Advice: Reasons why pick is getting stuck on the upstroke?

Playing Technique
#37

Another fantastic video! Below is my video reply for critique but there are a few things I wanted to type on first:

  1. Lean picking did not come natural to me. And I say natural in the sense that when you incorporate DWPS with natural thumb bend, you almost by default have some edge picking before consciously applying any. With lean picking, I had to consciously move the pick on my index finger FIRST, then close my grip, and go from there.
  2. Immediately my upstrokes felt smoother but at higher speeds the quality of my upstrokes did not ring out as clear as I’d like them to be, especially on the Low E. Any recommendations please?
  3. In your previous post you said that you have slight bridge lean (somewhere around 45 degrees). May be silly but what did you mean by 45 degrees in this case? I’m assuming if the point of the pick is facing the guitar dead on, 45 is just turning the butt of the pick towards the bridge on the horizontal axis?
  4. I see in this case you used rest strokes? Is this normal for you when you play alternate picking licks?

CHEERS

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#38

I really appreciate those kind words Bullseye, thank you :slight_smile: I’ll answer 1 and 3, then 2 and 4 combine into a longer response for better readability.

1.) Having lean in my picking was not something I adopted naturally when learning DWPS either. I too had to move the pick in my grip when starting out. Over time it became natural because I could tell when it wasn’t in the right position, the picking quality went downhill until i readopted the lean angle. Now I just pick the pick up in the “correct” way. Sometimes I have to adjust the pick whilst playing, it likes to spin itself to neck lean on occasion and I can feel when it happens.

3.) That is spot on. You have understood that right.

2/4.) I do use rest strokes for pure DWPS and UWPS licks, if I cross pick or TWPS then they go away. I used rest strokes to force the pick slant and to ensure I was clearing the strings on the upstrokes when I was learning the movement, now at slow speeds it’s just a natural part of playing. I don’t really feel them at fast speeds but it by the looks from the video they are there.

In your video it’s somewhat difficult to see the pick due to the light, although the angle at 3m40s is better. My gut wants to say that you aren’t getting enough pick on the string during the upstroke (perhaps as a result of wanting to avoid the sticky feeling?). I get a tiny fraction more than the width of the string over the pick during the upstroke, whereas you look to be only grazing the pick across the top of the string. Your first down stroke looks good and committed but you then appear to get more reserved and only glance the strings instead of committing to each stroke. In my opinion if you want a strong sound you need to commit to each stroke so that the pick goes through the string as opposed to grazing over it.

I tried looking at your other critique post but none of the videos are live anymore, with exception of @Troy’s, my opinion on is that you are string hopping in that clip. Reason being that I think you are using wrist extension on both the upstroke and the downstroke, this well inevitably be a speed limiter since you are using the same muscle groups for up and down strokes. It may also contribute to the sound you are getting.

To remedy all this. I would recommend you start on just a single string and practice something like the Yngwie six note pattern (in the pickslanting primer), really focus on using rest strokes and getting good attack on the up and down stroke. The pick should move in a straight line, diagonally in and out of the guitars body. Once you have speed and tone you are happy with on one string then you can look at applying this to string changes. The rest stroke might feel alien to begin with, however it’s going to force your pick to travel in a straight line as opposed to the curve you use at the moment. If you can nail this new movement then you will be able to apply it to any DWPS passage, be that Zakk Wylde or otherwise.

Feel free to post another video for critique of you doing this, I’m happy to look over it, when you shoot it making sure you have lots of light on the picking hand will enable the best feedback possible for you.

I think it might be useful for you, and others if I post a video of the process I used to learn one way pick slanting, since I too came from the position of not being able to do any of this until a year or so ago. I’ll try and make some time to put that together this week. If you or anyone else reading this wants me to cover TWPS and Crosspicking in it too then I’ll be happy to oblige :slight_smile:

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#39

I will call you King Fisch from now on… :):smiley: You are no longer Mr. Fisch.

I am heading out of the house right now so I must cut it short. #1. Will get a new video up later today with proper lighting. #2. I deleted my old videos like an idiot on my YT. But yes I was definitely stringhopping/crosspicking/not DWPS. #3. I remember watching the 4 fundamental movements video re: wrist extension but could you explain why it is a hindrance in your opinion and what muscles should I be focusing on instead? #4. With #3 being said that would be awesome in your future DWPS video if you could please explain (as you did so clearly with lean picking and your overall picking) your mechanics in your wrist itself and possibly forearm and elbow if you use them. At different speeds we should incorporate different muscles and I’m curious what you like to use and when especially for the DWPS alternate picking runs.

