Brand new here. Looking for assistance

Technique Critique
#1

First off, how does this look to you guys? As far as the “starting fast” bit, that is. I don’t have too many questions revolving around single strings other than that right now.

EDIT: If anyone is wondering why I was moving my hand toward the headstock - My hand is having a tendency to slowly migrate toward the bridge while doing this, and I prefer the warmer tone of picking further up the strings, although picking closer to the bridge seems much easier to me, at least on single strings.

One problem I am having is when I go to different strings, particularly low > high strings, the meaty part of my thumb gets in the way. It hits the bridge pickup, bridge saddles, and strings and severely dampens my accuracy and speed, as seen in the second portion of the video where I try faster picking on the high E string. (It’s actually high D. Drop tuning ftw.) I’m just not sure what to try to solve this. If you guys need me to send a more close-up video, or maybe just a picture, or whatever, let me know.

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#2

Welcome to the forum @BuffsOP!

My impression is that this speed is a bit too low to assess whether the motion is efficient. As a rule of thumb, you should aim to hit around 150 bpm 16th notes, with moderate effort, to make sure you are doing a truly alternating picking motion. If you feel like you are stuck with this movement, you could try different pick grips and hand positions - have checked out the Primer chapters on pick grip, for example?

Also, are you keeping the picking motions small on purpose? I noticed that sometimes the notes cut off too early, perhaps because the pick never moves far away enough after plucking the note. If so, you can start by trying slightly bigger motions.

EDIT: bigger motions are generally achieved by putting a little more force into the motion.

PS: even though I mentioned the 150bpm thing, a metronome is not necessary and can even be distracting. The idea is to just try and pick fast, then you can look at the recording later to estimate the tempo.

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#3

I think what’s happening with the cutoff thing is my pick gets hung up on the strings. After playing around a little bit today, it seems to mostly happen on upstrokes, which makes sense because it’s upward pick slanting, so maybe I should rotate the pick a bit to get it to flow a little smoother.

As for the speed - I got it to around 150 BPM today with a little more effort, but the biggest problem I’m having is I can’t seem to get it right on low strings because my thumb is what I’m using to mute noise and when I move to low strings, it lose control over pick depth when there are no strings there to rest on. Then I lose freedom of movement due to the base of my thumb and palm catching on the pickup and saddles when playing on strings higher than the G. (I described this problem in the OP, so this is nothing new.) Any tips for these issues/?