Could curvature of bridge and neck make a significant difference in ease of picking?

Gear
#21

Yes—all else being equal, a smaller radius feels more comfortable for chords and a bigger radius allows for big bends that don’t fret out.

Forward-thinking builders are now doing compound radii where it’s a smaller radius for the lower frets but flattens out to a larger radius further up the neck.

That said, if you get a full setup from a good guitar tech (with a “level, crown, & polish”—should cost you $75-100), there’s no reason you can’t do big step-and-a-half bends on a comfy vintage-ish 9.5 radius board.

1 Like
#22

Well, I think there is a misconception. String changes mean going from one string to another, one could also say “a string-pair”. This string pair is lying in a plane, just not the same plane as the other string-pairs. The string-pair-strings are not affected by the strings that are not played, so it shouldn’t make a difference.

As has already been mentioned, string-skipping could be harder, as the string-to-skip is getting more in the way. Sweeping is another topic, might be affected to, I don’t know.

If those little differences make a difference, your picking technique might be error prone anyway. Mine is :wink:

Violins are a whole different beast. They have to be rounded, because you couldn’t bow one single string if it was flat.

Tom

#23

Could be. And what is true with radius might as well also be true with string action. e.g. if you have an open string to skip on a guitar set up with higher action it’s more in the way, even with a flat radius.

#24

There’s indeed a difference and on first view one can get the idea it’s easier to pick on a radiused fretboard, I did so.
Imagine a half circle with 6 points on it (the strings) and always the desired string on top, then you could maintain the exact picking motion and’d never need to think about escaping, that doesn’t work flat.
But for that you’d need to rotate the fretboard, which doesn’t make sense.
Doing the same by adjusting the hand position would be the same as pickslanting but with way more ‘versions’, which doesn’t make sense either.
So yes no benefit for picking (more the opposite) at all, but it seems to be valid to get that in mind, at least on first thought.

@joshuaskaja: Thanks for the clearification, at last my questions are answered :grinning:

#25

I don’t know if I do exactly this, but I know that in some situations I like to rest stroke on both pickstrokes (so it must be approximately “neutral” pickslanting). Obviously this can happen only when there are enough notes on the same string. I’ll try to think of some licks where I do this, and then record it with my newly built magnet :sunglasses:

#26

That is totally correct. If you’re just doing a repeating two-string pattern, like sixes on the top two strings, then you just find the hand position that matches those two strings. Sorry, I meant to mention this.

However…

I think the issue here is still that this hand position may differ from what works on other strings, so ‘finding’ it may not always be trivial, and may make it feel like certain pairs are ‘harder’ to play on.

#27

Yes. My intention was to clarify that “curved” is at least not easier. Of course it might make it even harder, as your fixed pickslant might have to be adjusted going from lower to higher strings. On the other hand, the hand position has to be altered anyway to track the strings, no matter what tracking mechanic is used.

#28

That can definitely happen, like on a 2wps pattern where you don’t instantly switch back to the ‘primary’ pickslant. However, conceptually, what are you probably doing in such a scenario is simply taking more time to make that transition. There’s a good example of this in the recent Andy Wood live workshop where he demonstrates descending sixes, and hits the first note so hard that it rest strokes, and takes him two more notes to get back to his uwps motion path. Is that in-between phase a third picking movement, or just a longer transition?

Ultimately, it’s six of one half dozen of the other. Whichever movements you use, they are completely memorized by the time you can do them with any degree of competence. There is no longer any difference in the amount of ‘work’ necessary to do one of these strategies or another. It’s not like people are doing mental math to make these movements in real time. If it is physically possible to memorize a movement that we could say conceptually appears to have three separate phases to it, then by the time you’ve chunked it, you probably can’t say that it is somehow more effortful to play this way than some other way.

The only question that matters is whether it is possible to make the movement work in the first place. If you can, then you can memorize it make it habitual. If you can’t, because the movement is somehow fundamentally inefficient - like stringhopping - then you probably won’t see players using it at higher speeds.

1 Like
#29

Sorry to bother with that, but i thik that’s not the intentional idea of @Marse.
If the fretboard would be rotated correctly all the time (which is not the case) there’s always a flat line escaping both adjacent strings. My understanding was that you take a triangle, current string on top, adjacent strings on base and then pick parallel to the base.
With the radius small enough that would work fine … just you’d need a second person rotating your instrument :grin:

#30

You don’t have to rotate the instrument. You can rotate your arm/wrist. And that is exactly what you do when preparing for a string chang on a “flat” guitar.

I see the initial idea of fully escaped pickstrokes without a curved picking path. Might be possible. But as you have to adjust your pickslant for every picked string also, it does not help. At least if I’m not absolutley wrong here.

