Artifacts and Picknoise in fast runs (Economy Picking)

Playing Technique
#21

I can’t wait to read 'em! Thanks man!

Got some ordered. Jazz 3’s are Nylon also, but a little bit too small. I’ve gotten used to the flows so I will stick with 'em. I think Nylon will help substantially! Thanks, dude!

What gain level are you at? Like if you were on a distortion pedal and the gain was 0-100% where would you be at? Also, I think I have a “mixed pack” here somewhere… *Digging *Searching *Rummaging *Strikes pay dirt… Okay cool, I have one and it’s thinner, yep substantially less “chirp”.

Thanks, everyone!

#22

Not especially high, lol. I play throguh a Mesa MArk V, and the preamp gain is usually around 1 oclock. Varies a little depending on pickups - not a great way to demonstrate otherwise, but here’s a clip from some in-progress stuff I’m working on with my Strat. I’d get a hair more saturation using something with humbuckers, I’d say, and this is a little on the cleaner end… but not much. :rofl:

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#23

The recording sounds good. Did you mix and then sync audio, or is it live feed?

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#24

Awesome! That sounds really, really good! Good job, man - and thanks for sharing!

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#25

Thanks! This is iphone footage, with audio from Reaper mixed in afterwards. The sync isn’t perfect, I’m afraid - I have NO idea why but it seems iphone audio is a little out of sync with video, so my usual approach of just zooming way in and aligning peaks with the camera audio doesn’t work, and I’ll have to start there and slide it around a bit by hand, which is madness-inducing.

But, guitars were recorded DI, and then reamped thorugh my Mark V after I was done for the sake of having something to share. I’ll go back and re-record reamped tracks when I’ve finished the album and spend a little more time on mic positioning, getting the amp dialed in just right, etc etc etc, plus my Roadster was still in the shop at the time but I picked it back up Friday. I’ve only done very little experimentation but when I recorded an A/B reamp with the Mark in IV mode and the Roadster in Ch3 (sort of Ch2 on a 3-channel recto) Vintage, I think, to see which sounded better, at some point along the way I ended up just playing them both back at once and it sounded fucking huge, so something like this with minimal rhythm accompaniment I might end up using both amps layered on top of each other.

This is all still really minimally mixed, nothing on the guitars save some delay, and… maybe a compressor on the bass, maybe nothing at all? I honestly don’t remember. Drums are still a Superior 3 preset but I’ll multi-out the kit into Reaper and mix it from scratch when the time comes; I think I want something with some real grittiness and roominess to it here, though it’ll depend how it sounds once I get some rough mixes in and if it sounds like crap, then I might just play it safe with a similar vibe.

But, thanks guys! I’m kind of way inside my head on this project right now, it’s really good to get some outside validation that it’s moving in the right direction!

(To bring this a little more on topic, this is a 1.0mm Flow!)

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#26

I’ve found worn picks without really smooth surfaces leads to unwanted high overtones. Similarly, more pointy picks like the Jazz III seem to have those high overtones compared to more rounded picks. Use a 10x loop to examine your pick for tiny nicks and the like.

Others have also commented on amp settings and pick material, which also matter IMHO. Good luck, and your playing is awesome.

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#27

Cool, thanks so much! Yeah - I have discovered the same. Watched the CTC pick chirp vids and read all of the threads and they are really conclusive! I am hard on my picks (Pick destroyer) so that is definitely part of the problem; they don’t stay new for long!

#28

I have some pointers:

  • Your playing is fine and chances are you are overthinking. I wouldn’t notice any issue if you hadn’t said there was something to fix.

  • Dynamics are your friend. Playing everything with the same intensity might reduce the benefits of accent-based chunking.

  • You are trying too hard and that might be limiting yourself. Focus more on the groove and less on the pickstrokes and I’m sure you’ll come up with a tone that makes you happier.

PS: That Wolfgang gives me GAS in the worst possible way. It’s just too cool.

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#29

You are most definitely correct! Really, this whole picking dilemma started out some time ago, I knew there was something up, some stuff worked great, and some stuff (seemingly easy stuff!) was prone to error/choke, etc. I wanted to repair it, find THE way to pick so that I could “solve” it and have a one-size-fits-all/magic-button approach to picking that covered everything! Hah!

Yeah, for sure. I am trying to get a really consistent rhythmic control for ALL of the things I do with a pick, and in this instance… well, I definitely learned a thing or two from paying attention to myself and going back over @Troy , @Tom_Gilroy and @tommo 's notes over the years. Probably my biggest weakness is stubbornness hahah

Possibly that stubbornness coming into play. It’s like, hmmm should I just be “economy guy” or should I be “tap/legato” guy or “fingers” guy or keep killing myself trying to be “Alternate pick anything guy” when really, I think that it might be wisest to blend these things and focus on the things that succeed as opposed to beating the weak points to death.

So here’s the conclusion I have come to;

  • A motion that works, it’s pretty OK fast also - use and develop it.
  • Alternate pick even number of notes per string using DSX. Indeed many of the scale sequences and whatnot that I do as attempted economy work out well re-arranged for 2NPS, 4NPS, 6 NPS, 4+2 NPS etc
  • Ascending economy picked/sweeped lines are problematic. Hybrid picking to the rescue!
  • Descending economy picked/sweeped lines work out pretty well, keep those.

