This one is hard to explain, so again I will demonstrate my problem in video form:
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Hey! Two quick things:
- Please post a written description of the question along with the video, makes it a lot easier to see at a glance what we’re talking about
- Have you gone through the wrist motion section of the Primer? If not, I’d do that first, lots there that may be relevant!
I think this “Wrist Motion Checklist” may be particularly helpful for running through one at a time various factors to look at here, including grip, approach angle, wrist alignment, anchoring, and the motion path itself:
Hey - yes I have looked at that. I can’t really explain my problem better than I did in the video - basically, I feel like my hand needs to be bent upwards in relation to the rest of my arm to achieve a perfect deviation movement. This causes problems including tension and the fact that it leaves me without the ability to anchor my arm on the body.
Hmm not really sure how to address this. If it’s hard to explain clearly, I think it’s hard for us to know what’s going on too.
You’ve already tried going through that “wrist motion checklist” step by step and trying to match exactly what Troy’s doing? Maybe it’d help to do that and then alter each of the different variables to try to get it more comfortable? (Of course blends of wrist + forearm work too as I think we’ve talked about previously.)
Feels like we have pretty much all the variables on the table, you know what they are and how to experiment with them, and it may just be a question of continuing to experiment to get the combination of all the variables working together as smoothly / comfortably as possible. Does that sound accurate? If so I’m not sure how much further technique critique may help!
To step back a bit, I think we’ve seen from past posts you can have a tendency to overanalyze and get caught up in aspects of technique that maybe seem weird but aren’t necessarily really a problem. And looking back through post history I see some convos from like a year ago where you’ve got some techniques basically working! See: DWPS, UWPS - are they actually 3 - 9 o'clock movements? I think Troy’s advice there still applies. Focus on the technique(s) you already have and work on dialing them in to be more consistent. Concretely, are you able to play the stuff you want to play? Ultimately that’s that matters!
Have you tried a guitar without an arm cut, like a telecaster? I think Troy is saying exactly what you are saying somewhere, that the wrist can’t be bent or it will easily turn into rotation, and that the arm cut can be a problem.
Yeah I do find telecasters easier to play for this reason. Although, as I’m about to explain, I actually don’t mind a bit of rotary action now, it just also a lack of stability.
I’m not sure we have, are you referring to forearm twist or the movement that MAB does?
Thing is about my playing is that it’s very inconsistent, even a year after that. I’ve never been able to play even most of the stuff I want to play, as picking feels very unnatural to me. It’s actually been a bit better in the last few days since I’ve just been thinking about the path of my pick rather than how my hand is making the pick move that way, and trying to memorise the feeling. But shifting my right hand position is still very tricky to do with any stability. I’ll post something about that another time though.
I was thinking of the “Crosspicking with the Wrist and Forearm” session we did (in Talking the Code) that covers compound wrist + forearm movements. This has come up a few times in your past discussions, see:
Also, we do cover this in the forearm motion video here in the Primer:
We’ll be adding more videos to this section pretty soon with additional detail. But the one there already gives a good overview of the forearm motion + how it’s commonly used in combination with wrist.