Hey guys,
The ascending/descending fours pattern has been a thing I’ve been working on on-and-off for a while. I wanted to pop up a video and see if anyone could spot any places where my technique could be tweaked or if it’s just a matter of lather, rinse, repeat at this point.
Cheers!
Hey @Totem, I think that at this intermediate speed it’s harder to spot problems, because it is in principle possible to hit all the correct notes with relatively inefficient motions. Only thing I noticed is that you occasionally catch the open E string on the ascending downstroke, causing noise. We could call this “swiping” - happens to the best of us at times so make sure the left hand is dampening the strings around the ones you are playing.
What happens when you try to play this pattern close to your maximum picking speed?
Hi @tommo, thanks for the reply! Ya I definitely fall victim to messy swiping. The technique is coming along slowly though. I filmed another video that’s pretty close to my max picking speed, and tbh I was able to play it better than I thought I was. My main complaint with the execution is that the note before the string change is audibly longer than the other notes, making the timing sound a bit sloppy. This is maybe a sign that my string tracking isn’t super efficient? Let me know what you think. But after working on my picking as much as I have been lately, I’m definitely seeing improvement which is encouraging!
Hey @Totem thanks for filming this, looks and sounds much better and smoother than the first attempt! I think you got rid of some “bounciness” that I could see in the first video and a result you got a simpler, faster and more reliable movement!
I haven’t noticed this with a couple of listens, I’ll come back to it later and see if I can hear it as well. In any case:
I’m skeptical that you would need any string tracking for a 2-string range - i.e. everything should be accessible from the same hand/arm placement.
You have everything running pretty smoothly here, so it may be that just being aware of the timing you want will fix the problem. You could temporarily try to forget the string changes, and just focus on the regularity of upstrokes/downstrokes?
Just guessing here but it could be that you’ll end up making all the pickstrokes with a similar movement size (regardless of whether you are staying on a string or moving to another).
Let us know how that goes!
Thanks, will do! After listening back, I can’t really notice that timing issue I was talking about yesterday either… I’ve seen Troy refer to the “long tail” of the learning process, and I think that’s kinda where I’m at now as I’ve got my basic movement down and I’m just slowly ironing out the kinks through trial and error.
Cool I’m also in the long tail for many things, and struggling with many others 
I think you have two very good reference videos here that you can use as reminders every now and then: the more “bouncy” first video and the smoother second video!
@Totem correction! Your first video does not look bouncy either, just a bit slower which allows for the curvature of the picking motion to be a bit more visible!
So everything looks good and you are going in the right direction!