Finally and to circle back on your initial point, I will definitely be committing to those upstrokes.

CHEERS

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#40

I’ll try and make sure to include as much info as I can in the video. In the meantime, check out the CTC video on string hopping
https://troygrady.com/channels/tutorials/what-is-stringhopping/

How I learned to alternate pick
#41

KING Fisch… Here is an updated version of me playing the Sold My Soul lick:

Again apologies for the lighting. Turned on as much as I could in the room plus flash. My days off from work aren’t even days off anymore and I end up having a small window to do the stuff I love (this lol). Few things I wanted to share this time around:

  1. A good lean picking angle will allow you to more forcefully downstroke and upstroke to really accent the notes. One thing that floors me about Zakk is how “wylde” his pick attack is. It’s not all neat and pretty like MAB for instance. But he is able to smoothly attack the strings. I wonder if lean has a a big part in his picking mechanics? I’m sure he swipes like mad but I still don’t hear it…

  2. I discussed this with Troy and another guitar buddy of mine the other week. And again I felt it tonight when playing. I have a tendency to fix my right hand when palm muting and not move with the strings. Could be all the years of down picking Metallica and all the usual thrash suspects? Regardless my right hand tends to move off the bridge area to maintain DWPS and then the lick sounds bad OR I end up crosspicking by the A to D strings since my wrist is forced to curve as I lose the DWPS angle. Recommendations to combat this?

  3. When I slowed down and made it a point to accent that last upstroke on the Low E it helped me with the timing overall. I must consciously chunk this lick or else it goes to hell…

Best to you and our fellow members- BB

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#42

This looks better to me, I can tell you are still fighting the old habits, that’s normal in my experience and should go away with time and practice.

  1. I think Zakk uses bridge lean quite liberally you can see it in the video linked above and some of his instagram videos

  2. My hand definitely moves towards the floor slightly as I change strings. I do this by moving my forearm towards the floor, that way my palm can remain on the bridge in DWPS. Try running some full pentatonic scales up and down whilst maintaining your DWPS posture. This should reveal what variables you can change in order to string track effectively. There are some post on the forum about string tracking which will have some info in I suspect

  3. I chunk this lick every four notes, this helps with timing and note accentuation

the video I made about my picking is live in this thread

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Not able to keep smooth technique at slower speeds
#43

Morning! Since joining CTC and getting awesome advice from members including yourself, my technique has gotten much better. Funny though is its harder to unlearn your old crap than learn new stuff. And that is my case. But I guess I am being super cautious in that I don’t want to rebuild new habits that are not beneficial towards my playing. Re: your reply for #2, not to split hairs, but when you are going up the strings from low e to g for instance, would you say the driver is the forearm in your example? Do you feel you are pushing through with the forearm. In my case I feel the forearm activate over the shoulder/upper arm. Will definitely work on my pentatonic scales again…

Also will have a proper view of the new thread and circle back soon over there!

BB

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#44

KIng- One thing I realized that you do when DWPS is similar to what Troy does. You almost pop your right hand out on the upstroke. You accentuate the into and out of the plane movement. Almost like a conscious way to avoid crosspicking. For me it works at lower speeds because I can mentally correct myself in real time. At higher speeds I find that I lose form or it slows down some for me. Any ideas on the right hand movements to speak on?

#45

That sounds pretty close to what I experienced, the mental correction is pretty normal when learning a new movement in place of an old one, and when you play faster you end up firing the old movement because it’s stored in a chunk.

It helped me to think of the start and end point of where I want to the pick to move between as I was playing at a moderate speed. Remove variables, so do it on a single string, without your fretting hand if necessary . Once you have the movement ingrained you just apply it to the fretting hand and to crossing strings.

I imagine this is why you are swiping as per your comment on the other thread.

When the pick moves in a straight line as opposed to a curve, the A string in this case becomes a backstop if you are using rest strokes, therefore you won’t swipe through. If you are hitting the E string on the string change, the path of the pick stroke isn’t really DWPS, it needs to be coming in and out the plane of the strings for DWPS to work.

If you could post a video on your picking critique thread then it will be easier to diagnose the issue, rather than just guessing as to what your movements are :slight_smile:

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#46

I’ll definitely post soon for review! When you said “firing the old movement” does this mean I will recall and do the old movement because of old habits? Sorry I misunderstand the context of firing in this case? Want to clarify. Look for a video soon King.

