Ok, recently, I have been working on playing more thrash metal. I am aiming at playing stuff like older Sepultura (Beneath The Remains, Schizophrenia). I came up with a exercise were you downpick for 5 seconds, rest for 5, downpick for 10, rest, and so on up, then you tremelo for a mintue straight, then tremelo as fast as you can for the last 10 seconds. After this, you downpick for a minute straight, and for the last 10 seconds, downpick as fast as possible. Now, do you think this is a useful procedure? I do this with a metrenome to make sure I keep on time also. If there are some sites/articles that have exercises for thrash metal playing, that would be really cool if they could be listed here. Thanks much.

Master of Puppets.

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seems great for the right hand

I use one of these hand gripper thingies and my picking forearm is like a ham. It helps with tremelo picking a shitload.

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That sounds cool for the picking hand.

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For picking i'd practice slayer, dimension zero (mainly cause most of their songs are 200+bpms and have a lot of palm mute stuff in it), Elder Misanthropy by The Black Dahlia Murder because it is fast. Anything over 200bpms i'd practice playing man.

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The only thrash band I really like nowdays is Testament. Alex is one of the greatest thrash composers of all time. He mixes jazz with metal which results in a very awesome sound. I'd recomend learning some of older Testament but honestly...write your own shit. find a scale that fits your playing abilities and master it. Then write some shit using techniques thrash metal associates with

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Hahahaha. 'I need some advice mastering the right hand technique required for thrash metal.' 'Just write your own shit, dude.'

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?

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You must be drunk because it's clear that that makes no sense whatsoever.

and MTM, thanks for the idea. I've got one of those things, I'll be using it more now.

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I've got one of those and masturbating is clearly more effective,

I must be drunk...What I ment was play for a few months and whatever you feel most comfortable creating may fall into a written scale. I don't know, thats what happened to me...I was playing untaught for 2 years and what I had wrote fell under some harmonic scale. Like I said I don't know shit about theory but according to the Guitar Grimoire "scales and modes" book I'm playing the Harmonic Minor scale all the time when I write songs. I need more beer


edit; scratch Testament...I was just giving an example of a good thrash guitarist...I'm not into thrash anymore, I'm into death..so what would I know...ABSOLUTLY EVERYTHIGN! 'n stuff..

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Ineffective. Just play some fast death metal, like Sadistik Exekution [like fastest evar!!!11! ] and you'll get all the speed for anything you need.

I dont care if you dont like the hand gripper, it definately works, and if you dont use it, your loss. Cloaca knows. And he will be tremelo picking faster than you.

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btw do it like 400-500 squeezes a day in reps of 50, for like a month or so. I was picking with my forearm (incorrectly) fo about 6 months, and I could hardly play A Lesson in Violence with my wrist. I used the gripper for a month and could play Jeasus Saves and Agent Orange and shit like that. Before i got the gripper I was just sitting in my room and tremelo picking and it was a WASTE of time for muscle building. Plus you can use it in school and the likes of that! Still you need to practice picking for coordination though, but the gripper speeds up your progress 3 or 4 times easily.

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Alright...thanks everybody for the tips. About that hand gripper: I don't have one, but I have two clamps that pretty much do the same thing. Here is a picture of it...do you think it would work? Thanks.

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I could see how doing forearm exercises would help with down stroke speed, but if your tremolo picking correctly than there shouldn’t be a lot of stress on your arm and I wouldn't enforce bad habits; speed should come from your wrist.

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do you lift weights? if so then the clamper you put at the end of a barbell to keep the weights on would do the trick,
that grip you have might work but the pressure probably isnt that great on it

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hey, ive seen those hand grip things efore but my local music shop doesnt carry em and theyr lik 15 without shipping from musicians friend. U know where i coould get one?

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Elder Misanthropy by BDM would be excellent to practice. It gives my hand quite a workout when I use all downstrokes for it, though it's a lot easier with alternate picking, but still, try that with downstrokes.

P.S. In case you didn't know, The Black Dahlia Murder RULE!!!!

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