1 starts off with slight downward pick slanting associated forearm rotation or supinated I think (rolled away from the player)
2 also has ulnar wrist deviation (wrist is also away from the player) as part of the orientation
And it start with wrist deviatiom from 9 o’clock to 0 o’clock hitting the string then 2 o’clock where the extension gets involved to help the downstroke escape. And and for most of the movement it goes from the neutral wrist deviation position where its not one way or the other and only ends up going twoard ulnar devation and returning to neutral. Not into the other side (radial deviation I think)
Does he use the elbow on the upward pick slanting, downward pick slanting, TWPS, or all three?
You said he uses wrist extension to help with the downstroke escape. What else , if anything helps him with downstroke escape? Such as maybe wrist deviation? There are wrist movements that are sort of half way in between strict wrist extension and wrist deviation? Does he use those mixtures of half way between wrist extension and wrist deviation or is it pure wrist extension that he uses to help with the downstroke escape?
I don’t think he uses elbow to generate the motion but for the string tracking yes, and yes it’s a blend, so the clock face analogy is where if ur wrist is neutral and held out in front of you and u imagine a clock, the points 6 and 12 o clock are pure extension and 3 and 9 are pure deviation so everything else is a blend of the two , so that’s where the 9 0 2 comes in , it start with dwps posture and come in straight with deviation only, 0 is hitting the string and 2 is the escaped downstroke part where there flexion and deviation
The talk includes slow motion footage of Andy, David Grier, and Molly Tuttle, and in general, is our best introduction to the way the wrist works.
“Pickslanting” really doesn’t matter here. Andy’s motions are all pretty flat to the strings, so small changes in his grip will make his pick have a slightly different appearance, sometimes uwps, sometimes dwps. As long as these changes are within a few degrees one way or another, the effect is minimized.
Pickslanting motion is really about the motion path, i.e. which way does the pick escape, and which way does it trap. Andy has a uwps / 2wps mode, and he has a crosspicking mode. They are all derived from his “902”-style setup, either the ulnar side, the radial side, or both sides connected. Which it sounds like you are describing correctly, more or less. Where did you learn that, did you watch the lesson I linked to above?
Yes I’ve watched all the carl miner, Albert Lee, Steve Morse, and the live video you tagged and the forearm one and thanks Troy! So just to double check it’s a pretty flat motion like Carl miner. And does the forearm influence the escapes ? Like if I just used forearm rotation it sort of creates a circle but is Tiring to rotate it that extremely.
Andy is mostly a wrist player. For those who nerd out on this stuff, they might notice that there are small bits of forearm motion here and there in Andy’s playing. But he is not like Jimmy Herring, where there is some amount of turning all the time. The amount of forearm in what Andy does is small enough that if you are trying to understand the big picture of his approach, you can basically ignore it.
In the bigger picture, Andy is mostly a wrist player with a slightly supinated arm position. He can get his downstroke escapes and upstroke escapes from mostly that same arm position. He makes tiny adjustments here and there to his forearm but again, I think you can mostly ignore that, and just try to get the flat motion happening with a centralized arm position that is good for both. That broadcast you watched is our best description currently of how to do that. I like the roll patterns because it is easy to know when you are doing them smoothly and when you aren’t.
You can then take that same centralized arm position, and try other lines with it. I think this mostly boils down to just having the arm be relaxed and thinking about the “right” strokes that escape when necessary, and “left” strokes that also escape when necessary - as we discussed in the broadcast.
Awesome thanks Troy! You’re the man.
I also had a follow.up question if that’s cool.
I’m able to.do the wrist crosspicking rolls and the more.jimmy.herring kind with more rotation but the faster.i go the less I can trace the strings.
So I end up using the shoulder I believe to track the string with a bit of wrist. And with allt of string skipping I am using the shoulder. Espiecially in like a pedal situation if I’m.pedaling between a note on the door string like d itself but up the ocatve on the 12fret and then playing a triad on the same position up and pedal the d with the triad on the next three strings. So it involves a lot of tracking necessary. I was wondering what other people were doing. Ex like shoulder or elbow tracking or wrist only
I can’t really comment on this without video. But big string-skipping patterns really aren’t super common and would try to be concerned first with whether the motion is working correctly across smaller distances where moving your whole arm is not an issue.
If you’re saying the motions don’t work correctly when you speed up in a smaller area, that sounds like a different problem. You can definitely have a movement at one speed and not another. This is a coordination issue. Even in athletics, you might be able to do something gracefully at one speed, but when you try to put more power into it you change the form because you haven’t learned what it feels like to do the graceful form with more muscle - or more speed, or whatever. This is where the constant testing at different speeds and power levels comes in. Test, film, evaluate, test again. If things aren’t working, don’t waste another minute on repeating it. Change the form, see if it feels any better, and film it again.
