Hi all,
I am trying to improve my guitar picking speed and ultimately see if I can get somewhere with a tune or two!
Currently looking at the initial steps for Gordon Lightfoot Early morning rain similar to the cover version done as below:
I will see how it goes and let you know:
As Oldswanner would advise slow and steady is the key but it can be frustrating and painful to get anywhere.
Welcome Richard. Busy day but got here in the end! I've got a version of the intro here which shouldn't present anything too demanding (other than some solid "Million Pound Challenge" style practice!) and should offer a foot in the door to what's going on throughout! Both lines are played with the little finger holding down the top E string at fret 3 (giving us a 4 finger C chord) ready to be picked at the end of line 2.
Here's a sheet you can print off and track progress with, towards our target speed (180 bpm and higher!).
What do you make of it?
A good session this afternoon grinding through the mechanics of the two lines I'm sure you'll agree (😁) and here is the outcome:
There shouldn't be any issue in quickly bringing the 2 lines together up to the speed of the weaker of the pair (80bpm). Your challenge is to post that improvement here, in bpm or even better, in video form!
well, currently line 1 on its own is 145bpm and line 2 on its own is 90bpm.
both lines 55bpm.
Sounds good ... should still be clear headroom to quickly bring the pair together up to 90bpm! We can dig into it on Monday if you're still keen to nail this one. :)
As I know you're a reluctant poster I'll share the latest scores here following our session on Monday:
I'm confident a big part of that improvement is down to the work we did using one of my favourite angles of attack as shown here:
This approach allows us to easily see which half of something is the weaker and to focus on that. In addition, since we're dealing with a smaller section we can generally improve faster than when tackling the larger construct. "2nd Half into 1st" still has a little catching up to do and I'd bet that once it's also up to 160bpm then "1st Half into 2nd" will have improved by default! Target speed is in sight!