Guys like you, Jack Gardiner, Pete Thorn and Andy, are the future of modern guitar, Rick. You deserve all the success that your hard work, dedication and integrity will no doubt bring.
6:06: "Obscure Blues Riff". I busted out laughing at that, lol. This guy is insane, he has got to be one of the most technically gifted guitarists I've ever heard.
maybe not that hes one of the most technical, but that he blends that technical ability with so many styles/ideas/feeling, without sounding like a shreddy robot
I wish I hadn't clicked on this, I was just starting to feel good about my guitar playing. Think I'll just go ahead and quit now. Listening to Andy Wood play is both thrilling and depressing at the same time
I can't remember the last time I had so much fun watching/listening to a guitarist...Andy is a real freaking musician with a massive vocabulary and I was so taken by the music itself that I forgot to be blown away by his incredible technique LOL WOW
+TechMetalRules We used to tab these ourselves, but it took forever and ate into the time we spend editing new stuff. We now hire the wonderful Levi Clay for all our transcription, who is a true pro. It was a big step for us to be able to afford him on large projects like this, and your purchases and subscriptions are what finally made it possible. So thanks to you and everyone for supporting us!
+Chord TheSeeker He really played all that! It's a bit of a barrage when edited into in a montage like this, but in person Andy is still a non-stop juke box of styles and vocabulary.
Wow, this guy is an amazing player. Just saw his name listed on the Bijou website saying he was rolling through town. Checked out this video and was completely blown away. Can't wait to see this dude live now.
Should I really continue playing after watching this guy? What a fluid, technical, creative and versatile player. Andy really blew my mind. I always enjoy Levi's transcriptions. Hope to purchase this someday.
While still giving full credit for the epic banjo-roll type licks and tasty hybrid picking, the thing that strikes me most is how efficient and effortless-looking Andy's wrist movement is when he's doing fast linear runs like 1:45, 3:47, 4:38 . Very strong resemblance to Paul Gilbert. And seemingly no (or very little) elbow movement on those runs. I suspect many people who describe themselves as "wrist deviation" pickers probably have more elbow movement or forearm rotation than they realize. But Andy seems to have a very "high purity" wrist deviation movement on his linear runs, unless there is something more interesting happening that's hard to observe. If you ever revisit the Biomedical Engineering labs in North Carolina, Andy would be a fascinating subject to "put under the microscope."
+severalpaperclips Definitely, Andy is a textbook deviation two way pickslanter. But there's plenty of forearm for pickslanting movements during inside picking, and even crosspick arpeggio playing in the Stoney Point example. For near-zero forearm or elbow you can think about Albert Lee or Molly Tuttle. Molly alternate picks everything with essentially only wrist movements. We'll see that coming up.
I totally agree. I am sure Andy did not start playing by thinking about how pure and precise his wrist or forearm movement was. He simply started playing that way from the start.
This stuffseems way beyond human capability. Who knew that starting with a mandolin could send your guitar picking frequency straight through the sound barrier? Techniques like sweep picking start to seem totally redundant when you're already able to pick at a rate which forces Troy to explain what's going on in terms that sound like quantum physics to mere mortals. But it's still a feast for the ears and eyes.
Really like this stuff, it is amazing. I like this hybrid picking more than thump pick and finger style. You can be more dynamic and snap the strings. This is epitome of picking, thanks.
He's got a Suhr. Good man. I just got mine a little over a month ago. Best guitar I've ever played, hands down. It's the Modern Satin with FR, HH. I don't know how I ever played without stainless steel frets that have been PLEK'd lol.
Suhr's are great-playing and beautiful guitars, no doubt. But most of the all-time great guitar recordings were done with guitars that wouldn't hold up to modern "boutique guitar" standards. Hand someone like Andy a plywood no-name guitar from China, and as long as the intonation is close, he'd still sound badass. I'm not saying it's bad to appreciate the qualities of a more refined instrument, but sometimes conversations of that sort can lead naive observers to overestimate the role of the guitar relative to the role of the player.
An astounding demonstration of greatness! Also, even though I love distortion, it was a great to hear so much of that beautiful clean tone, which would seem to leave no room for error.
Best cross picker I've ever seen.I'd say better Yngwie,Vai,Eric Johnson,Al DiMeola,etc etc.Bonamassa is a quite a picker but I don't think this good.Yes I said it.This guy has mastered picking angles/string skipping .These are some difficult runs to play without sluring mutes over other strings to get where the note is.His constant repositioning of his wrist angle is advanced stuff.
+Petter Eriksson Not a crazy comparison - he and Martin came up together, and both represent a 21st century standard for what you can do with alternate picking, among other things.
That's cool :) I've noticed that I'm decently rubbish at alternate picking unless it's a decending run. Ascending runs are pretty much always economy picking for me if I want to do it at speed. By the way, did you ever have problems with your left hand speed? The left hand is my weakest point when it comes to playing.
I'm not particularly "fast" compared to the average player when it comes to raw hand speed, either left or right. I may be cleaner, but that's because our contribution to this conversation has mainly been accuracy techniques like pickslanting and crosspicking. If there are specific challenges related to finger speed I'm not aware of them, but hopefully we'll learn more about this over time as we collect more data.
I know that my picking hand sucks because I play also violin and so much higher speed. It is easier to play violin fast than guitar. I have better left hand.
I don’t know what just happened, but I feel the same way I did when I saw Yngwie for the first time and he played all solo no band the whole time. Feel like I have to grab a wall or somethin 😂
Am I being wrong or Andy is really using upward pickslanting for higher speed licks, especially while picking the bass strings? I think this is caused by shifting the anchor (from bridge to the body), too.
Hello! I'm from Brazil. You would know where I can buy a holder like that to attach my cell phone to the guitar arm. I can not find it on ebay. Thank you and congratulations to the videos. They are great!
I wish I could figure out how these guys get so much speed and articulation with wrist movements. I'm an elbow picker, like Vinnie Moore, and wrist movements just feel so sluggish to me. I can't grasp it, but I feel like I could gain more articulation if I mastered the movement.
Gabo González so let's make a distinction, I was talking about technical abilities and not performing music as an artist would do; Malmsteen won't be able to play Brian May's stuff as well as Brian, and vice versa; I was not talking about recording, I WAS talking about playing live; also if there is a ton of mediocre guitarists, it doesn't matter, the fact is there is at least one who can play Malmsteen's stuff, so it is possible, and this is the kind of thinking you can stick to in my opinion, otherwise why would you bother at all?
Gabo González it's true, Ive always had 'unrealistic' expectations, I mean I've always wanted to be one of the best, I can at least die trying, I don't have that much time these days
@Rishabh Kumar.....pains me to say it but it's a gift. Most of the great players achieved their mastery with nowhere near the effort and in a tenth of the the rest of us have to put in to get to half of their skill ...( and that's if we're lucky).
