Another crosspicking technique critique

Technique Critique
#1

Hey, I first wanted to say that Troy’s videos are amazing and his suggestion to use slow motion to record the right hand changed the way I trained my picking hand. I never really thought about the way I picked. So when I saw the string hopping video and realized that I don’t use pick-slanting, I started panicking thinking that my picking hand movement was string-hopping. However, it doesn’t feel like it at all, I even tried replicating the string hopping flexion of the wrist but it feels slow and sluggish. I’ve only been playing for a year now so I’ve yet to hit high speeds. I have included a video of me doing sixteenth triplets at 75 BPM in slow-mo and not in slow-mo. Any faster than that and my technique starts breaking down. Thank you for reading!

#2

Welcome to the forum!

No need to panic! However, if you can’t move your hand any faster than in the video, you have no way of knowing whether you motion is efficient or not. You can get away with almost anything at a low tempo!

That being said, it looks pretty good to me. The eternal question is: what does it look like if you try to go a lot faster?

Now, keep in mind that what you’re playing is not single escape material, if you’re aiming to pick every note. This in itself may be an additional challenge because it requires more complex right hand mechanics. Try going for something with an even number of notes per string, for example.

#3

Sorry, I just realised that the title of the thread had the word crosspicking in it… You’re no doubt perfectly aware of the different escapes required! But the advice still stands, to a degree. When trying to learn double escape material, or single escape with a helper motion, you still have to “floor it”, to use Andy Wood’s words. This “breaking down” that you speak of can be a valuable learning experience. In what way does it “break down”? Does it become sloppy? Tense? Can you make it feel any better by putting your hand in a different position, by holding the pick a different way? And so on.

#4

@Johannes The faster I go, the flatter the curve gets, and it gets to the point where I can’t really exit my current string. Moreover, I can’t really string track clearly and my rhythm goes off as I cannot switch strings after 3 triplets as well anymore. Even my pure tremolo caps off at like 180 triplets. I guess as a 1-year player this is my limit so far. I’ll keep on going with this movement and I’m sure I’ll be able to hit 130 sixtuplets by the end of 2021.

#5

Sorry for the delay in replying! This is not really how speed works, in our experience. Meaning that a top speed of 180 triplets suggests that there may be something inefficient with the motion you are using. the inefficiency is not likely to go away with repetition.

In constrast, an efficient motion can go fast on day 1. Maybe not clean, but fast.

So I can recommend 2 things:

  1. If you feel like it, show us a video of your fastest possible tremolo on a single string. No metronome, no regards for accuracy or timing, just go fast.

  2. Have you tried some of our “guitar-less” speed tests? There’s at least one of them that you can check out for free on youtube. I’ll link that below as well as the relevant primer section. In fact I’ll also link a video of one of our case studies from the forum - it may give you some ideas :slight_smile:

#6

@tommo My tremolo is around 140-150 bpm 16th notes? The video linked below also includes a slowmo of the movement. The movement is just too flat to do cross-picking with it.