Hi,
I’ve just become aware of Troy and his material. I’ve been playing 20 years .
Always struggling with alternate picking . Both my hands are fast but syncing them together was always impossible to me. I’m going to practice the method shown in the primer video and if there’s even the smallest of improvements I’ll buy the course straight away. I just don’t want buying another course to sit on the shelf with the rest of them… any advice would be great …
Thanks
Hi! Thanks for stopping by. If you can already move fast than that’s good news because that’s the first hurdle — and often a significant one even for experienced players.
The sync problem is comparatively easier to solve. The most common approach involves using accents on simple repeating single-string patterns that have an even number of notes in them, and so always begin with the same pickstroke. We call this process “chunking”, a term we borrowed from motor learning research. It can be boring and repetitive if you just repeat the same stuff for hours, and that actually reduces the effectiveness of this type of “practice”. So the more variety of patterns you can use, and the more musical you can make it (playing to backing tracks over different chords, moving around the neck, etc.), the more it will feel like real, varied playing, and the better this phase works.
However, before you do that, I would still take a look at your picking motion to see what it is you are using. The motion tutorial we just posted on YouTube is only one type of motion, and even then, only one type of pickstroke: the upstroke escape. It can be your go-to pickstroke for single-string playing, but if you want to play multi-string phrases, it only works on phrases where the final note on the string is an upstroke. And there is plenty of variety among such phrases. This is just an FYI that there are in fact different alternate picking motions, and those motions generally only fit with specific phrases.
Let us know how else we can help!
Hi Troy,
Thanks for your reply.
After looking at my picking I seem to use upward picking with the pick more or less flat.(I’m thinking because I play country , and use hybrid picking this is the case)
I tried Downward slanting and it’s completely alien. Should I persevere???
How should I use this material ? Record myself etc?.
Thanks
Dom
Hello dom123do, I am pretty much in the same boaut, my picking is somewhat fast, but not as accurate/clean as I want it to be meaning at somepoint during pentatonic runs and soloing, as I try to speed up, I get sloppy. I am hoping the material here on this site can help me with speed and “cleaning up” my soloing. i am also interssted in other scales and patterns for soloing I too will pursue purchasing the course once my faith is sealed with it. 
Hi ,
Good stuff, keep me updated on any stuff your working on from Troy and I’ll do the same , exchange a few things 
Good observations! Country players who want their fingers to be “on deck”, as Andy Wood likes to say, i.e. on deck as in ready to go for hybrid when they need it, do use a less obvious arm position. Let’s call it “less obvious” because from this arm position you can still have access to any kind of pickstroke, either downstroke escape or upstroke escape. Also, from this arm position the slant of the pick won’t be so visible. So looking at the pick and thinking it’s neutral or straight up and down is normal / common.
Instead, the way the pick is moving is the best way to understand what kind of motion you are making. i.e. Does the pick go up in the air when you play a downstroke, when you play an upstroke, or both? That tells you what kind of motion you’re making. When most people go fast, they have one default motion that they click into, and it’s usually either upstroke escape (i.e. upstroke in the air) or downstroke escape (downstroke in the air).
From there, if you use wrist motion, the new wrist motion section has the most step-by-step instructions for getting these movements to happen. Even if you’re already doing one of these, it can help to understand exactly what you’re doing, since most of us learned this stuff subconsciously. We put the upstroke escape chapter on YT. The downstroke escape chapter is in the product, as are some other thoughts about speed and lots of thoughts about getting your grip and arm position set up.
As part of this, I think taking a look at your grip is a good idea, and even trying more than one grip, as a way of shaking the tree a little. The pick grip section of the Primer has most of what we know on that subject, and then the wrist motion section revisits that again just as a refresher.
After that, it’s hand synchronization via chunking, as we talked about before.
Ok thanks Troy
Is there exercises in the course to work on each subject?..
Yes there are thousands of musical examples all over the web site, hundreds in the Pickslanting Primer itself, that you can use with all these techniques. But…
I don’t like to think of them as “exercises” and I don’t think highly repetitive practice on a specific phrase, or small number of specific phrases, is necessarily the best way to acquire a new physical skill like a picking motion. At least not if that’s all you do. Instead, if your goal is to learn a new motion or smooth out an existing one, try to think of things like a supermarket. You want a big basket with lots of variety in it that closely approximates what “real world” playing looks like. This gives your hands lots of opportunity to learn what “correct” feels like, so that if one phrase wasn’t working, maybe another one will. They won’t all be perfect at first, and that’s ok. But they will gradually clean up over time, together.