Carl Miner's hand position (accoustic vs electric)

Playing Technique
#1

Firstly, thank you so much for an amazing site, with some amazing content. I’m a new subscriber and i’m in awe. I’ve been working on crosspicking for a few months and decided that I needed to work out the mechanics in my picking hand. I’ve found that my comfort zone is with an elevated hand (AKA Carl Minor).

This got me thinking after I watched the 2007 interview with him. Have you (or has anyone) ever seen him play electric guitar, and if so, does his hand position change drastically when he does? (string muting etc would dictate he has a radically different way of anchoring on an electric?). Unfortunately there are no youtube videos of him with an electric in his hand!

Mostly a curiosity thing I suppose, Anyway, thanks again!

Jim

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#2

This isn’t specifically answering your Carl Minor question, but I have also been using an elevated hand… following a somewhat similar mechanic to Carl. Initially it was fine, but of course… the lack of muting was really starting to bother me when I used it on electric.

I’ve finally broken through that… and have learned to do the mechanic without the elevation. I’ve had to introduce more finger motion & rotation motion, but it works well… and it works great for 1NPS runs.

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#3

Yes I can’t imagine using a floating hand technique for electric guitar- the muting problem is quite huge in comparison to acoustic where it is fine if multiple strings are ringing. With pedals and effects (particular overdrive/gain) it is going to sound really sloppy if you aren’t muting using both your left and right hand.

However the mechanic of Forearm rotation + Wrist extension is totally valid for Crosspicking. It works great for Carl, Martin Miller (who also uses some finger extension in combination with the wrist), and many others.

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#4

Sorry for the delay in responding!

I talked about this with Carl, I can’t remember if it was on-camera or not. But Carl does play electric and has done it on recordings of his own material. He didn’t have one handy so I haven’t seen him do it, and I don’t know if he plays high-gain muted lines on guitar like a rock player would.

However a non-muted technique with a Carl-style hand and arm position works fine on electric. We included a few examples in the “Crosspicking with the Wrist and Forearm” lesson:

I haven’t actually worked on this - these were just done on the-spot during the broadcast mimicking Carl’s pinky anchor approach. But it’s clear that it does work and would work fine for Carl-style rhythm parts. The fact of the arm being raised really doesn’t change much about the motion. You just want to match up the total height of the grip with the pinky height. That may be why Carl uses a little more pick to make sure he can reach the strings.

For another example of how Carl’s motion changes on different instruments you can also check out the mandolin examples in his interview. Some great playing in there:

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