#31

Yeah i know, I posted that before.
I just wanted to point out the main idea of the thread, which was using 3 strings to find a pick direction instead of 2. Using the connection of 2 strings is transferring the flat scenario to the radiused while Marse’s idea was trying to take advantage from the radius.
The existence of that triangle is the difference (pickingwise) between a flat and a radiused fretboard, and I still think the idea is pretty neat, eventhough there’s no benefit in real life.

#32

This, basically, even beyond that… But as you get down towards vintage-spec 7.5" radius, especially if you’re also using vintage smaller frets, then choking on bends starts to become a real problem.

And, while I could maybe see more of an arc helping with picking, I think it would hinder your ability to bend WAY more than it’d help you pick.

#33

So as the OP of this post I’ve thought a lot about this now. I think GuyFromGermany has the right idea in that the kernel of my idea was clever, but pretty useless in the real world for various reasons already pointed out.

I also agree with Troy. If you take out all of the politeness and jargon, what Troy is saying is, “Bro, it’s not the guitars’ radii. It’s probably your picking.”

After videoing myself and watching for the first time ever, the picking looks kind of all over the place to me. I can’t say I can tell what is consistent about it. Lol! Any elucidation would be appreciated. Sorry for the poor quality. I assumed the rear camera had the same quality as the front, and it doesn’t. Please use the YouTube slow motion feature. I’m new to this. Hope this works.

#34

I am guilty of completely not reading, or perhaps misreading your original post! Apologies, we were doing stuff in the office. I thought you were asking about different guitar radii and whether or not it affected your playing. I’m seeing now that you’re proposing a violin-like neck radius to simplifyy string switching.

Yes, as has been discussed, that could work in certain situations - it certainly does for bows!

However if the root of this is that you are trying to figure out why different guitars feel different to you, yes, this is probably a theoretical issue at best and more related to technique - unless you’re playing highly radiused necks like some vintage Fenders.

#35

Youtube video is missing / not playing. If you’re looking for video critique, I recommend making that a separate thread anyway. Just check the YT video directly and make sure it’s working first. Then paste the link on its own line surrounded by space and the forum will display it as a video.

You don’t need the “&feature=youtu.be” suffix - just the “watch?v=someletters” is enough.

#36

Sorry. Fixed the link by hitting “publish” on youtube.

#37

Sorry, Master, I think I have to disagree. String switching with a bow would be easiest, if the radius was infinite = the strings totally flat. Of course, that wouldn’t work, because you would bow all strings at once, but the switching is easier, the greater the radius is. Of course it requires more precision then.

As for guitar, I thought about this some more:

1.sweeping
I think we all agree, that sweeping is (theoretically) harder on a radiused guitar.

  1. 1 NPS arpeggios
    Even that should be harder, because (example, pick D-g-b-strings):
    a. Pick D-String with a downstroke, UWPS to clear g-string → No difference.
    b. Pick g-string with an upstroke, now the g-string gets in the way of your picking path towards the b-string. As the b-string lies “deeper” due to the radius, the g-string sticks out higher as it would with a “flat” guitar, so the escape-motion has to escape even more. The next string is buried deeper behind the string you have to get over.

  2. 1WPS
    The Pickslant has to be adjusted from low to high strings, otherwise you hit the string on the “escaped” side.

  3. 2WPS (scale playing with odd NPS)
    It really doesn’t matter, as the only thing that counts is the angle or relation between the picking motion and the plane defined by the two adjacent strings your playing.

Yes, you can pick with a straight line without hitting the adjacent strings, but If that’s a problem, we don’t have to discuss string changes.

See it that way: There might be idea that it is easier to get over the string, but then it is a longer way to get “under” the string to pick on the next picking motion.

So far my theory. Try to prove me wrong, that’s how science works :wink:

Tom

P.S.: None of this matters in real world playing. It’s just brain-iron-pumping.

#38

I don’t think that’s the case (eventhough I never tried) but if you rotate the bow the target string should stop the rotation automatically, so it’s not precision it’s the distance to travel. So I don’t know what’s easier but I’d say the bigger radius requires more precision to avoid hitting wrong strings, on the other hand it should be faster due to the smaller angle.

I would be careful to (just) look on the known scenarios that we know from non radius picking, the question what solutions would be developed if you’d be in the radiused scenario, not that i know of an advantage, but even for the world I know it took CtC and Troy’s enagagement to find ways to solve problems, so I’m just careful if I (and probably most of us) are able to spot all good and bad things of a world I (we) have never been to.

The only thing I see actually is playing to strings is save from hitting another one … pretty theoritcal, but hey let’s build a Honky Tonk woman generation :joy:

EDIT: I just got in mind that playing slide is something that we didn’t look on so far. Probably that’s another reason for the radius tendency on electric?
I see lots of parallels between a bottleneck and a bow.

#39

Man, those Germans are such smart-asses :wink:

Stuttgart, den 24.04.2018

#40

Yeah … we build the best Diesel Engines in the universe :grin:

Braunschweig, 15m later