I'm learing the bass part of Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker and parts of the song have areas where he playes the open A and the B four times sorta fast.....(I think I explained that well) but my speed isnt that good. What do you guys suggest will improve my speed with 2 fingers in situations like this and altogether?

I play only five months and i can play sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!The secret I play thrash and death and not led zeppelin!!! :bassist:

I play only five months and i can play sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!The secret I play thrash and death and not led zeppelin!!! :bassist:

LMFAO, i'm sure you use a pick, if not post soundclips...

I play only five months and i can play sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!The secret I play thrash and death and not led zeppelin!!! :bassist:

:eyebrow:

mmmm... right

I play only five months and i can play sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!The secret I play thrash and death and not led zeppelin!!! :bassist:

Let me guess... you're playing 250 notes per minute?

Blah, blah, blah...
Seems like the newest troll is in.

Ninthwondernj, the trick to improve speed is practice. Start slowly and gradually build up speed. Watch your tone, articulation and consistency.

Seems like the newest troll is in.
Hah, I thought it was a pretty funny post. 16th notes at 250 bpm though? A thousand notes per minute? Sounds tiring

For the Original Poster: Like omgbudsman says, break it down and play it perfectly, slowly.

Hah, I thought it was a pretty funny post. 16th notes at 250 bpm though? A thousand notes per minute? Sounds tiring

I suppose it could be done.....just tremolo pick.

A buddy of mine plays that sorta stuff on guitar and it's pretty intense, but once you get the tremolo picking down it's a piece of piss.

A piece of piss? Is it frozen?

The secret to playing fast is to practice slowly and build up speed gradually. Use a metronome and don't goose up the tempo until you can play it perfectly in time.

I suppose it could be done.....just tremolo pick.

A buddy of mine plays that sorta stuff on guitar and it's pretty intense, but once you get the tremolo picking down it's a piece of piss.

Well this thread is about improving "2 fingered speed"...

Scales, scales and more scales.

guarenteed to make you play faster, and with more precision.

Well this thread is about improving "2 fingered speed"...

No sh*t! :eek:

Bass Fitness.
Get this book and do the exercise, absolutely fantastic workout, has helped my fingering no end (no jokes please ;))

Bass Fitness.
Get this book and do the exercise, absolutely fantastic workout, has helped my fingering no end (no jokes please ;))

no jokes here...but giddy laughter from the peanut gallery cannot be stopped!!

this is probably bad technique but i just grab a string and hammer the same note till i can accurately maintain the tempo it needs to be at. then i add the notes in from there...kinda like getting a running start.

that or the slow and perfect then speed up seem to be the best ways to do it imo.

Well Mass Hypnosis of Sepultura has sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!!I don't use a pick,I'm not so useless!!And why is it so strange??

I think you don't fully understand the bpm thing, it's ok, I made the same mistake.

Well Mass Hypnosis of Sepultura has sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!!I don't use a pick,I'm not so useless!!And why is it so strange??
You don't seem to know that the guy from Sepultura does use a pick. Nothing wrong with that. And many people can play faster fingerstyle than pickstyle.

Now about those 1/16's at 250 bpm, I'd love to hear that (nevermind, though, my computer doesn't have speakers). It's one thing to be fast, it's another to be clean, on time, tasty, accurate, etc...

Finally, playing fast music won't magically make someone play faster, only through practice can someone achieve that.

My finger speed increased 10 fold by playing tunes with mates - as well as jamming to some blues riffs etc... it just comes together after a while! Practice!

Do drugs.

I practice ex. for 3 hours a day and the rest i learn songs and you don't gonna tell me what i can play!!What's your problem if i'm better than you??

do you have any clips of you playing sixtenth notes at 250 bpm with your fingers? i would love to hear it.. it's just hard to belive.

about the issue. you could ad your ringfinger for those passages.

I practice ex. for 3 hours a day and the rest i learn songs and you don't gonna tell me what i can play!!What's your problem if i'm better than you??So post a clip where you play 1000 notes in a minute. I don't think you can play that fast, but I'd be happy to hear any evidence to the contrary.

