More guitar help - fingering difficulties

Nitefly

Nitefly

Nitefly

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As posted elsewhere, but I'm looking for a quick response.

This is a question about Racer X shred classic Scarified.

As you know, the bach section features a load of pull offs and picking all over the d to high e strings. For the first bar, the first two notes at a picked 18th fret on the g string to 14th fret - a move that is obviously done with the little pinky finger and first finger. The shape is repeated for the second bar. However, the 'shape' changes on the third bar to one that is used for the majority of the section. The third bar starts with a pull of on the g-string 16th-13th frets. However, is the 13th fret held with your first or second finger? It's a lot easier to use your first finger on the 13th fret initially, but then you would have to move your hand to get the 12 fret on the B string.

I've always used my first finger, but I think at speed, it would be cleaner if I used my middle finger. Thoughts? What do you use?

To help make sense of this, here is the offending bit:

scaryr.png


As you need to use your first finger on the 12th fret B-string, should you use your middle finger for the 13th fret g-string?

Also, I always pick the last section of notes and never bother with that last pull off as noted by the curved line in that tab. What do you do?
Click to expand...

Thanks.
 
I'd imagine even Paul with his giant spaceship sized hands would just use position shifts, it's easier to move the same shape around at speed than try and think of clever ways to finger it, and if you watch a load of cover vids on YouTube I imagine you'd see people doing it that way as well.
 
Thanks for your reply :)

Yeah, I think he is shifting his first finger around a lot. You can see him doing it here from 0.48:


Since my hands are tiny (:o) I was just wondering what everyone else did.

Plus is doesn't help that I suck brutally at guitar. Don't think I've ever got this song clean above 110bpm and even then I was probably kidding myself :D

EDIT - phwaaa those end arpeggios are sick *throws guitar in the bin*
 
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Michael Romeo has tiny hands and watch him fly, it's just practice.*


*I believe a few of the things to drill into your hands, other than the eternal maxim of 'play it slowly till it's perfect, then speed up a bit, repeat', are (if you didn't know already):

Teach your fingers to have a default position hovering over the fretboard
Do a chromatic 12-13-14-15 type thing with all four fingers, only ever having one finger on the fretboard at any one time, and see if they fingers play these notes and return to that default position, or tend to fly upwards. Pinky is especially guilty for doing this. Think of your digits as the hammers on a piano.

I'm sure it's not just for iPhone, but the Guitar Toolkit app is really useful (metronome).

'Find' John Petrucci's Rock Discipline (pdf/guitar pro file + video) online, as I'm not sure you can get the DVD these days. I think Google Videos still has the whole thing up. Might want to save that. Then there's the book/CD Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar by Troy Stetina, another famous book.

Practice stuff with a clean tone at lowish volume. So easy to pick/fret harder than necessary when playing loud/distorted. Need light touch for this sort of stuff.
 
ahh the good old pull-offs, i personally would start of slow then speed up.

one thing i learnt is playing a riff im trying to learn, leave it for 10 mins by playing something else then come back to it. problem you have is playing the riff over and over 100 times you actually begin to make more mistakes, so it's better to play the riff 2 or 3 times, play something else then come back to it.

The main reason for this is that you want to keep your mind exploring new things, also it will become frustrating ovetime if you cant play it at first, the other thing i learnt about guitar playing is always try out unique things even if they sound rubbish, that way you will have better mechanics of what each note sounds like and what string/fret to play.
 
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boxman2000 said:
+1 for John Petrucci's Rock Discipline - great advice on improving your scale work!
Click to expand...

And more importantly, warm-up/downs, improving your reach/stretch, using all four fingers and hand synchronisation. It's pretty dry lesson stuff really, but a lot of it is the kind of fundamentals/foundations that make you better in the long run and make playing harder stuff easy. Same technique whether fast or slow - e.g. speed picking is invariably a wrist action, with the elbow pivoting as you move up and down the strings, stretching is much easier standing up when the guitar is a similar height to the classical position sat down, etc.

Also, inspiration!
 
Moar help please :D

I'm currently trying to suss out the Rhythm guitar on Coroner - Grin.



It's the change from 1.07 that I can't figure out what's going on - all tabs / guitar pro seem off to me.

Also, this song is definitely in the tuning of D - if it was just drop D the ringing notes at the start wouldn't be possible.

I'd be most helpful for anyone's pro ears :)
 
Quality control on tabs... god I miss PowerTab's site, they were always 100% reliable because they were self-corrected, huge number of people working on accuracy etc.

Once again, if in doubt, YouTube, ignoring covers.

Looks like the tab has the right idea but he's not stretching to reach the notes like the tab, he's just using the higher string. Sure it's not D standard btw? Every cover on YouTube seems to use that over Dropped D.

Cracking tune btw, never heard of 'em.
 
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Yeah it's definitely in D standard, I said that in my last post :)

I've had a look at these and still couldn't suss it. There is actually a good video of someone doing a cover... effect on his tone is off and I'm still not 100% convinced on his note choice. The bit starts at 1.17.


All I can muster is that there might be a pull off on the D string fret the 6th fret to the open string that the tabs are missing.

Meep, I'm useless at this :o

And yeah, cracking tune from a cracking album! Was actually turned to them from the guitar solos thread. Unbelievably, the album is out of print, you can't get it anywhere!
 
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