First there was Angus Young...
Then there were Dave Murray/Adrian Smith...
Then came Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield...
Then things got more serious: Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and, finally, the Biggest Swinging Pick of them all: Yngwie Malmsteen.
As you've probably copped on, I'm charting in chronological order my journey of discovery into the world of guitar speed picking technique.
You see, picking technique is to wannabe teenage guitar heros what bicep size is to muscleheads in the gym. A former such wannabe, I remember religiously practising Nick Nolan's "Joy Of Picking" exercises on a daily basis, dreaming of the day when I might be able to nail one of Yngwie's ridiculously fast arpeggios or, at the very least, the riffs from Battery or Damage Inc.
Things didn't quite work out on that front, but I still get a shiver down my spine when I hear a particularly fast bit of picking. Imagine, then, how hard my jaw hit the floor when I saw this:
To summarize for those who can't be bothered watching it: the guy plays Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" -- fully picking the sixteenth notes -- at 320 beats per minute! That's 4*320/60 = 21.333 notes per second. And each note is different, demanding coordination between left and right hands. As far as I can tell, it's genuine, and sounds pretty clean...
The funny thing is that his "warm up" rendition is at 170 beats per minute, which is already mind blowing. In fairness, once he gets beyond 200 bpm, it's hard to really hear the increase in speed: it just sounds like a slightly different species of buzzing insect.
This is probably not something that would appeal to anyone who hasn't spent a significant fraction of their teenage years in the woodshed sweating over three-octave scale patterns, but it is nevertheless an impressive physical feat worthy of anything you'd see at the Olympics.
Still, you have to wonder: when, in the course of his practising, he got up to somewhere around 200bpm, wouldn't he have paused to think something along the lines of "okay, well I guess by any reasonable standard my picking technique is pretty much under control; maybe I should focus on song writing or something -- that way I won't just end up as some circus act on YouTube..."
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