Just pulling out some awesome clips as we edit this. Here’s some blazing roll playing from Andy:
For the mechanically inclined: Beware the medium speed examples, they are stringhopping. Only the faster takes are efficient. And even then, you’ve got quite a mix of movements happening. You’ll see wrist movements, forearm movements, and finger movements. It’s complicated out there!
See if you can spot the movements. Hint: Andy engages the forearm on ascending inside string changes.
Thanks for pointing out the string-hopping. I’ve been tooling around with crosspicking since it’s been coming up a lot around here and I’m also really working my jazz knowledge lately and I’ve been noticing some serious speed limits on a physical level here. Pretty sure my crosspicking is just hopping in disguise–it looks a lot like what I’m seeing in this clip. No idea how to make it work.
Have you seen the little two-minute tutorial and have you tried that? I would recommend copping every detail of that, including the grip and arm placement, just in terms of eliminating variables, and filming what it looks like when you do it. Then you have an exact reference you can compare with to see what you may be doing differently.
yeah I’ve been trying it out since it was released but I can’t seem to make it feel easy or accurate, even at slow-mid tempos. I tried to take a video last night on my acoustic but after about 30 seconds of playing my wrist actually got sore, which has never happened to me before in my life. I’m clearly doing something wrong but I couldn’t figure out what so I had to stop.
When trying to crosspick with my hand close to the bridge like the video it feels like the pick is crashing into a wall–like there’s no chance in hell of it actually passing through the strings. I’ll take another crack at a video over the weekend.
Well that’s no good! Definitely don’t do anything that creates any kind of soreness or tension.
Can you do both uwps and dwps from the same arm position? This isn’t even really a crosspicking test, per se, it’s just a deeper truth about the way pickslanting works, which crosspicking takes advantage of.
In other words, if you plant the arm what you might think of as neutrally, where both pinky and thumb heel are on the strings, and play an escaped downstroke with a rest stroke upstroke, that’s a uwps pickstroke. However it is not a pure deviation movement. It’s a deviation plus flexion/extension movement that is making the pick escape.
Then do the opposite. Without moving the arm, find the escaped upstroke path, with the rest downstroke. This is pure deviation dwps movement.
The combination of these two movements is what crosspicking is. But first things first. Can you create those opposing diagonal movements.
I think this is what I am missing as well. By now I think I found some decent-feeling “primary DWPS” and a “primary UWPS” postures, but haven’t yet found a position that is comfortable for both.
It’s encouraging to know that also Andy had to practice this stuff though 
It looks like in this second interview he shares much more about his thought process during practice. Cool 
Don’t worry too much about comfortable. First worry about possible. Is there any position, close to what I’m showing you in the tutorial, maybe with both thumb / pinky heel contact patches, maybe with slightly more pinky heel contact patch and less thumb, where you can simply execute the individual “single arrow” motions the way I’m demonstrating? First establish that such a position exists at all. Doesn’t have to be like, oh yeah, I’m going to play this way all the time, just, yes I can do that.