Just trying to inject some life into this community beyond NGD post.
What techniques are you struggling with right now? What does your practice routine look like for improving that skill? Any advice you want to give to the other players on here?
I’m a super beginner so I’ve been working on basic chords and playing along with a click track. My God is tempo difficult for me especially as I haven’t fully mastered fingering positions.
But hey, I’m a little bit better than I was yesterday and that’s all I’m aiming for.
When I first started one thing that helped me get chord transitions was doing 3 minutes of alternating between two chords super slowly and making sure they were perfect, then doing three minutes moving literally as fast as I could with no regard to how sloppy it was.
Doing both seemed to help my brain meet in the middle much faster.
Not a technique per se but I’m trying to memorize the notes on the fretboard
Alternating Picking. Specifically string skipping stuff. Personally never had too much trouble on a single string, and naturally don’t mind going down a string, so long as the last pick was downward. But I’m trying to get a more universal and smooth technique.
At the moment I’m practicing a typical pentatonic box (2 notes per string) and trying to get it smooth and clean. I think I’m at the point where I know what movements will work for my hand, going both up and down the strings, but I’ve realised that there’s a lack of proper coordination between my hand and my arm for moving between strings while my hand maintains a consistent picking action. So I’m just practicing doing that at a slow speed, making sure my arm moves to the next string and my hand maintains a clean picking action. The hard part is focusing on making sure both are done well enough at the slow speeds that I kinda get some muscle memory for the technique … because at these slow speeds I’ve just got habits I don’t even thing about.
Generally it’s been a rewarding process because I don’t think I’ve focused on how my hand actually feels while doing something. Previously I’ve thought about that kind of movement works well or what I struggle with … but for this I’ve had to kinda concentrate on the precise feeling a particular movement has and which precise muscles/tendons are involved. I’ve generally been pretty bad at doing the whole slow down thing, so it just be me finally taking that seriously.
The other hard part is that I’ve got a line6 helix and it’s always so tempting to just muck about with making a new preset (“what would two stereo memory mans sound like?”).
I have been trying to figure out pinch harmonics, and they are kicking my ass if I’m honest.
Watched dozens of videos, tried probably a hundred different ways to do it, and for something that seems so simple, I am really struggling to figure them out.
What helps me is knowing what they are. The strings don’t vibrate in a perfect single wave, the harmonics are already there. If you pluck an open string and briefly touch the string at the 12th fret (half a wavelength), you’re dampening all the harmonics that DON’T have a node at that position, so the full wavelength and thirds are dampened but the 1/2, 1/4, 1/6, etc are left to ring out.
You just hold the pick in a way that your thumb follows and briefly touches against the string at the 1/2, 1/3, 1/6, etc. nodes. You pluck based on the length of the string from the bridge to the fret you’re holding. So if you want to do the 1/3 wavelength, you “cut” the string into thirds and pluck at one of the two nodes such that your thumb “nicks” the string at that node.
A way I used to figure out where those nodes are based on the fret I’m fingering is to lightly rest my thumb on the string, and pluck with another finger (usually ring finger), moving up and down the string until I find one. The node is where your thumb was.
Alternate chord forms for harmonies and jazz playing. It’s a beast for me.
