Is Speed Picking Musical? Are Guitar Shredders Any Good?
If you had good tone woods, solid construction, and a large enough body to resonate, you would get a brilliant warm tone.
Grown up with the music of guitar gods like Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen and George Lynch I soon discovered how exciting it is to play fast and wild guitar solos. It represented the pinnacle of year-long practise and experience. Besides that is both looked and sounded cool when a guitarist’s fingers speeded up and down the fretboard while delivering pure sonic power.
Speed picking exercises constituted a major if not leading role in my daily practising and it did not take too long until I had developed a certain speed with my left and right hand perfectly in sync. It was measurable. I had been playing the guitar for no more than one and a half year when I reached my mark of 14 notes per second; all picked.
Needless to say that my extended guitar solos featured fretboard racing up and down with little distinction between two or more solos. Two years later I booked a recording studio to track down some songs I had written. The two studio owners, both seasoned guitar and bass players started raving about guitarists like Gary Moore, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Carlos Santana as well as many blues and jazz players. It was their tone which had caused all the excitement. The vibrato, the way they bent fast and slow, the phrasing – and on top of it all that boring, un-tricky element: the melodies.
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Without ever having me heard before the studio owners made a statement: Musical talent can only be measured by the ideas someone delivers through his guitar and the way he is doing this. Skills and technique can seriously impress as they represent lots of hard training, but there is nothing musical about running your fingers up and down the fretboard. It is not artistic, it is rather some kind of craftmanship.
That moment I realized that quite some of the fretboard wizards I had admired were actually lacking good musical ideas, be it nice remarkable melodies, cool licks or interesting rhythmical figures. But is it really that un-creative to play fast?
Yngwie Malmsteen, prototype of the shredder, once said in an interview that even if you played fast your solos still had to make sense. Lots of things he played fast also sounded interesting when being played at a slower speed, he added. What he basically said was that it all depends on how you are using your shredding abilities in the context of a guitar solo.
Take George Lynch of Dokken and Lynch Mob. He is a true master in combining slower, traceable licks and melodies with tricky virtuoso passages. Gary Moore also did and so do Malmsteen, Vai, Satriani and many others. Shredding still is cool when it is used in digestible portions that allow the song, the solo and the listener to breath. When I look at my very own playing skills I realize that it is much more a challenge switching from slow to fast and back again than it is speeding all the way through, non-stop.
So try to give your guitar solo room to breath. Use shredding where it sounds cool but does not disturb the melodic nature of your solo. Add it as a bonus or a climax. Start slow and then pick up speed towards the end. Create a game of call-and-response with slow and fast passages. Even if you want to leave no doubt that you are the fastest speed picker in the world, a well structured guitar solo always leave room for trickery and wizardry. After all, other musicians will keep an eye (ear) on your tone and phrasing anyway.
Keep it interesting!
Julian Angel is a mainly self-taught guitarist with two solo albums to his record as well as one with his hair metal band Beautiful Beast. Julian Angel runs the guitar blog ‘Guitar Jooze‘, had his music placed in film and television and has been nominated for German Rock Awards as ‘Best Guitarist’.
Article SourceDifferent pickups would give sharp tones, mellow tones, or hot distorted sounds.