Thinking about this the last couple nights… I’ve been a casual CtC viewer since I first saw Season 1 and some of Troy’s transcriptions of Vai licks on YouTube and was impressed by the level of analysis he put into his transcriptions (and videos!), and a Masters in Mechanics member for maybe a month now, working on my picking in earnest. There’s a couple things I certainly hoped for/expected to happen that seem to be happening - my picking is faster, looser, and more accurate than it used to be, for one.
However, there are a few things that I’ve noticed I’m doing differently that I don’t recall consciously changing, and yet here I am…
- I’ve always been an “open handed” picker, with my picking hand fingers kind of splayed out. Recently, I’ve noticed that, through no conscious decision making of my own, I’ve been picking with a “closed” hand, with the fingers curled up under my hand, though not in a tight fist. I still anchor with my palm on the bridge, though I believe more lightly than I used to. The funny thing is, this is something I TRIED to develop a number of years ago, but I couldn’t get it to stick - the tighter hand position seemed like it would have less inertia than one with fingers flying everywhere, so it seemed like a more efficient way to pick (and I know there’s a ton of examples to the contrary, EVH perhaps most notably, but still, lol), but yet now that my picking technique is starting to flow a little better, it’s just kind of happening.
- I’ve lowered my straps a couple inches. Again, I don’t know how conscious this was, as I’m always tweaking length here and there… But the other night I realized my strap length was about as long as it’s ever been, and it felt more natural to me. I suspect this is just because I’m doing a lot more alternate picking than I used to, and it’s a more relaxed arm positioning for me, but that’s just a hunch. At any rate, it’s another thing that wasn’t a conscious change, so much as a series of minute adjustments added up to a pretty big change. I’ll try to find one I haven’t changed and compare, but I’d guess it’s at least a 1-2" change, perhaps 2-3".
- This one’s still evolving… but, as a product of the lower strap and a lot of the yngwie licks, I suspect, my fretting hand wrist angle seems to be changing. I’ve always favored an angle tilted a little bit relative to the neck, angled down to the floor a little further, as this seems to result in less wrist angle while doing wider stretches on the neck of the guitar and I had some RSI issues in college. Thanks largely to the Yngwie repeated 6s, I suspect, that angle is gradually coming more in line wiith the plane of the neck. I THINK this will ultimately be a good thing, but it’s something I’ll be monitoring very carefully, as I have had some tendonitis/RSI problems in the past using a more conventional “classical” fretting position like this, and binge practicing wide stretches. Where I had ended up was probably closer to more of a “blues” thumb position angle (thumb around the top of the neck, rather than resting on the flat of the neck behind the fretboard) as you have a slighly canted wrist angle there too, but I’ll need to give it some more time to see what happens.
Idunno. I think it’s interesting. I’ve been playing more than 20 years, and after doing some extremely focused picking practice for really no more than a month or so, I’ve already seen other aspects of my technique begin to evolve subconsciously in ways I wouldn’t have expected, but probably make sense from an efficiency standpoint.
Anyone else notice anything like this?
