Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello learned how to pick properly and really upped his game as a guitarist all thanks to shred overlord Michael Angelo Batio.
According to Morello in an interview with Total Guitar, he only took one lesson from Batio once but it totally changed the way he played.
"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, IL, if I wanted to learn a song – where a hippie stoner teacher would show me my favorite 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 different modes.
"He forced me to start slow and said once I had mastered the exercise, I could click the metronome up by one and eventually move on. I believed what he told me and it was a lesson that changed my life and led me to able to play solos like 'Take the Power Back' and '#1 Zero' many years later."
If you're unfamiliar with how insane Batio's skills are, please see the below videos with an increasing amount of guitar necks.
