I've been playing for almost a year now and I've learned a lot, but recently I think I haven't been improving very much. I haven't been pushing myself to do anything really challenging.

I can get some nice leads going pretty accurately, just not very fast. My riffage and tremolo picking is pretty good and I rarely miss/fuck up nowadays. Palm muting also goes well.

As for practicing on speed all I've been doing is working the blues scale up and down and improvising on it as fast as I can, nothing special. Sometimes I just pick the 12th, 14th, and 15th frets on the 1st and 2nd strings and just wank on them as fast as I can.

So as you can tell, I'm not doing anything special here. What exercises/songs/scales/etc. do you reccomend I should work on to get my lazy ass to improve? No Yngwie Malmsteen shit yet, please. :P Some thrash, death, or heavy metal songs from well-known bands would be cool suggestions. What other scales should I learn that are commonly used in metal, and what kind of tips would you suggest for building speed?

I haven't bothered with arpeggios and sweep picking yet, should I wait til I build more speed on plain old soloing?

Thanks for any help.

learning how to sweep will always help you improve. Dying fetus is a good band to improve your skills with. I know it helped me.

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i wanna learn the blues scale
is that what you were doing

http://www.ocmusic.com/blues.htm

?

if not can you show me what your doing
cheers
(sorry to hi-jack the thread)

Yep, thats the blues scale, but you should learn all the positions and crap.

That happened to me. all you gotta do is wait it out, and find new inspiration.
CoB worked for me.

I am a rhymin' sonuvva gun

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He said no Yngwie type crap . I think the best stuff to practice to be a good lead guitarist, is to do penatonics and root scales and shit like that.

I did this same thread for more general applications.. I hope this one continues for the shred thing


http://metaltabs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19488

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Pentatonics are gay.

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Hahaha

Pentatonics think YOU are gay

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Soeru, how much of Randy Rhoads' playing have you absorbed?

Uh... I haven't really learned anything from Ozzy except for the lead to Crazy Train, but that was around the first week I started playing. :P

I'll take a look at that thread.

By Yngwie Malmsteem stuff, I was talking about "arpeggios from hell", fucked up solos that involve a lot of fast shifting of the hand.

I'm just looking for general stuff I should work on, I guess this is the point where my path breaks off into leads or rythm, but I want to focus on both, I just don't know what to challenge myself with. I don't remember what was the last tab I learned, I've just been playing stuff that comes to mind(sometimes real songs).

I came up with a kick-ass riff, only to realize 3 days later that it was the same exact riff from a song off of Kataklysm's new album. :P

Its funny that you say that, because I can't shred, but i can sweep. Most people say that you are supposed to shred first. Weird.

If you want to try sweeping, I think this one is easy

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I was in a slump a while ago too. But then I discovered Ride The Lightning.

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Nigger please, pentatonics are sooooo boring. I'd rather kill myself than practice them, unless it is one of Frank Gambale's lessons, he actually does interesting things with string skipping pentatonics.

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try E(12) phrygian. that gets the blood pumping, and was used on fade to black

there is another thread exactly like this down the page.

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