Rocco Prestia gave a very useful tip in one of his instructional videos. It's very easy, but really helped me along.

Play and octave and each note twice altering fingers. for example; you play a D on the A string twice with 1st then 2nd finger then quickly switch to the D on the G string with 1st then 2nd finger on your plucking hand. It may be tricky at first, but it's a brainless excersise you could do while watching tv. (hope that explaination makes any sense?)

hey tom, lets thinks about what you are saying. you have been playing all of five months, and you say you can play 1000 bpm. well, if your playing is anything like your grammar, then we all know that you are full of s%$t. take time out of your day and read a book.

This may sound a little stupid. But try playing with a pick. no no no hear me out... I used to play fingerstyle for a while back when i began, i could play mostly everything I needed to but some things I just couldnt so I used a pick. About 4 months ago I put the pick down and hey presto, im playing everything I couldnt before fingerstyle.

Ok heres my theory on that, your hand has a whole arseload of muscles. By playing fingerstyle you work on one set of muscles, by playing pick style you work on others, including wrist where your finger tendons extend up to, if you play predominantly with your wrist and not elbow joints the tendons become looser etc.
Im no doctor and I know pretty much only a 10th grade knowlege of anatomy but thats just a theory, prove me wrong if I am.

Ok, heres some non bass playing techninques that help me.

Do the following whenever you can:
-Click your finergers
-Do finger/thumb splits
-twirl pens and coins around your fingers
-play games like tekken on PS2 and change all the buttons to shoulder buttons,
-make horse running noises on tables.
-play basslines of songs you hear on your invisible bass.
-type on your keyboard with ALL your fingers.
-do the moonwalk with your fingers on a desk
-Dance, because you can
-learn to do things like openeing crisp packets without using your thumb
-do shadow puppets etc.
-apply fasle eyelashes to a duck
-thrust down pigions throat to retrieve stolen tastey peanut
and finally (of course)
-push a bannana into deep space

These are just a few things you can do that build up finger and hand strenght and dexterity which when applied will help you play faster. Well... most of them.

i don't have a ****in' computer camera or something and i adviced someone 'cause i wanted and not to impress some jurks that listen to victor wooten and play jazz and i'm not from ****in' USA or England to speak good english and my name it's not Tom,that's a nickname. :spit:

i don't have a ****in' computer camera or something and i adviced someone 'cause i wanted and not to impress some jurks that listen to victor wooten and play jazz and i'm not from ****in' USA or England to speak good english and my name it's not Tom,that's a nickname. :spit:

Calm down.

Let's deal with your initial claim... 16th notes at 250 bpm. "bpm" is short for beats per minute, which in common time means "quarter notes per minute." There's four 16th notes per beat, so it's 1000 notes per minute.

Think about it, it's not physically possible to play 16.7 notes per second.

-push a bannana into deep space

hahah

Think about it, it's not physically possible to play 16.7 notes per second.

I believe some shredders can hit more than that, but they're playing using alot of legato and thus not picking even half of the notes.

I can downstroke 8th notes at 220bpm with a pick, so it doesn't seem that far fetched that someone could alternate pick 16th notes even faster.....I don't know much about fingerstyle yet, so I don't know if it could be done fingerstyle or not.

16ths at 250bpm? :eyebrow:

Is he telling us he can play at this speed? (10 second clip of 16th beats at 250 beats per minute)
http://4x4given.com/band/Metronome/16ths-at-250bpm.mp3

I would REALLY like to hear a good clear recording of him doing that for even 10 seconds. ;)

I would REALLY like to hear a good clear recording of him doing that for even 10 seconds. ;)

It's not going to sound clear....it's death metal.

hmm... playing 16.7 notes per second... despite a predictable amount of clicking from playing that fast I doubt it would be all to discernable from plucking whole notes :P

Though I must say... I bow to this demi-god of bass playing... if truly after only 5 months of playing he can do that... I mean, how can that even be possible... it boggles the mind... please someone take a video camera to this guys house....







