Literally, with little or no effort you can play twice, three times faster than almost anybody. HOWEVER, and it's important to stress this, I had a sound in my head years ago that I wanted to get (after listening to Vernon Reid and jazz guys like Dolphy and 'Trane) and all my techniques were designed around that. That's why the phrasing is so crazy. I do not and will not play scales or arps a la shred and fusion guys. You can use limited versions of my techniques to do normal stuff but I just don't. Why be normal?
In the year I was a way I revamped my techniques such that now I mostly play with a clean channel with no effects. My goal is to arrive at a musical place similar to what 'Trane was doing at the end of his career on Interstellar Space (listen to the track "Mars")
I used to sell videos of all this crazy stuff...it was fun to enrage the shred kids. ;-) Actually, last week I shot video #5 but it was not cool...or, I should say, I was not cool in it. So I'll have to re-shoot the video this summer some time.
But seriously, listen to the track called "Jupiter Blues" (one of the later demos) and at the end, as far as I can calculate, I was reaching insane speeds (I'd say how many notes per second but it sounds absurd) -- not really "notes" but more like sound events) -- but let me say, it is not speed for the sake of speed (or to hotdog and show off) but only as an effect, as texture...and anybody can do it...more of a trick than anything else.
The hard part is doing stuff like that on a totally clean, dry amp. I can't play anywhere near that fast on a clean amp....but still way faster than most. The secret is treating the guitar as a matrix rather than a linear instrument.
Again, I say, anybody can do it if they just try. The blueprints lesson is enough to get most people off the ground. With some imagination and experimentation you can figure out the rest.
http://kronosonic.com
[Edited by Ego on 06-06-2003 at 10:10 PM]
