Tremolo melody mini-lesson

Do you have a good picking motion for tremolo, but find yourself reverting to string hopping whenever you try to include the fretting hand? Fortunately, there are some intermediate steps you can take to ease yourself into the world of hand synchronization. Take a single-string lick that you like. Instead of playing each note once, try repeating each note 2 times, 3 times or even more. For example, if we repeat each note twice, something like this: -0-2-3-0-2-3-2-0- Becomes -0-0-2-2-3-3-0-0-2-2-3-3-2-2-0-0- This means you can still pick “fast”, while fretting at half the speed (or ? or ¼ of the speed if you repeat the notes 3 or 4 times). By doing this, you are still learning something about hand synchronization at high tempo: If you want the transitions between notes to sound clean, your fretting fingers will have to be placed down (or removed) at very precise times, so that they line up with one of the pickstrokes. If you play each note 2 or 4 times, you will find that each fretting motion has to line up with the same pickstroke (an Up or Down, depending on how you started). Playing each note 3 times, you’ll see that you will need to alternate between changing notes on an upstroke and a downstroke. This is a skill you’ll definitely need for the final goal of fretting a different note on each pickstroke. This type of exercises will give you the opportunity to learn this skill in a more gradual manner, by essentially slowing down the process by a factor of 3 while still requiring individual fretting motions to be performed fast.