Though... my bet is this is some gross miscalculation... no offense of course :rolleyes:

hmm... playing 16.7 notes per second... despite a predictable amount of clicking from playing that fast I doubt it would be all to discernable from plucking whole notes :P

Scoop the EQ.

Though I must say... I bow to this demi-god of bass playing... if truly after only 5 months of playing he can do that... I mean, how can that even be possible... it boggles the mind... please someone take a video camera to this guys house....

1) Just because he can play fast doesn't mean he can play well.

2) He may not be able to slow down much either.

3) Spend 5 months working on nothing but going as fast and you can, and you might just learn to play pretty freakin fast.


(I am getting really tired of defending this guy, but I feel alot of people are being really closed minded about this whole speed thing.)







Though... my bet is this is some gross miscalculation... no offense of course :rolleyes:[/QUOTE]

Well Mass Hypnosis of Sepultura has sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!!

With my deepest hope of helping to settle this controversy: I don't like that kind of music, but I've just got that track to see what's going on there. This song has many meter changes, most notabily from 4/4 to fast double-time feel (cut time), which is the trademark of thrash metal.

I'm going to talk about the first 20 seconds of the song: Tempo is ca. 212 bpm and the featured riff is made of 8th note triplets, which is still a fast rhythm, but that means 636 notes in a minute, which makes a bit more sense. From 0:25 to 0:33, there's a two-bar rhytmic pattern made of 8th note triplets on beats 1 and 3 of the first measure and beat 1 of the second one. The remaining beats are plain 8th notes. Still the same tempo.

The fastest sections of the song are the thrash parts. Here, tempo speeds up to an average of 237 bpm, still playing eight-note triplets. This means 711 notes per minute. I took as a reference the thrash section from 0:34 to 0:50. I wanted to give a detailed listening to the whole song, but without being unrespectful, this kind of music is a nonsense to me and this tune was giving me a headache. As far as I listened, the fastest sections are similar to this one.

In this thrash part, each triplet is made of a single note within a two-bar melodic pattern: G-F-G-F-G-F-A-F. In my opinion, at that tempo and with such a load of distortion on guitars, the bassist can play the same melody with simple quarter notes (well, they're actually halves since it's cut time) and it will work perfect. For breaking them in 8th triplets, a three-finger technique is required if not using a pick.

Again, without the intention of sounding unrespectful, I think that the point of this thread isn't about that kind of stuff, TomAngelripper. I'm not trying to say that this Sepultura song or similar ones are easy to play. A huge amount of stamina is needed to play songs like these. But is it possible to play an 8th note triplet pattern at that tempo being each 8th a different pitch? Maybe there are monsters who can do it, but I don't think the result will be musically coherent or pleasant. BTW, one of the reasons because 8th note triplets are so popular for fast passages is that they still sound fast and exciting and are "easier" or "possible" to play compared with 16th notes because with 8th triplets you're playing 3 notes per beat, while with 16th you must play 4 notes per beat.

One more time, I really want to help to make things clearer. Not to enliven the flame.

I believe some shredders can hit more than that, but they're playing using alot of legato and thus not picking even half of the notes.

I can downstroke 8th notes at 220bpm with a pick, so it doesn't seem that far fetched that someone could alternate pick 16th notes even faster.....I don't know much about fingerstyle yet, so I don't know if it could be done fingerstyle or not.

Sure, I can tremelo pick at that speed, but bearing in mind the thread title (Improving 2 Fingered Speed), picking and legato are kind of irrelevant, don't you think?

(10 second clip of 16th beats at 250 beats per minute)
http://4x4given.com/band/Metronome/16ths-at-250bpm.mp3

Just for a comparison, the link below will allow you to download a short recording of 8th note triplets played at 237 bpm.

http://s41.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2VUYFZXFAT60G0I0TTYNIDCR6J

Alright... We can agree that there ARE ways of producing 16th notes at 250 bpm... and that it will most likely sound like rubbish :p ... but i can't agree to the fact that you can do it with 2 finger picking (listen to that metronome clip, its insane)...