#47

Here is an updated video for review! Few things.

  1. When you DWPS, aside from supination and and wrist deviation (up and down wrist movement), what else are you concentrating on?
  2. I found some more success moving my right hand towards the pickups in terms of consistent palm muting. I had a real issue lifting my right hand when palm muting and I flubbed notes as a result.

Thanks as always!

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#48

This looks better bullseye. I think there is still some curve in the pick stroke, it looks like you are going into the string in a straight line but then gliding off the string slightly once you strike it. Keep working on making the tip of the pick move in as straight of a line as possible, in and out of the plane of the strings. It should travel along the same path for both up and downstrokes.

The only thing I think about now once my hand is in position is moving the pick backwards and forwards,
that being said when I started out I made a conscious effort to make pick move as straight as possible.

By “firing the old movement” I meant that the old movement is stored in muscle memory, above a certain speed your brain can’t intervene with the movement and instead uses a stored sequence of movements a.k.a. a chunk. Trial and error will tell you what the highest speed you can play at is, without the old movement being used. The fastest speed you can play at without making errors in your form/physical mechanics is the one you should practice at. Troy talks about this idea in the newest cross picking live stream and I think it holds up here too. It’s better to be mechanically correct than musically correct when learning these things. You can correct the musical errors once you have figured out the movement. I would probably drop the position shifts in the exercise you are using, simply to remove variables so that you can concentrate more on your picking hand.

I’d read up on closed vs. open loop motor learning, this helped inform my practice Speech-Language Pathology/Stuttering/Fluency-Shaping Therapy/Motor Learning and Control - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

I’d like to see a shot with some of your forearm in if you get the chance, I found that when I consciously tried to use my forearm to pick, like gypsy jazz players, i couldn’t go that fast. My forearm/wrist movement blend happened by focusing on moving the wrist. Currently it looks like there’s a lot of forearm involved but that is conjecture until I can see it.

Hopefully this is helpful, I’m pretty swamped at the moment so it may take some time for me to respond to your updates but I will try my best :slight_smile:

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#49

This is extremely helpful advice. I have a similar problem at the moment, although the reason seems different.

As a UWPS I consciously started to work on pure DWPS-stuff, as the DWPS-part of my TWPS is giving me trouble. What I’ve achieved so far is, placing my hand i a suplicated setup, I can do DWPS-stuff up to about 140 bpm/16ths. I can go a lot faster, but then the travel-path of the pick becomes parallel to the guitar-body with the pick being tilted downwards. This way, at about 160bpm I’m starting to get the same old trouble again by having to incorporate forearm rotation on every string-change. Also the combination of pick-travel and suplicated position leads to? Yes, getting stuck on the upstroke or, as I seem to have solved that problem by including edge-picking into the equation, not clearing the strings on the upstroke. Even worse on no stroke :wink:

So it seems I have to put in a lot of practice at around 130 bpm. I’m quite curious to see if all of a sudden I can replicate that movement up to 190 bpm or if I still have to work that up step-by-step.

Thomas

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#50

Swamped here too King Fisch so no worries on a reply! Thank you for the review. I read thru that Wiki page, lot of good and new information to think on…

Just to clarify before I can post a forearm focused video, when you say that I glide off the string once I strike it, what do you mean? I come into the string on a straight path and then continue that downstroke with a slight curve to it? Is the issue in your opinion once I make contact on the downstroke or the upstroke is an issue still? Sorry to nitpick, want to consciously know what to focus on. Chat shortly and have a great weekend coming up- Bullseye

#51

I really want you make some progress on this! So I’m going to call it like I see it.

This to me looks substantially not much different from where you started. In particular, look what you’re doing at [edit, sorry - wrong timestamp] 42 seconds. In no way should you be making this type of movement, at any speed, this many months into this. These type of bouncy movements should be banished entirely from your vocabulary, or you will never learn better ones. If you continue to make these movements, even when you are just demonstrating something slowly where you think it doesn’t matter, you are simply reinforcing these movements, and you will have them forever.

Second, your playing speeds are way too slow to learn what “smooth and fast” feels like. You’re still at the point in this process where you have not internalized the feeling of pickslanting. In order to experience that click, you need to “floor it”, as Andy Wood likes to say.

If you say, well, this is the fastest I can go, I am going to say it is not. It is because you have internalized the bouncy movement that you can’t go faster. I guarantee you, you can tap on a table way faster than this. Which means you don’t have a speed problem, you’re using the wrong movement. If that’s the case, you have to radically bust out of this jail cell.

