Hey guys, I recently saw this video with Guthrie Govan talking about the difference in loudness when using strict alternate picking vs. economy picking. He basically says that when alternate picking, you can really only pick at a loud dynamic level. But with economy picking, you have more control over dynamic range.
I’m just trying to make conceptual sense of this statement. What is it about alternate picking that precludes soft playing? I don’t see why economy picking would be better for soft playing, is it something to do with how firmly you have to hold the pick? Additionally, economy picking is not possible for every note, as sometimes you have to string hop. In these string hopping cases is the dynamic level forced up to what it would be for alternate picking? Hope that makes sense, would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.
He says that economy picking is more natural and organic, hence it is more relaxed; consider the pick smoothly going in one direction vs. reciprocating. But note he also says to select the technique that is feasible and sounds appropriate.
To a large extent this comes down to the player and how good they are at various techniques. Anton Oparain has the opinion that when comparing these types of techniques you have to make sure you are comparing someone who is really good at economy picking to someone who is really good at alternate picking. Not to over generalize but for example, Steve Morse will probably have much more control over dynamics when alternate picking. Frank Gambale might feel the opposite.
Guthrie’s point makes sense though because the degree of relaxation should correlate to more control and allow the player to use more dynamics. Everyone will have a different threshold though. Any player, no matter how good, is going to lose control of dynamics when they play their absolute fastest.
I think I read in a thread, somewhere here, about different setups eg forearm and wrist resting on bridge or the flexed form, wrist only picking, elbow picking etc and how some are louder than others…
I play forearm and wrist resting on the strings or bridge and have a fairly light attack, especially at speed.
If I do the flexed form, it’s a lot louder… but seen as I play with distortion I don’t use this form.
Experimenting with dsx wrist motion, it was also significantly louder than my forearm and wrist picking. It was a pronated form which I couldn’t use on two of my main guitars so I stick with forearm and wrist.
I’m currently researching this very topic for my doctorate. There are variables, as some of the comments here attest. But ultimately, sweep, and economy picking can shave up to a third of the right-hand movement allowing for a more relaxed pick grip, and I have read research articles that cite Guthrie discussing this topic. The trade-off, however, is the reconfiguration of the left hand to accommodate the sweeps. I am predominantly a sweep player, but as a jazz guitarist, I use alternate for chromatic lines
Re Guthrie’s comment, I would snopes that as FALSE. It may be that given a lot of the things that often correlate with alt vs economy, the combination of factors makes the statement often true, but it’s definitely not a rule.
I remember that Guthrie video and thinking it was a bit overblown. Maybe for him personally (which I always thought picked pretty hard) it’s hard to control, but that doesn’t make it a hard rule.
I’m sure technique and pick choice are huge for this. I always found trailing edge to soften the attack a good amount, George Benson being my go-to example. I had posted this video before of someone I know switching between leading / trailing edge picking to change attack (trailing edge to combine with legato, leading for more attack):
I would be a little careful here. This is somewhat contextual, and doesn’t really hold up as an absolute when you are talking about a scenario where your guitar is pretty heavily square wave limited cough cough distorted guitar. Which I would assume for most of us here, it is.
True, it of course depends on how much you squash the signal. A lot of us, I think, use distortion / overdrive but still leave a little bit of room to have difference between strong and weak pickstrokes.
Picking weakly is presumably analogous to rolling the volume down, so it should be quite audible even with significant distortion unless excessive compression is in play.
Distortion is like a spice, to be used appropriately, but dynamics are really fundamental to a great performance.
Finally, note that one should always be recording the dry signal, so it is very important to keep the dynamics for future re-amping flexibility.
I’d guess the two are approximately equivalent, but weaker VS stronger pickstrokes could cause different harmonics to be stronger/weaker depending on where on the string you are picking?
Personally I 100% agree
But I know some artists prefer to “commit to a sound” in advance and don’t want the option of changing it later (kind of capturing the performance in the moment).
Not exactly, what happens between the two are a bit different for various reasons. You could likely write a whole dissertation on these differences if you were so inclined.
Eehh, that shouldn’t matter so much, the guitar is split between a DI feed and the amp input and are recorded on separate tracks. You still get to keep the original mic’d performance, but you also get a DI track for reamping later in case you had to. It generally a good idea, and is considered to be a studio norm now. It also makes editing guitar (time correcting) easier since the DI feed will showcase the initial transients much clearer than a distorted signal does, so you would visually reference that track when time snapping the distorted mic’d one.
So if I’m picking loud/quiet in the same place, I think that the frequencies would be the same (given a Fourier transform is linear, but also assuming the string has no non-linearities). But I wonder if you’re hinting that quiet = “near the bridge,” and loud = “further away from the bridge,” and if that’s true, then quiet would have relatively more high-frequency components… I need to do some experiments to see what the heck I’m doing, or, better yet, see how Rusty Cooley approaches this!
Not necessarily. You can even audibly discern these differences. picking closer to the bridge sounds different than picking in between pickups which again sounds different than picking near the neck, regardless of picking velocity. Certain areas of the guitars frequency response will be more pronounced or diminished depending on where you are hitting things. If you mean that the range of frequencies won’t be different, certain areas of the guitar will tend to drive up overtones that may not even be very consonant with the fundamental. Alot of how the player plays may also considerably contribute to that.
If you want to do a test for this and see the differences using a constant velocity, you could try to rig up something that would strike the strings at a constant velocity and than put the guitar through a spectrum analyzer. Although this is a very simplified test and only a fraction of what it would take to find anything definitive, it would be a step in the right direction at least to see any differences given those specific parameters.
Of course this would be only for the guitar and pickup itself. You start adding in what happens when the amplifier starts processing the sound than it’s a whole different ballpark. again leading back to the original argument, that distortion, even mild in the most simple of terms, is the product of the amplifier not being able to amplify any more. Once you breech this ability, picking harder will not result in a louder note, as the amplifier can no longer amplify this difference, it may just lead to a faster transition into distortion, but in this there may be accentuation in upper frequency response which may give the impression of a loudness.
Absolutely right, and the mathematics that I was talking about (those Fourier transforms) agrees with you as well. What was intriguing me was that I was wondering if some people play “quiet” close to the bridge, and “louder” closer to the neck—that thought never occurred to me before! It’s really hard to put energy into the string close to the bridge, hence it’s difficult to be loud. And it’s easy to put energy into the string close to the neck! Now I agree that the timbre of the resulting notes are different.
But I’m still not exactly sure how to change volume effectively, there are lots of really fundamental things that I give no thought to! (Well, I’m much better now that CtC provides me examples of quality thought.)
Well it really depends to what degree you intend to do so. I think honestly you don’t need a massive dynamic range to get the effect in practice, you just need enough of a perceived change for it to be audibly apparent, so picking lighter, glissing over strings with fingers (or a pick), rolling down volume on guitar, or a combo of all of them, is more than enough to get the desired sonic effect.