But I digress...


The real point of the thread was someone asking how to improve their speed... The inappropriate remarks by TomAngelripper turned it into some sort of lesson on the limits of the human body...

So to provide my 2 cents on the original question... Im going to have to go with the gradual speeding up method... if your into tablature (lets not get into a tablature argument) the program guitarpro has a function where u set the initial tempo you want to play at and the amount of BPM you want it to speed up each time...... I found this to be quite useful... it helped me to learn the two-handed tapping from Metropolis Part 1 by Dream Theater (thats now my "hey check out what i can do" piece :D )

Just for a comparison, the link below will allow you to download a short recording of 8th note triplets played at 237 bpm.

http://s41.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2VUYFZXFAT60G0I0TTYNIDCR6J

Well that's pretty much the same speed as straight 16th notes at 180bpm, i could play that with 2fingers...

Do the following whenever you can:
-Dance, because you can
-learn to do things like openeing crisp packets without using your thumb
-do shadow puppets etc.
-apply fasle eyelashes to a duck
-thrust down pigions throat to retrieve stolen tastey peanut
and finally (of course)
-push a bannana into deep space


Bit of a Shooting Stars fan then? :p

Well that's pretty much the same speed as straight 16th notes at 180bpm, i could play that with 2fingers...Really? That's very difficult to do for more than a few seconds - you should post a clip.

Another comparison point: Iron Maiden's "The Trooper", which bassline is made of three notes per beat (one 8th plus two 16ths - These are NOT triplets, as many people seem to think), is played at 172 bpm in the "Live After Death" version.

Bit of a Shooting Stars fan then? :p



:D:D:D:DSure am! :p

I play only five months and i can play sixtinth notes at 250 bpm!The secret I play thrash and death and not led zeppelin!!!


I saw Tom do it live man, and his f**king fingers caught on fire! He was playing, like, 6000 notes per minute without a doubt!!!

Then, right after that, I saw Humpty Dumpty and the Tooth Fairy playing Bocce with Fidel Castro.

Shortly after that I cured cancer by mixing sawdust, goat lips and crushed "ABBA" Cd's and blending with Ovaltine.

And finally that night I saw Jesus and Satan squaredancing to "Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side" in front of Wal Mart.

It was quite a day I tell ya...

I do remember seeing the guitarist Tony McAlpine doing a demo when I was around 18-19 ish (15+ years ago) and this other guitar player/sidekick dude said this solo he was playing was 14 notes per second or something. Was BLAZING fast so I guess it's do-able. I think the only thing Tom is beating 250 times or 1000 times or 1000000 times a minute is his man meat.

My friend told me that Yngwie Malsteem or Rusty Coolie or some other wanker can play something like 30 notes per second. Obviously he doesn't pick them all, but 30 notes a second, that's a hell of a lot.

My friend told me that Yngwie Malsteem or Rusty Coolie or some other wanker can play something like 30 notes per second. Obviously he doesn't pick them all, but 30 notes a second, that's a hell of a lot.


Yngwie I have seen live a couple times and I would say he is the fastest I have seen without a doubt, though I like Vai's playing MUCH better.

Yngwie I have seen live a couple times and I would say he is the fastest I have seen without a doubt, though I like Vai's playing MUCH better.

Yeah, I totally agree. Also, Vai has Billy Sheehan which makes it about 12 times cooler. Satriani is better again, he has a real cool groove and has Stu Hamm on bass.

Wow, the quote thing worked, that's so cool.

My friend told me that Yngwie Malsteem or Rusty Coolie or some other wanker can play something like 30 notes per second. Obviously he doesn't pick them all, but 30 notes a second, that's a hell of a lot.

