Originally Posted by: ChristopherSchlegel

That shredding stuff is fun but a pretty deep rabbit hole. :) It's a lot of work for very little return. It's not very practical for most music. But if you want to have that skill or tool at your disposal then, the material in those lesson will show you the path. The hard part is the time involved in getting that stuff in your fingers. Sometimes that's time better spent learning songs or other more practical skills.

Funny. Back when I had 'shredding abilities', I never really thought of them as the end goal. You can read a million guitar player interviews where they will tell you that shredding in and of itself is not useful. Truth. Shredding without musicality is noise. It's laregely why I didn't like much of the Varney/Shrapnal stuff back then. There was some good stuff but lots of noisy stuff.

Even back in my twenties, I saw shredding skills as more about the ability to command the instrument. It happened as one of those 'a ha' moments when I was really trying to be a fast shredder that I realized that due to my pushing to physcally be a better player that I had much better command of non-shred stuff.

I started to see shred excersizes (the things I made up to practice speed) as more a means to ensure that when I played anything, there was some authority to it.

I remember seeing the band Hurricane in the 80's and the guitarist Robert Sarzo (Rudy's brother) always seemed to be on the very edge of his skill as a player. The Hurricane stuff wasn't super-complex and maybe I was misreading what I saw but it just seemed like he didn't have full control (eventually Doug Aldrich replaced Robert in Hurricane, so there's that).

Steve Vai can play just about anything but generally doesn't but what he does play, it's command, command, command![br][br]I suppose it's like working out.

I don't work on shredding anymore and given that I have had to semi-rehab my index fingers over the last few years, my shredding ain't what it used to be. I still whip out a lick once in a while but there are some that are just a no-go nowadays.