thing though, having guitars out in the open occupying chairs and shit helps tremendously; sometimes you walk past, just pick it up and start playing.

Working on Alter Aeon has been consuming a lot of my time, which explains a good chunk of the lack of practice. But another, more critical factor reigns supreme:

I suck.

Ok, so I always knew that, and of course it's going to be a difficult process. But I've been having trouble with two things in particular, and progress on them is slow. To make things worse, they require growing new neurons, which is a multi-month process. No point in blowing my brains out over it when the hardware isn't finished yet.

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The first problem is the age-old 'raw picking speed' issue. My high speed picking target is around 225, though in order to do that reliably I'll probably have to train to 240 or so. This is 240 bpm quarter notes, each divided into four sixteenths; in short 16 notes per second. The actual picking rate is only 8 per second though, as you get one note on the down stroke and one on the up stroke.

This really isn't unreasonable. A lot of speed metal guitarists can do this without any real difficulty, you just have to grow the appropriate nerves and feedback loops in your body to make it happen. If you try it yourself, you'll find that by default, without any real training at all, you can probably do 120 bpm. Just look at a clock and try tapping a table four times per second.

Over the last year and a half, I did manage to break through that default 120 or so bpm and get into the lower 200 range. The big problem however is that in doing so, my technique is awful, and I'm using the wrong muscles to trigger it. Instead of using my wrist, which results in short, quick and exact movements, I switch to using my bicep and tricep to move the entire forearm. This happens automatically above certain speeds, and it's VERY hard to stop. You tell your wrist to go faster, and when it doesn't respond the rest of your arm jumps in and says "Let me help!" It's incredibly difficult to separate the two.

I have been making slow progress though. A couple of months ago, I noticed that my wrist and forearm were beginning to 'unlock' from each other, where I could request certain actions from the wrist and not trigger the forearm. I've been working on that and it's been slowly improving. I believe at my current rate, I should be able to get the proper behaviour fine tuned in a year or two.

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The other problem is related to speed of both fingerings and picking. While the twitch reflex is around 120, the base speed at which I can do arbitrary patterns seems to be around 80 to 90. Probably as a result of my previous violin and piano training, I seem to be able to play most anything at 80 pretty easily; but going above that, pretty much everything falls apart. A few things are harder than others, but in general just about every complex pattern falls apart between 70 and 100.

While I do have some trouble with fingerings at this rate, I'd say 75% of the problem -still- remains with the picking hand. This might be a side effect of being left handed and again having played violin; the left hand is stronger and is already used to playing strings. Of course it would have an easier time than all the brand new stuff the right hand is trying to learn.

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That's my current status. I've been pushing both problems fairly aggressively when I play, and I've been avoiding the higher rate material that I know reinforces bad behaviour.

On the plus side, I've been making progress in other areas. My sweep picking has come up to around 90 for a couple of patterns. I've also been able to play the solo for Quiet Riot's "come on feel the noise" at over 100, though at 108 and 112 it breaks down horribly (target is 155). That's up from the low 90's not that long ago.

I also noticed a huge improvement in power chords today, which spurred me to post this. Multi-step movements across strings were flowing very quickly and easily, and I'm improving on various quick transitions. My 'think the chord and it plays' skill is improving, as well as being able to shift up and down the neck without trouble and even changing the chord patterns on the fly. It'll be a while before I can play most of the In Flames chord patterns though, as they're substantially more complex than most heavy metal.

One final note - due to string stretching (I haven't changed strings in over a year), I ended up downtuning the entire guitar a half step rather than unlock the nut and retune it properly. I think this was responsible for a good chunk of my improvement on 'thinking to play' power chords; nothing is where it used to be anymore, and you just adjust to it.

This downtuning also greatly improves some songs, largely because a lot of bands downtune half a step anyway. A number of Finntroll songs now have a good, meaty low E-flat open chord now, instead of some wimpy shit up on sixth fret A. Foersvinn Du Som Lyser is especially nice, in that the dissonant low E-flat chord is easy to play and just sounds right. I never did figure out how to make it not sound stupid when tuned properly.