Does he play them with 2fingers? :rolleyes:

Ah no, he's a guitarist, I don't think anyone can do it on bass. I think what he does is sweep picks and in the time it takes from the pick to go from one string to the next he hammers on the next note of a scale. It's incredibly fast and totally unmusical. He's also a total wanker. He played in G3 for a while but no one likes him.

who said about 1000 notes aminute???the riff is about ten seconds!!I can't play that fast for a minute!!! ;)

Hmm.. you know if anyone could play 16ths @ 250 bpm with thier fingers it would probably be Matt Garrison... I am not sure he can play that fast, but isnt he the fastest finger style player, or pretty damn close to it? although he does use four of em... I think i can actually come pretty close using a pick( i do not anymore, four fingers work so well! :D ) Anyways i am going to see if i can in a few days, i will probably post of soundclip seeing how close i get.. most likely something around 230ish.. Only thing is, at that speed, esp with a pick, things sound so blured and notes run into eachother... In my opinion playing 3/4 that speed with fingers actually sounds faster. Besides true speed lies in the left hand anyways. And if you want to hear someone who regularly plays 16ths @ 210-220 bpm with his fingers(three of them) listen to the bassist from Dragonforce.
And tom, practising for three hours a day isnt really all that much, i am sure there are alot of bassists on this forum who practise for longer, or practise more efficently.

I don't think the limits of technical accomplishment have been reached yet, but for absolutely ridiculously fast guitar playing, i've never seen anyone who comes close to michael angelo batio. I'll leave any musical taste judgements up to the individual, but in terms of sheer speed, it's hard to top this guy. check out some of the audio/video clips on his site, www.angelo.com especially the track "Speed Kills"

I don't think the limits of technical accomplishment have been reached yet, but for absolutely ridiculously fast guitar playing, i've never seen anyone who comes close to michael angelo batio. I'll leave any musical taste judgements up to the individual, but in terms of sheer speed, it's hard to top this guy. check out some of the audio/video clips on his site, www.angelo.com especially the track "Speed Kills"

I watched a bunch of his clips and listened to a few tracks...he's real speedy no doubt. I am not sure if I think he's quicker than Yngwie though...plus I think Yngwie is a little more versatile from what I have heard so far.

believe it or not, the clips on his site are a bit toned down as far as speed goes. a guitarist friend of mine has his instructional video, and his picking hand is absolutely blinding.

I agree about the versatility; I'll take steve vai anyday over any of the other technical monsters out there.

I hear all this talk about speed and I say, "So what? Can you make me feel something other than `Wow, that's fast'?" All the speed in the world doesn't matter if there isn't some emotion behind it. Typewriter music, I call it.

i have been trying to improve my two finger speed. infact ive been trying to use three fingers. but i can only use three fingers when im playing three notes on one string, or the same note in like 16ths or 8th etc. playing liek a more melodic line, with a more arkward rythm , with three fingers just confuses both of my hands lol. im trying to play the run down in Overture 1928 by dream theater at the mo. Altho progress is slow, playing that over and over has increased my speed.

the biggest tip i can give is to concentrate on efficinecy of fingers, like how far they move out after each note. try and minimize that time.

Ah sweet finger speed. I remember the day when playing the break down to RATM's "Bullet In The Head" was too fast for me. Really the best strategy is to practice playing fast with anything whether it be a song or scales.

Also remember that bass is a low instrument. I like speed myself, but, IMHO, I think too much notes jammed into one measure sounds kind of goofy. Regardless, good luck with your practice.

i was intrigued by suggestions to use a pick or more fingers, but after i saw the guy playing the solo i was trying to learn on the DVD that came with the album play it nonchalantly with two fingers, i was determined to learn it properly (i use this term in my world's relevancy, of course!)

i started practicing it slowly, steadily, speeding up to the next notch when i got that down,.....then once i got close i just tried to take a leap and play along with the recording, doing it successfully maybe 1/10 times, but i think its getting better.

I remember the day when playing the break down to RATM's "Bullet In The Head" was too fast for me.
Excuse the unintentional (badly done I might add) pun, but you've just hit the NAIL ON THE HEAD! Honestly... I used to think EXACTLY that... now it's one of my fav songs to play... especially when the drummer kicks into his 1/18th beat 4 measures before the end... brilliant :D I play songs much faster, and don't really struggle with them either!