Advice for centering the pick on the high strings?

Playing Technique
#1

Hello all, I’ve been playing for around 15 years at this point and have always struggled with my picking hand. I have a fairly high degree of accuracy, and am a fairly consistent picker up to around 180bpm 16ths, and can push to 200bpm comfortably in more broken up rhythms. However I’ve always struggled with something I’ve never been able to pinpoint the cause of. It seems my upstrokes are significantly stronger than my downstrokes once I get to the D string and higher.

This is especially noticeable when palm muting. The upstrokes are often powerful enough to give more of a bright pop to the notes rather than the intended mute that I am getting on downstrokes. As you can imagine the contrast of the two together makes for very choppy sounding alternate picking. Over the years this has largely gone away on the D string through sheer will of attempting to even out the notes, however I never truly understood what was going on until today.

Viewing from a fretboard angle, I can see that my pick is barely passing the string on the downstroke, then on the upstroke almost reaching the next string. This can also result in the downstroke being muted by the pick attack prematurely.

Has anyone run into this before and has exercises or suggestions to correct it? It’s something I’m sure I could overcome through meticulous practice now that I actually understand what’s happening, but after 15 years of doing something it’s an uphill battle. I hope this makes sense, and I apologize for the length of this post. It’s entirely possible that I’ve miss analyzed the issue as well, but this seems plausible. Thanks in advance!

#2

I would imagine that some video might be useful to those capable of an evaluation? Also, you are a member, so you can ask Troy or tommo to evaluate it!

#3

I agree, video is kind of necessary. Unfortunately I don’t have a neck clamp at the moment so need to figure out a way to film this.

I can say I made a fair amount of improvement today working on this. I think now that I’m aware of it this might be a pretty simple thing to correct.

EDIT: And if anyone wants a fun way of working on string picking consistency: Moving riffs and licks from the lower strings and practicing them on the higher is a fair amount of fun. I basically just considered my G string my low E for the last day and things are fairly consistent now. I was finding trying to resolve this with a metronome actually just accentuated issues and engrained them. I needed a more musical way to practice.

#4

You don’t necessarily need a Magnet if you position the camera strategically. Here are the instructions:

When and if you’re ready, add some clips to your library and make a TC, we’re happy to take a look.

#5

Thanks I’ll do that for sure. This issue I’ve 90% resolved at this point, as someone who had a ridiculous amount of difficulty learning picking though I’d love to get some thoughts on my current technique.