A fun gypsy jazz lick to work on your USX chops!

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#1

We’re back - this could become a weekly thing lol. It’s good motivation to learn new phrases :grin:

This one is very straightforward - just follow all the rules of Gypsy picking/USX and the pickstrokes will figure themselves out, although if you need it they’re notated below. A little sweeping in the beginning, always starting each new string with a downstroke and it flows very easily for the right hand.

I stole this one from a Remi Harris video although I can’t remember which one - he’s an awesome player to examine who’s really got the USX/Gypsy picking system down pat.

Have fun with this one!

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#2

Cheers, nice!

I play acoustic as well (can’t have electric due to travelling), and wonder what kind of limitations you might find with your picking, if any. e.g., I’m currently working on simple picking patterns (just 3 notes repeated on a string, eg —5-7-8-5-7-8— …) and find that at around 190 bpm, sixteenth notes become hard to distinguish – perhaps due to heavier strings, perhaps due to my technique still evolving and I’m not getting the pick through the string fast enough. Curious if you have any insight. Thanks! z

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#3

Feel free to post a video - I’d love to take a look!

I feel like the main reason you’d be losing the note definition at higher speeds might be a hand coordination issue, especially with phrases that contain that many notes per string. With those kinds of passages where you’re playing a repeating pattern and using a single escape strategy (assuming you’ve got a pretty consistent technique without a bunch of variation between pickstrokes) I feel like the left/right hand coordination may be a more likely culprit for the loss of clarity between notes than the actual picking itself.

Fretting the notes just a hair too early or too late can really make everything blend together - this was/is my biggest hurdle with the USX stuff, especially the Eric Johnson phrasing. I was always a trailing edge, primarily DSX picker before I discovered CtC and basically threw that all out the window over a pretty arduous trial and error process in order to make those kind of licks work :joy: once the fundamental picking motion is there the right hand can kind of start outrunning the left hand and make everything sound a little wonky, which still gets me sometimes.

#4

Thanks, great points. Thinking through it some more, and observing my own playing, I think you’re right about the hand sync — at least it is the most obvious place to start. I can trem pick loud and fast on one fretted note so the change is likely what is bad. I just posted a longish note in a thread on descending picking, and after just a few mins of a drill my left hand feels much more alive. I’ll work on that and more syncing. Thanks again! Z

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#5

Awesome! Glad I could help a bit!