MASTER CLASS

Once you can play something 150 times perfectly, you can move on... “It was a very fateful day when I learned how to alternate pick properly. While I was self-taught, I would occasionally take myself to a guitar shop in Highland Park, Illinois, if I wanted to learn a song – where a hippie stoner teacher would show me my favourite Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath songs that I couldn’t figure out on my own. One day he was off sick and so I got sent to a room with the other guitar teacher, who was Michael Angelo Batio... The famous four-necked guy before he was famous! I had one lesson with him. He sat me down and told me to play something. I scrambled my way through some leads, trying to show off and sounding very hackneyed. He said, ‘It sounds like you want to play fast but you don’t know how!’ and I said, ‘That’s accurate, sir!’ So he wrote a series of exercises on one sheet of paper – fundamental picking exercises using quadruplets and triplets in differentand many years later.”