Less of a playing style and more of a gameplan or strategy lol

Yeah, I love the EVH stuff. Cool guitars. Really fun to play!

EDIT: Here’s an example of what I think the strategy kind of resembles. lol A primitive version for sure, but gotta start somewhere. I tried a few takes with some economy ascended lines and all I can say is… :face_vomiting: lol Still some chirping, and this one ends up pretty elbow’ed out, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. Oh yeah, I am trying to improve the audio and video fidelity… Zoom Q2HD seems better than my Imac, still not as good as my iphone.

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#30

Love the run between 0:07 and 0:13! Super tasty and sounding clean to me :smiley:

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#31

Ahh that was my version of “ascending 4’s”! I still want to default to umm, lazier things so it’s going to take time to sound a bit less stiff.

Thanks so much for the kind words!

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#32

Okay, now I’ve been doing some thinking, along with some reading and I think I have an idea why it is exactly that the ascending economy thing doesn’t work as well (for me). Good lord someone correct me if I am wrong;

So since I am a DSX’er, that means that my upstrokes are trapped. Escape on the downstroke, awesome. That part is understood. So when doing sweeping, descending lines are going to work out way better because the entrapment lends itself well to the umm directional flow of a sweep. (Does that make sense? Not sure it does…)

But when I do an ascending line, I think that I may need to change to USX so that the downstroke is trapped, and that lends itself to THAT directional flow - down the strings. Watching the Frank Gambale CTC series I am pretty sure that he’s doing 2 way pickslanting and doing just this ie “leaning into the curves” comment…

Safe to say then that if one wants to economy pick everything, one maybe needs to develop USX as well as DSX?

#33

Wouldn’t necessarily go THAT far but it really depends on many aspects and how how extreme that DSX of yours is. even then may just take a slight adjustment. Really, since economy doesn’t really require an escape at all, an adjustment, if even required, only takes enough to move the escape enough away from a pure directional escape towards one that doesn’t inherently have one, or a 0 deg. This is much less than switching to the opposite end of the escape spectrum.

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#34

Good points. In considering that, I think maybe that the first order of business might just be to lighten the hell up! hahaha I’ll circle back in a bit and see if there’s any changes! Thanks, everyone!

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#35

Okay, I messed around with lightening up, and a bunch of other stuff - lol Really to no avail, I mean I can do stuff like ascending 3nps scale or such, but the descending lines are always quite a bit clearer. After some careful examination, the “edge” of the pick seems to do a small pick scrape when I try and do ascending economy lines a la 3+3 or a 3+ 1.

So I sad to myself, “Self it might be time to try something different..” lol Intellectually, I understand what works and what doesn’t seem to work for me, however I am sort of dim when it comes to clueing in to something else I have at my disposal; hybrid picking.

For a 3nps scale, I feel like I got not too bad results with up down up middle finger pluck down hammer

U D U M D(hammer)
-------------5—6—7-----
—5-6-7-------------------

I included a video for reference, apologies for the repetition and me kind of going off on tangents, but lots of 3+3 and 3+1 with hybrid looking after the ascent. Thoughts, anyone? Currently the best I can do!

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#36

Sounds quite good to me!

On paper, this looked a little unnecessarily complicated to me, but you pulled it off, so kudos!

I have probably mentioned this before elsewhere, but I think the fastest way to play a straight ascending 3nps scale using only DSX is to do up, down, hammer on every string. Uniform, and easy to play. There’s video somewhere around here of Andy Wood doing it on mandolin, and that’s how Andy James plays a straight scale, as well.

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#37

Damn dude. Every time you post a video you sound better and better. Love your tone, too.

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#38

Yep, I do that one also, but it feels a little too legato for me, the way I am doing it only sacrifices 1 note as a hammer-on out of every 6, and the plucked note is pretty snappy so I actually enjoy the punctuation. I actually have a good DSX version of straight scales up and down as either 4 nps or 4+2 nps. They work very well, but the 3 nps fingerings for everything is just baked in, I had to find a way to leverage those… I didn’t want to “lose” them which is why I was trying to get a good economy picked thing going. 50% (Descending) hahaha

Aww man, thanks so much! I practice like the devil in an attempt to get this stuff all sorted and, you know maybe get a vocabulary going! lol I am becoming at peace with what I can’t do and finding a “way around it”! I think that’s the sort of thing that leads to interesting, non-uniform sounding music anyways. Well, I will keep telling myself that!

My tone! Thanks, man! The tone was EVH Wolfgang into Boss OD200 (DS1 setting), into Boss Nextone Special with a Boss DD500 in the loop. Then I just hit record with my Zoom Q2HD camera.

Still tons to work on, but I feel like I’m getting there. Bit by bit!

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#39

Are you keeping the same form as your dsx economy when ascending?
If you are, it’s possible that your ascending sweeps are getting a bit jammed which you’d also be able to hear.
Try rotate your arm slightly when ascending so that you have smooth sweeps.

Keep in mind I can’t see the pick angles close up, nor can I really hear the pick noise. It’s just something that I’m assuming based on a few comments.

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#40

Sounds good, vibrato reminds me of Bill Connors. The artifacts will disappear into hi-hats and cymbals - that’s why we have drummers… You could also try lower gain settings, it’s amazing what you can get used to.

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