Accenting, tremolo picking, and two way pick slanting

Playing Technique
#1

On this site, unless I’ve missed it, the only discussion on accenting has concerned Troy’s larger initial pick stroke for each new run of notes.

So I thought I would share a practice routine I have come up with that seems to help my two way pick slanting.

If we play a smooth and relaxed tremolo on a single note, say on the 5th fret of the third string, usually the first note will be accented as above and the rest will not be accented.

Now, if instead we accent every down stroke if you’re best at down strokes, or vice versa if you want to start on an up stroke because that is most comfortable, you will find that relatively easy if you can already play a regular tremolo.

But now if you change to accenting every third note, so that the accent falls alternatively on your good and then on your weaker stroke, to be able to make a good contact and keep the tremolo steady I think needs you to master the two way slant.

And once this one note pattern has become smooth, you can then move this accenting into licks using more than one string, so that you still accent every third note but you are doing so musically.

3 Likes
#2

Thanks for sharing!

We talk about “chunking” in various places, including here on the forum, so that may turn up some useful related discussions.

As I understand it chunking — grouping notes / movements such that they’re totally memorized as a unit that can be executed without conscious thought — is often correlated to accenting but is more of a mental distinction; you can have “chunks” without audible accents.

Anyone else have specific tips / routines for using accenting, or have tried the above tip re: using accented notes with tremolo to work up to two-way pickslanting?

#3

This seems in principle possible, but in practice I doubt many (any?) players can do it.

#4

What I think I am doing above is making two way slanting take place on a single string by introducing accenting.

The principle, my hypothesis, is that you cannot put the accent force into a note unless you are slanting in the proper direction. Unless of course you are using two way escape picking, the arcing movement rather than the linear one of two way slant picking.

As for chunking, I prefer to think of a modular construction of a phrase.

An example.

I am trying to put together major fours, and so with the idea of chunking I would practice four note chunks and then play them together and they fit easily.

But in fact when I play them, I not only have to learn each four note section but putting them together is another learning process, so you need to learn how to attach each part together as well as learning each part separately.