What’s your biggest weakness?

metropolis_4

Shredder
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1,970
What’s your Achilles heal in your technique? The thing you struggle with the most.

Mine has always been coordination between right hand and left hand. Both of my hands are about 10x faster on their own than together.
 
Same except not 10x faster on their own, maybe only a little faster for me. That and extra string(s) noise. Been working on those 2 things the past month or so.
 
Barring 2 notes with one finger and cleanly going from one to the other, picking single notes. It’s tripped me up since my teens because I still manhandle the strings.
 
Retention. I learn a song and three weeks later it's like it never happened and I have to relearn it from scratch.

I'm also not great at picking fast, palm-muted figures across multiple strings. Fatigue sets in really quickly, which means I'm doing it wrong.
 
Alternate-picked runs, going from string to string trips me up like a toddler
giphy.webp


Probably due to the lack of coordination between right hand and left hand.
 
Not being completely honest with myself. :idk


:rofl


Can I even trust my own self-analysis? Not so sure. :LOL:

I feel like it is tension, though. Too much in my hands. Like I need to lighten up my touch.
And with that maybe a little more precision, though I NEVER want to be clinical. Clinical
is for the operating room.

I also wish I could play Slide better. But like with the tension thing I end up not being able to
float the Slide with just that right amount of pressure, and end up using too much or too little,
and not having that consistent amount of perfect pressure.
 
Hmm. My biggest weakness is either lack of musical aptitude or lack of relevant physiological aptitude--they pretty much run neck-and-neck. My only real 'strength' is lack of ability to read the room you might say. So I just keep plinking away without any concern about it being an endeavor in which I have a very low ceiling.
 
Lack of focus. I spend way too much time thinking about or tinkering with gear and nowhere near enough time practicing or writing.
This definitely happens to me. The slightest thing wrong on a guitar and it’s straight on the bench. I was playing some Gipsy Jazz the other day and by the end of the day I had made a new rosewood bridge for the guitar. Yes it has made a huge improvement but not in my learning curve for this style.🤣
 
My finger speed sucks.

I can play some fast licks, picked, but they start to get on the verge of being sloppy because my fingers are slow. Throw in some pull-offs/hammer-ons, and the bpm's drop by 15 or so!

And I'm not trying to be a shredder of any sort. But I would like to be able to play solos like Are You Gonna Go My Way, or Carry On Wayward Son with 100% confidence, but even those (which are honestly not that fast) make me struggle. Because my damn fingers!
 
Over the past 15 years or so, it's been Essential Tremor. I've had symptoms since ca. age 10 but was able to manage them - for the most part - during my working guitarist days. These days, it is occasionally bad enough that I can't always count on being able to play when I pick up a guitar. Sometimes it improves as I warm up, other times not. It's forced me to adjust my musical focus in a major way, which has a definite upside, but I've been forced to abandon any notion of serious chops.
 
Muting unwanted strings/notes on fast-ish stuff. I'm a real luddite, though with a phone camera maybe I should video my playing see where I'm going wrong.

Also picking 6's with two notes-per-string pentatonics. Just seem to have a speed limit there no matter how much I attempt to apply the Troy Grady mechanics. Tripplets and 16th's I'm OK with.
 
I feel you guys. :(

Physical limitations with increasing age (post 50-is or so by my reckoning) are not imagined,
and seem to be non-negotiable. :idk Yeah, maybe you can limit the damage age does by a
percent or two here and there, but you ain't stopping the Aging Train. No way. No how.

I always joke with my friends that when my fingers stop working completely I am going to tune to
open E and only play Slide. Problem solved! :LOL:
 
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