Learning to play the guitar is a combination of mental and motor skill acquisition. And to develop motor skills, repetition is essential ... Whenever musicians have trouble executing a passage, they generally tend to blame themselves for not having enough talent. Actually, all that's wrong is they don't know where their fingers are supposed to go ... You should learn the piece in your head before you play it. And when you do play it, play it so slow that therre's no possibility of making a mistake.

My first [guitar] lessons lasted two weeks and it was "Jingle Bells." It didn't make any sense at all. I wanted to know how to play like Hendrix...

Practice, practice, practice. Practice until you get a guitar welt on your chest...if it makes you feel good, don't stop until you see the blood from your fingers. Then you'll know you're on to something!

I don't know ANY secrets about playing guitar, and there's no fairy dust that you can sprinkle on your guitar to make you good or great. To master an instrument requires suffering. It is also a process, not something that can ever be finished... If you REALLY want to play great, there's only one way — work. It's like trying to take down a mountain with a toothbrush — you can never finish, just scrape a little more every day.

Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt talls. My brother would go out at 7pm to party and get laid, and when he'd come back at 3am, I would still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years — I still do that.

One thing I learned a long time ago was my fretboard, in terms of all the scales in all the positions...You have to learn it - there are no two ways about it. I shift between positions so easily now that I really don't have to think about them much...I would suggest starting your scale education with the major and minor scales, and after that, diminished, augmented and whole-tone. Then depending on what kind of music you want to play, the modes should be learned. My theory about this kind of thing is that you should learn it all. Once you've learned it you can play whatever you want to play, and I think that your playing will be more advanced, and you'll have a better understanding of the instrument.

Memory, perception, coordination, strength: guitar is just plain hard.

I spent a lot of time teaching myself theory and harmony so I could be free to express myself on the instrument. I learned what relatives and substitutes could be played against a root of a chord, like E minor related to G, and so forth. I've also gathered all this knowledge because for ten years all I've done is play jazz, every day.

If once he has got the right fingering, plays in good time, with the notes fairly correct, then only pull him up about the rendering; and when he has arrived at that stage, don’t let him stop for the sake of small faults, but point them out to him when he has played the piece through. . . I have always adopted this plan; it soon forms musicians which, after all, is one of the first aims of art and it gives less trouble both to master and pupil.

Guitarists who play fast are insecure. I can’t really stomach too many guitar players who just play these non-stop, incessant runs. It gets crazy; it’s just exercises. There has to be a reason for soloing. Usually, guitar players who play that fast and put everything they can into solos are insecure. The more sophisticated and mature guitarists become, the more they go with the feel. If you try to play too technically, you lose something in the music—like you’re playing for another guitarist. I like to play for people. The most important thing to me are the vocals, then the arrangement, and then the song. And way down, ‘Oh yes, there has to be a guitar solo.’ Whereas for a lot of players, everything revolves around the solo.

How to improve melody... I get this question a lot. I think people kind of make something too complicated out of that. There's a lot of rules. You can [read] books about the melodies... But [if] you have great songs all around; if you have a nice chord progression, you can just follow [it] and play the notes of the chords, and it's gonna work. Then, sometimes, you deviate and come back, but you don't need to think much about it. [...] You can also just pay attention to melodies... and play melodies. Get the guitar, and play melodies. I think guitar players, in general, at least from my generation, learn scales, the pentatonics, the shapes of the modes, the triads, this and that, and we don't play a lot of melodies. So that's something that I was paying more attention to later [in my career]... I just try to play the melody. No fancy arpeggios, no nothing. Just a singable melody.

I couldn’t hear the bass in a lot of the thrash [metal] I was listening to. It seemed like the bass was doing exactly what the rhythm guitar was doing, so that’s what I tried to do. I think that shaped my righthand technique, having to learn how to play the really fast stuff with three fingers. I didn’t realize a lot of these guys were cutting things in half [playing half the notes] or doing something a little different. I’ve always played fingerstyle since we got Cannibal going, just trying to keep up with the guitar players. In thrash, there’s not as much of a bass–drummer connection as there is a bass–guitar connection—at least I didn’t see it that way in the beginning. [...] When I started, I played fingerstyle with two fingers, and not very fast. I could get going to a respectable speed, but not something crazy like Jeff Berlin or Juan Alderete. But then we did a show with Cynic and Malevolent Creation. Cynic’s bass player, Tony Choy, played with three fingers, and Malevolent Creation’s bassist plucked with four. I said, “I have to be able to keep up, and I’m not going to use a pick. I have to be able to figure out how to do it with my fingers. [...] Around that same time, I was listening to Sadus a lot, which is the band that Steve DiGiorgio originally came from. I could tell the bass was played fingerstyle, and it was really fast. I managed to track down Steve’s phone number, so I called him up and asked, “Dude, how do you do that?” He explained his technique, which was going from the ring finger to the middle to the index back to the middle—there’s your four notes. I was very grateful, and we’ve been friends ever since. I tried to learn that way and got it down, but as I would start to drift off in doing muscle-memory practice, my technique would start to fall into a different technique. That was the one that I described in the book, where it ends up being a 12-note cycle. You’re basically playing a triplet pattern, but it ends up feeling like straight 16th-notes. So Steve’s tip helped get me started, but I ended up developing my own thing.

When you tuned a guitar a new way you were a beginner all over again and you could discover all sorts of new things...It allowed us to throw out a whole broad body of knowledge about how to play the guitar.

I used to practice scales, but I think mainly in positions. I do runs that go from position to position, basically around chord shapes. I can get around pretty easily from one position to another, and on a good night it sound pretty hot. I'll take chances. Sometimes I'll trip over myself, but most times I'm lucky.