i've been getting a lot of emails asking me how the hell i play 53 notes per second. i will be making a trick soon. i will let you know when it is done. but for now let me just explain to you how i do it. it's not just that i can play that fast, because playing that fast normally would be physically impossibly without some trick right?

i figured out a way to play very economically and thus much faster... i'm trying to come up with something to call the technique. its not that it's that different than normal picking, it's just a combonation of legato and staccatto. anyway...give me ideas.

here is a copy of an email i sent to gulder describing how it works:

the trick as far as picking is to not alternate pick every note, but to find something in between sweep picking and muting, kind of a combonation of legato and stacatto.

as for the fretting hand... i keep it loose and then tighten it hard at the last second, trying to do it with evey successive note, but i end up just kinnda letting it fly and tightening the muscles in my fingers...almost like the way you snap and contract all your muscles when you throw a punch. Every string has the same shape, so i just kinda let it do it's own thing and just. it's not so much like standard fretting, but more like fluttering between two notes, except i do it with 3. try and forget about the notes and just train your hand to stay on the right frets and play them in the right order. articulation does get lost, but since the sound is very blurred anyway, it doesn't really matter.

sometimes i will bar my first finger so the transition between strings is easier, that way, it's basically like fluttering on one string, so as fast as you can do that between 2 notes on one string is as fast as you can fret the lick.

also, since it's so fast and articulation is lost anyway, i basically treat it like a chord with my picking hand. this results in the last note on one string and the first on the next almost being played at the same time, which increases the overall speed. so quite honestly, i don't think at all about accuracy, i trust my fretting hand to get it right becuase it gets so used to the notes after a lot of practice that it happens by itself.

the resulting sound after all is said and done is like a chord being played over itself slightly off time. this is becuase the fretting hand is just trying to play catch up with the sweeping motion of the picking hand, and always barely makes it.

It really isn't that hard. I just analyzed the way the instrument is played and figured out the most economical way to play fast. since chords have the most notes for second technically (because their all played at once), and the fastest the fretting hand moves is when 2 notes are being fluttered, i just combined the two. a step away from stacatto, and a step away from legato....a step away from a chord, and a step away from simply fluttering 2 notes on a string. it's more about a physical excercise and a mental examination of the process, and less about any amazing talents. although speed has always come easy to me and that probably is helping.

Just so you know...I practiced it legato and i couldn't get it smooth enough because i was basically just fluttering my fretting hand, so it didn't sound articulate enough. so i decided to kina cheat and came up with a sound that is almost purposefully sloppy...well, not so much sloppy as just really blurred.