Your Speed

[TheWannabeMusician]

Well, since this topic is pretty much a must for a shred forum, and since this forum deserves a lot more activity, I thought this might be nice.

I guess the title is self-explanatory (proper english?)

Anyways, I'm at about 180 BPM 16th notes on the really easy exersices, designed soley for building speed
The more difficult ones are 150 (sweep picking and such) to about 170.

I'm still nowhere near my goal, but personally I rejoice in the fact I finally got out of the speed rut that lasted over a year. Which sucked.

So how about you guys?

[ONEbpm]

Well,

I can't read standard notation, so I don't think in terms of 16th notes. The thing I've practiced the most is probably outside picking (a la Paul Gilbert). It's at about 5:00...



I did the first example only and didn't double or tripple the string crossing before I altered it slightly. Let's say we are in 5th position playing A natural minor. So if I started on the B string at the fifth fret, it would be Bstring= E-F-G Estring A, Bstring G-F-E....then Bstring= E-F-G EstringB, Bstring G-F-E Then Bstring= E-F-G Estring C, Bstring G-F-E. Then I removed the middle part and only worked with my index finger and pinky because it's more difficult to play the E and B stings one after another on the same fret using outside picking. I usually do this counting one lick as two triplets at 154-166-174BPM. I can go faster, but the disciple that I use in practice only allows me to change timing or exercises once a month. After a month at a new speed, I can usually cruise with no issues. After doing this for at least a year, I started adding on differnt patterns.

Since I started doing this, I've added a decending sweep pattern followed by a descending alternate inside picking staggered pattern, followed by an ascending three note per string picking pattern. That pretty much covers a lot of different things.

For sweep picking, I don't practice arpegios too much...everyone does that. I practice three note per string sweeping scales (from the low E to the high E and back) using all six fingering combinations (2-3-1,2-1-3,1-3-2,3-1-2,3-2-1,1-2-3) I do this in triplets at 140BPM. Any more than that for me and it starts to get sloppy because it takes a while to do the whole exercise. When I first started doing this, I fould that going Low E to High E was a lot more difficult to do in time than the ride back. So, like the Paul Gilbert lick, I created another lick that does some outside picking descending from the high E and then sweeping back up from the low.