A forum user recently posed the following great question about practice time, and how much of it our interview subjects say they did:

Troy, just curious since you’ve interviewed so many world class players. Have you interviewed anyone who has not put in 8+ hours a day practice at some point in their career? It seems that almost everyone I’ve researched with extraordinary technique has put in these type of hours at some point. Usually in their teen years. Just wondering if you’ve run into anyone who hasn’t. Thanks!

Sometimes when I have a few minutes of downtime, I toy around with trying to do the Eddie Van Halen tremolo technique. This is the awesomely beautiful and deservedly famous pure forearm rotation motion Ed uses for the famous Kreutzer etude section in Eruption, and for the mesmerizing tremolo section in the acoustic “Little Guitars” intro.

We’ve been stealthily rolling out updates to the Pickslanting Primer to fill in long-standing gaps in its coverage. The first of these, a long-overdue section on pick grip, went up this week. You can check it out right here!

The wrist is one of the most important and commonly used joints in guitar playing. And yet, when it comes to popular guitar teaching, its function has been almost entirely overlooked. When it is addressed at all, it’s usually by way of clumsy analogies like “knocking on a door” or “shaking hands” that are so imprecise as to be mostly useless in teaching players how they’re supposed to move. Read More

Did you know there are different kinds of pickstrokes? These pickstroke types have different capabilities, and profound implications for what you can and cannot play with them. As with anything mechanical, you have to use the right tool for the job. Read More