Oh, my ****ing fingers

[xekushnr]

I wrote a small two string arpeggio for me to practice speeding up my sweep picking and tabbed it into Guitar Pro so I could play along and use GP as my metronome. I set it to repeat the section 99 times. I restarted it 3 times. The section contains 4 different arpeggios repeated 4 times. So I just played 4752 arpeggios straight. My fingers, especially the pinky, are ****ing tired.

On the plus side, my arpeggios are sounding a lot cleaner and if I keep this up my speed will improve drastically. Maybe I'll finally be able to play those sweeps from Alaska and Vela, which I have been working on for a while now.

EDIT: I guess I shouldn't say "straight", since I rested for about a minute every time I had to restart GP to play. I don't think it should count though. A couple minutes between almost 5k arpeggios is nothing.
Modified by xekushnr at 10:03 PM 2/9/2008

[iwantans13]

I feel you, I mustve played that really fast arpeggio from the Fade to Black opening solo a million times to get it down. That stuff is hell sometimes.

[xekushnr]

That solo, and that arpeggio in particular, is one of the best in metal IMO. One of the best sounds in music actually. Metallica in it's early days had it's **** together. That first FtB solo was the first solo I ever learned. I still find myself screwing that arpeggio up every once in a while if I'm not careful. Argpeggios are weird like that, I can play most songs that I know without really paying much attention while I'm doing it, but when there is an arpeggio coming up I have to readjust and concentrate 100% on it.

That exercise is working though. I just went back and played the same 16th arpeggios at 160 bpm with no mistakes. I cant hold that speed for long though. I'll go down to 120 to practice probably. I should be able to hold that for a long time.

[iwantans13]

Yeah, honestly I still can really play it that well. Right now Im working on this song that requires some decently fast alternate picking between notes on the A and D strings with an open E between them. Its sort of frustrating me because I know it should not be this hard.