How do you do that? You do it by aggressively trying something completely different. How about elbow? How about forearm? How about uwps motions. There is too much emphasis on “dwps” here, or “playing like Zakk”. It is holding you back. Aggressively demo all the movements until you get one that is closer to you table tap speed. It doesn’t matter if it’s “dwps” or “uwps” right now. What matters is that you break out of jail.

When you see the same problems repeating over a span of months like this, that’s a strong indicator that you are not really changing what you are doing. You might think you are, but you are not. The mind plays tricks on you, but the camera does not lie.

Finally, when you film these technique update videos - which are great - please eliminate the verbal commentary. It makes it much harder to zero in on the movements we need to look at. Instead, keep them short, and include just the playing we need to look at. Include a couple different speeds, thirty seconds tops, is fine. Include any important commentary in the thread as text. This makes it much easier for I and others to quote and reply to specific questions, one at a time.

Sorry for the negativity. I don’t want you spinning your wheels and I feel like a good guitar teacher would have laid all this out months ago. For that I apologize!

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#52

ZERO negativity here! Just a willingness to help from you and every great member here on CTC. Quite the opposite… I’ll do my best to get an updated video out playing on one string at different tempos and will add any comments in writing if that’s OK? Thx

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#53

BTW one issue which I mentioned to @mr_fisch93 a while back was, being able to maintain DWPS and palm mute when changing strings. I know I have a long way to go but I find that I end up doing my crosspicking, bouncy type motion when trying to maintain a solid palm mute. Just food for thought as we progress.

#54

Hey @Troy- The first video is of me playing 16th notes starting at 100bpm and I worked my way up to 170bpm using a simple 1 2 3 4 chromatic on the low E string only. Please let me know what you think. I wanted to work different tempos for you to see if and how I was changing mechanics #1 and #2 not be robotic either. Looking forward to improvements I can make on that one :+1:

The second video I wanted to highlight my crosspicking before any concept or knowledge of CTC and what I believe has helped me some in my DWPS journey. Granted I have a heck of a way to go… On a side note when using this bouncy motion I specifically feel it on the top of my wrist near wrist joint itself. It is like that knocking on the door motion from the Mechanics video.

When I play slower and focus on that into and out of the plane movement I find it best to use forearm rotation. Finally I “get” what forearm rotation means and feels like at least at low speeds. When speeding up I find myself creeping back into that crosspicking territory and have to slow it down again. One thing which you do when DWPS and I hope to develop myself, is your right hand looks like it’s making a hammer motion almost? You have a way to pop up that upstroke with force (16:50 in the Primer video is a good example of your DWPS upstroke What is Pickslanting? (Pickslanting Primer, All Intro Chapters) - YouTube) If you had to pinpoint how your upstrokes specifically are as good as they are mechanically what are you focusing on?

I know I’m jumping the gun as I need to get one string down before switching to others, is palm muting. As I palm mute going from the E to D string, my right hand feels planted and I end up curving my wrist. Something I wanted to throw out there for the future.

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#55

Hi @Troy! Just wanted to do an updated video from 100bpm to 130bpm using the Sold My Soul lick we’ve discussed before at length :smile: HOPING my DWPS is a little better? It felt better than before. Few things to highlight:

  1. I feel solid on the low E maintaining a DWPS hand position. As I move to the A and D strings my picking hand starts to go a little parallel. Not sure why? I did find that if I pick towards the bridge (slanted angle from left to right as I work my way up) it helps a little bit.
  2. Lean picking definitely helped more since using it thanks to @mr_fisch93 but still having trouble on upstrokes at faster speeds.
  3. Forearm rotation has also been a big positive in my DWPS. But I seem to lose that rotation as speeds increase. Recommendations?

Thank you again, looking forward to your insights- BB

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#56

Hi! Thanks for posting. I general I think looks good. However I still think you would get better results doing what I suggested, which is developing smooth motion by flooring it regardless of whether it is ‘DWPS’ or not. In other words, surveying the all the available motions to find what works now and not worrying about these two string licks and playing specific things that Zakk plays - yet.

Have you tried looking for a professional teacher here on the forum who can do the motions? I feel like you would benefit from someone giving you immediate feedback and who will lay down a little tough love if necessary. The forum is great for periodic feedback but it doesn’t take the place of the kind of immediacy that teachers provide.

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