From mastering thrash metal with Testament to becoming an accomplished jazz player later in life, Alex Skolnick has proved himself a chameleonic guitar player. But there’s one athletic aspect of his playing that he still struggles with: high-speed picking.
Apart from David Gilmour, who long ago accepted that he wasn’t born to shred, most guitar players dream of picking at finger-blurring speeds. Yngwie Malmsteen built his career on a seemingly superhuman blend of speed and precision, but even accomplished players can struggle with the technique’s most demanding aspects.
Skolnick, who rose to prominence with metal icons Testament, is one such player. Guitar solos may be a big part of his repertoire, but that doesn’t mean fast playing comes easily to him.
“There’s an athletic quality to super fast picking that has to be very precise,” he explains to Guitar Interactive Magazine. “It’s even harder with two guitars because you can tell when somebody falls. With one guitar, you can kind of get away with it, there’s a lot more freedom.”
Skolnick isn’t alone in struggling with the demands of high-speed playing. Speaking to Guitar Player in 2022, Joe Bonamassa said that “at this point, everybody knows I can play fast,” and explained how he’d taken advice from Leslie West to cut his playing in half. But when he does turn up the speed, he has to work within his technical limitations. In a conversation with Guitar World two years earlier, he admitted that one particular technique had eluded him.
“I have absolutely no capacity to play anything using the legato technique,” he said. “Eric Johnson blends legato and picking perfectly in my opinion. I am an Al Di Meola school player, especially when it comes to faster playing. I pick literally every note unless I’m on stage playing a pretend rock star.”
By contrast, Allan Holdsworth was renowned for reaching blistering speeds through his use of legato, although his picking technique was formidable, too. Ultimately, guitarists develop their own approaches around their strengths and weaknesses.
Interestingly, Skolnick credits his late-career foray into jazz with making him a “stronger metal player,” particularly when it comes to timing and speed. His jazz journey began shortly after a brief stint as Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist.
“I mostly focused on jazz for a long time, and then I found my way back into hard rock and metal,” he explains. “Of course, there's a lot of differences, but there are some common threads, and I think being around professional jazz musicians and being trained by very serious jazz musicians really made me focus on my timing.
“I wasn't aware of how much my timing needed work,” Skolnick admits. “When you play in a band and that's your main gig, you just get used to that. You fall into bad habits. You get used to your rhythm section, and you don't really think about keeping time as much on your own.
“But in a jazz situation, well, there's a lot more listening. You have to be on your toes. Sometimes the bandleader will ask you to take an intro, or have everybody else drop out so you’re just playing a capella, and that takes great timing. So I developed my timing playing jazz, and I think I was able to bring that to metal.
“I was listening to the bass and drums and finding the pocket,” he adds. “And then I later figured out that a lot of my favorite guitar players, you know, guys like Eddie Van Halen, for example, have this incredible sense of timing. That's partially why their work was so amazing. Eddie knew his way around a drum set, too!”
Since returning to metal, Skolnick has shared with Guitar Player his list of essential jazz albums for rock and metal players. He has also explained how an Allan Holdsworth solo serves as an exercise in “deep expression.”
