SHELBY WILLIFORD

Hello to all and welcome to my next column. I see that there have been quite a few new columns added to the site since I put my first one up. I've seen them all and I must say that I have yet to see one that I didn't like. They're all very good and packed with cool licks and useful info.

If you've been practicing the exercises in my first column then you should have a fairly good and accurate picking technique buy now. Now that we can jam away on a single string, it's high time we started moving around a bit. By the way, The principles that I outlined in my last column are applicable to all other categories as well such as legato, sweeps, string-skipping, etc. Also, last but not least, I just wanted to add that even though I will use 1-2-4 examples here, make sure you use all your fingers in every variation. For these exercises, I recommend starting your metronome at 40/45 bpms, doing each exercise 10-15 times each and then when you have it mastered on your current bpm level, move your metronome up another 5 bpms and continue on.

In the next column, I'll get into my string-skipping and legato stuff. Until then, enjoy these and keep on the quest for shredder-dom.

Any questions, or comments can be e-mailed to me here: shredderdude@excite.com