I felt like I was cross picking…especially since I alt pick open string arpeggios (like at the end of this video) but I’m not totally sure. The movements are too small, perhaps? Let me know what you think. This is without trying to cross pick, this is my natural picking mechanic.
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Thanks for posting! Alternate picking anything that’s one note per string, you have to be escaping on both upstrokes and downstrokes or you’d hit the strings. So yes, that is crosspicking.
The pentatonic stuff looks a little more biased toward upstroke escapes - I think you can see the arm is turning more on the upstroke and pulling them up higher than the downstrokes. Doesn’t mean the downstroke isn’t also escaping, we can’t really see from this far away. But it doesn’t matter. Pentatonic licks starting on a downstroke are upstroke escape licks so there is nothing wrong with your form here.
In general, it is natural to see variation like this that biases your movement toward what is necessary for a given phrase. That is the whole concept of two-way pickslanting, and what you’re doing for your 2nps playing is similar.
I know you were asking about speed limits - there is no speed limit in what you are doing. If you try to play as fast as you can on a single string, and not think about the motion too much, what does it look like? Don’t try to “do” pickslanting or anything different than you normally do. Just try to play fast on a single string with smoothness. If you get a second to film that, that would be interesting to take a look at.
In general your technique is great and I wouldn’t worry about trying to make it be anything specific. It already seems to respond fine to what you are asking it to do. Instead, I would get some musical phrases together that you want to play and use those to make the motion more consistent in terms of feel and sound. You’re looking for all the notes to be struck cleanly with even attack, volume, and tone. You have the basic motions together to achieve that.
Nice work!
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Thanks Troy. Here’s another short video of my picking mechanic. I THINK I’m getting the double escape, but I’m still getting tripped up a lot when I try for faster bursts of speed. I also notice what I think is the dreaded upward wrist flexion when I end the phrase and transition back to the G string to repeat it. Is this something I should try to eliminate from my mechanic?
And here’s one more on a single string, w/ tremolo picking. I notice that when I try to top out my trem picking speed, my elbow gets involved.
Oh and I just realized I’ve used a white pick on a white pickguard. Ugh. I’m sorry!
I think you have a good foundation here. Looks like a forearm rotation + wrist method, which works for many players.
One thing I would suggest, is to try and over-escape as part of your tremolo workout. meaning, try and go way above and beyond the strings in both directions. but make sure and keep it relaxed. I do this, to help get a really clear idea of how it feels to escape on both sides.
Another thing I love is to tremolo in triplets, accenting the first note of each triplet (which will of course alternate).
It helps remove any ‘bias’ I might still have.
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Thanks @hamsterman! I’ll definitely try both of those exercises regarding my tremolo picking. It’s weaker than it should be.
I’m pretty excited. After posting these videos and watching them in slow motion on youtube, i was able to get a better idea of what was going on with my mechanics. I played for a few hours after this and things felt better than they ever have. I love making progress after being stagnant for so long. I’m ecstatic!
I’m not really seeing any elbow movement here. The bits of tremolo you’re doing in between the six-note pattern are almost entirely wrist. The bit at 25 seconds, for example. That’s just wrist movement.
Also, re: wrist extension - there is nothing wrong with wrist extension. Stringhopping is when you make the same movement on every pickstroke. Which movement that is depends on your arm position. If you’re Steve Morse, radial/ulnar deviation is your stringhopping movement. If you’re Andy Wood, flexion/extension is your stringhopping movement. Obviously, if we eliminated all these movements, you’d have no wrist movement at all! So don’t worry about that - you don’t have a stringhopping problem.
In your case you have two picking movements, the slower one that has more of crosspick look and capability involves a blend of arm and wrist. Your faster movement is more exclusively wrist and looks like a pickslanting movement. Both of these movements look fine to me and I don’t think you need to work on movements, per se.
Instead what I notice in these clips is randomness. You’re speeding up, slowing down, playing the six-note phrase at one speed and the tremolo at another speed, and flip-flopping techniques when you do it. It makes it harder to know what is going on when things flip-flop like this.
What I would do is start to introduce some consistency. Do you have any phrases or solos you can play where you use one technique at one speed all the way through and you’re super locked up synchronized and clean? Because that’s where I’d start. Something that’s not just an exercise or a tremolo, but has musicality where you can start to turn off your mechanical brain and focus on whether or not it sounds good. The “Intro Solo” we did way back in the day is one example of something like this:
The idea here was to write something that has an even number of notes per string all the way through, for pickslanting purposes. That entire ascending section in the beginning works this way. I start that on an upstroke here so I can us dwps. But I more commonly play this starting on a downstroke so it works as a uwps line as well. You could easily modify this type of line to come back down and connect with itself, turning it into a phrase that can be looped. Or you could continue it “through composed” style, non-repeating, taking it to other strings or moving horizontally across pairs of strings. Whatever you like.
The idea again is two-fold. If you have have something to play that is musical, you can more easily evaluate whether it is starting to sound good by using your artistic brain rather than your mechanical one. Put on some gain and some verb and make it sound killer. It motivates. And also, when the material is mechanically consistent like this, all even numbers of notes per string, it makes it much easier to get a handle on things like your faster-speed wrist motion which I can almost guarantee you is a pickslanting motion.
Specifically, I’d like to see you get to a point where you can tell the difference between these two techniques you have and switch between them at will. They are both good techniques and worth working on. The wrist-only method in particular should not be dismissed. It’s fast and has solid clear attack. If that were your only picking technique, and you spent a lot of time building vocabulary with that, even if it were all single-escape vocabulary with legato, you could wipe the floor with anyone.
In short, consistent, deliberate, and musical is the goal. Good work so far!
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Thank you, that intro solo, for exposing my shockingly poor harmonic minor knowledge beyond the basic 6th string root shape.