Cmcgee 902 picking motion critique

I am going to try this too, it just will take a bit longer to get into my muscle memory since I’ve never done it before but it sounds cool for sure

Plays unisons on adjacent strings - here it kind of almost gives it a bluegrassy feel for a second:

1 Like

Another 902 exercise - I have a little, very rough playthrough of the Glass Prison arpeggio section I’m working on improving. Some sections of I think approach 150BPM 16th notes so I know the motion is working for it, really just needs polishing and consistency.

I still think biggest thing I’m struggling with is a comfortable attack angle that feels the same on upstroke and downstroke, and consistency of attack angle across strings while tracking. Even with the wrist motion available on command, I have to tool around, as Troy puts it, with the placement of my palm and pick angle pretty often.

I think I forgot how long it took me to really find a comfortable and consistent angle and depth of the pick the first time around learning to alternate pick, which I also had a very different form for more of a trailing edge grip - it takes time and slower practice to get these details into muscle memory and that work can only really take place after you have the wrist motion feeling very familiar.

1 Like

Have you experimented with different degrees of pick point? That’s normally how I fix attack discrepancies between strokes.

How do you experiment and maintain good tone/attack?

@carranoj25 as far as tone goes, I feel like the only real “control” you have is where on the string you play (i.e. the closer to the bridge, the brighter) and the pick you use. I tend to let my technique dictate where on the string I play, and just set up my gear around that. I don’t have a playing style in which I need different tone changes (other than switching pickups), and I tend to like where I naturally play on guitar / acoustic / bass.

Attack, for me, I split in two portions in my head. The first is what most sound guys would think of the transient quality. Eric Johnson’s tone got me to read / watch him talk about it, and how he looks for a either a hard or soft quality in the initial transient, dictated almost entirely by his technique (I think he called it “bounce” technique for a while).

I mostly control that by playing softly compared to the loudest possible note I could play, using the same technique. You can experiment with something simple: trem pick a random note at a somewhat slow tempo, while varying the loudness from as soft as you can to as loud as you can. Gradually increase the speed. You’ll find that as you get close to your max, your range of loudness will get smaller and smaller, with your top speed being a very narrow window. Once you get there, take note of how that sounds (you can even record it in your DAW if you want) and scale back the tempo to something slow again. That’s the loudness the you should use when practicing at slower speeds, which in my experience helps translate your technique to faster speeds. You can compare your slower tempo waveforms to your max trem waveform in your DAW to get a literal picture of how it translates. Once you’re comfortable there, being able to control dynamics with accents is the next step.

My long paragraph above more or less explains why I think Anton Oparin is a scary player. The speed / dexterity / cleanliness is there, but he’s able to put out a pretty huge dynamic range in loudness. I don’t think I’ve heard him go to one narrow window of loudness that frequently, which makes me think his true top speed is higher than he’s put on recording.

The second thing I think of attack is mostly tied to the feel of each stroke (haptic feedback). That’s a combination of pick choice and grip (to include degree of pick point). I could detail this more if you want me to keep writing, I’m not sure if this is what you wanted lol.

2 Likes

You can control the tone also a lot by the angle of the pick hitting the string, and the grip you use (soft/firm).

The dynamic range Anton has he gets mostely by how much of the pick hits the string; same as Paul Gilbert.
It is logical, because if you let more of the pick down into the strings, doing faster runs, you need more force to get it through as compared to hit the string with just the very tip of the pick.

1 Like

Hell yeah brotha keep on writing! I will go grab a beer!

Understood. I think Gilbert is a trailing edge player right? At least recent videos it seems like his pick is almost perpendicular to the strings. When i do that, its much harder for me
To get a nice tone. It also doesnt look like AO does that

Yes , Gilbert normaly is a trailing edge player like Anton.
They have a pretty similar grip and angle. But, he is indeed experimenting with different angles and grip lately.

I might not be up to speed (again) with CTC terminology, but aren’t both of them leading edge?

Yeah they are both leading edge. Trailing edge are a rare breed. Shawn Lane, Neal Schon. Oh yeah I saw a video of some dude on here tearing it up on the bass using trailing edge :wink:

2 Likes

@joebegly and George Benson!

Lol I was messing around with trailing edge on guitar again, I might record something for fun later and see what’s up.

Yeah how could I forget Benson, thanks!

2 Likes

Oops, I meant leading edge, my bad. Lately is experimenting with three finger grip.

My first fastest picking motion that I squared together for live gigs was trailing edge. I could probably get it back to form. The Leading edge like Pg and AO is a little rough for me. Usually neutral is where i like it most but i will experiment more with leading edge

1 Like

I also started playing trailing edge back in high school up until about a year ago when I started practicing a lot again and began working on CTC stuff here and there, my buddy who was a better overall player used leading edge grip, and I saw it was much more common so I transitioned to it.

Here’s a clip of my playing just as I was getting back into serious practice

I was a trailing edge player for almost 35 years (I have been playing since I was 5 and I am just about 50) and it seemed to only work with elbow for me - I was frustrated at not being able to play certain things without using hybrid picking or legato or something so I changed to leading edge, and while it solved certain things, it made some other, different things not possible without employing a workaround. Of course this was pre CTC. What works works really well, and what doesn’t is a bit brutal - thus the required workaround. I mean, I can play whatever I want I just can’t necessarily strictly alternate pick it. I suspect many others are in the same boat.

Truth. I wish I knew why we put ourselves through the struggle. I guess for me it’s that things that I can’t quite do are sometimes more fun than things I can easily do.

2 Likes

If you go to around 5:14 in this video and watch PGilbert blaze that lick, you can clearly see his leading edge pick.

The more “leading edge” I go, the less of a tone I get when I pluck the string. Trailing edge I dont have this problem at all. It’s very bizarre to me and Im gonna make some short videos demoing this soon. But not sure what the issue is. I really dont think Anton or Andy Wood is “as leading edge” as PGilbert