Critique my cross picking?

[JakeEstner]

Video at instagram:

Jake Estner (Guitar Stuff)

Not magnet-angle but close.

I used to play mostly with this type of technique, more or less, before I learned about slanting. For pure 1nps figures like these max tempos would be maybe 16ths at 110-120 on a good day.

Back in the day, I used to practice this stuff a lot and never made much improvement in tempo.

Any thoughts?

It probably gets weaker and weaker over the years as I avoid this type of playing.

Thank you!

PS - ( @Brendan ? ) is there a way to search threads by title here? When I search for ‘crosspicking’ within the forum I get every thread that has the term, but would be cool to limit to threads that just have crosspicking in the title.

[Troy]

Great playing Jake!

I think what you’re doing here is a stringhopping movement. These can be accurate, and musically appropriate, as in this example, but speed-limited and possibly strain-producing over prolonged use given the repetitive nature of the wrist movement.

Technically, stringhopping is repeated wrist flexion/extension, the “door knocking” movement. But that can sometimes be hard to spot if other movements, like wrist deviation or forearm rotation, are also happening simultaneously. So sometimes the simplest diagnosis is the clinical approach: Does the movement look “bouncy”? Does the user indicate a speed limit lower than the rest of their playing? If so, let’s just say that’s most likely stringhopping!

Again, not a musical critique - this sounds great. As far as adopting a more efficient “true” alternate picking approach for this, I know we’re guilty of lack of tutorials on this subject. But now that we’ve got the studio (mostly) up and running hopefully we’ll be able to put together some thoughts on this evolving topic that can help get players at least in the ballpark of the movements we’re seeing from Andy Wood, Molly Tuttle, and so on.

[JakeEstner]

Thanks so much for taking the time to check it out, Troy! Really appreciated!

I’ll look forward to the tutorials. I’ve definitely watched the Morse vids a few times and never quite wrapped my head around what the movement is, or I guess, more accurately, what my extra movement is.

Question - is there a black and white difference between string hopping and the more efficient motions you’ve observed in Morse, Wood, Tuttle, etc, OR is it more a gradient that goes from ‘hop’ to ‘smooth’ curve?

Would I get mileage out of practicing some different physical movement, for example simply trying to play a figure like this very slowly and avoid all ‘door knocking’ motion and see what else I can get to? I do understand the knocking thing you’re talking about.

Any tips on what to experiment with would be great! I would say these are figures I’ve practiced quite a lot over the years but I haven’t varied too much with my motion mechanics except at times experimenting w more/less wrist/forearm.

Thanks again!

[Brendan]

is there a way to search threads by title here

I don’t think so. When you click search “options” you’ll get an expanded advanced search view: https://forum.troygrady.com/search?expanded=true

Doesn’t look like filtering by title is among them. But looking in the Discourse docs about this, it sounds like they do prioritize titles in search, and may at some point add an extra filter to search title-only.

[Troy]

I’ll look forward to the tutorials. I’ve definitely watched the Morse vids a few times and never quite wrapped my head around what the movement is

That’s because those videos miss the mark. I can admit when we flub the ball. That was one of those times! I feel bad that we overcomplicated that presentation, and in certain respects just got it plain wrong. Steve is such a great guy he had to sit through that and was probably just as confused as everyone else.

We got it right soon after in the Albert Lee videos. Those are on point, and to date our best explanation of what wrist-oriented crosspicking actually is. Yes, it’s black and white. It’s that the two dimensions of the wrist trace the semicircle, and they do so in such a way that the downstroke muscle chain is completely distinct from the upstroke muscle chain.

In other words, stringhopping is painful and speed limited because both the upstroke and downstroke use wrist extension. It’s the same movement hammering away all the time. So it’s not actually alternate picking because the muscle groups don’t alternate.

In crosspicking, the downstroke uses one set of muscles and the upstroke uses their antagonists, so everybody gets 50% rest, same as if you’re doing any other kind of alternate picking. If you’re supinated (Lee, Morse) then the downstroke uses ulnar deviation and wrist extension, and the upstroke uses radial deviation and wrist flexion. If you’re pronated (Tuttle, Grier, Wood), then it’s the reverse. The downstroke uses ulnar deviation and wrist flexion, and the upstroke uses radial deviation and wrist extension.

And that’s a mouthful. In short, you’ve basically got wrist movements tracing a semicircle that’s mechanically efficient so nobody gets worn out.

How do you learn these movements? Well, consider that only Steve was aware he was doing this, and he’s a mechanical nerd and a tinkerer and a pilot and all those other great things. All the other players are not aware they’re making these movements, and only sense the movement of alternate picking.

So my thought is that there is probably a way to teach at least some of these techniques that simply has the student place the arm and wrist in a certain position, and then “do” alternate picking, just the two opposing diretions of what feels like a picking movement, while letting the hands sort out the rest.

That’s my thought! We’ll be back on this topic soon, even though it’s sort of a work in progress, but I think we’ve spent enough time thinking about it that we can at least supply a nice head start for everyone.

[Hanky_Pooh]

Cross Picking isn’t my expertise. But sounds good Jake!

[JakeEstner]

Hey @Troy I really appreciate the self reflection here, it’s nice to see you be so honest about your assessment of those vids. I liked watching the Morse vids a lot but yes I guess I have to admit I wasn’t sure exactly what the movement was. I haven’t watched all the Albert Lee vids in full but I will check them out and look for the ones that distinguish these movements.

In the mean time, I made this 30 second long video - could you or anybody tell me if I’m interpreting it all correct?

I’ll also review my biomechanical terms to better understand your post.

[Troy]

In the mean time, I made this 30 second long video - could you or anybody tell me if I’m interpreting it all correct?

Sort of! The first movement is string hopping because each time you jump over the string, you’re doing it with the wrist lifting motion, i.e. wrist extension. When you drop the pick back down as part of that jumping motion, that’s wrist flexion. So you’re doing both. The key is that you’re doing both every time you jump, so every pickstroke that needs to move to a new string uses the same muscles.

In the second example you are indeed tracing a semicircle. But that’s not really why it’s crosspicking. It’s crosspicking because you’re doing it with a different muscle movement for the downstroke as opposed to the upstroke. In this example, you’re using forearm pronation for the downstroke, and the reverse, forearm supination, for the upstroke.

The kicker is when you realize don’t need to twist the arm at all to do crosspicking. You can trace that semicircle with nothing other than wrist movement. One axis of wrist movement does the (edit:) “above the string” movement, and another axis does the “below the string” half of the movement. The wrist is capable of 360 degrees of movement, amazingly, so this makes perfect sense. The Albert Lee videos explain this in detail, with animations. Check those out and it should be a lot clearer than my opaque anatomical descriptions in textual form here.

Again I think a visual demonstration of this will be much clearer and we’ll do so soon in a live format perhaps.

[JakeEstner]

Much appreciated! Seems like I’m hovering around the right track. I will check out the Lee videos and do some digging, then report back next week with Tumeni Notes at 150% tempo

[JakeEstner]

Thank you @Hanky_Pooh !

[Montreal543]

Jake - When you max-out your crosspicking speed, what does it feel like? Do you notice tension anywhere in your picking hand/arm? Does it seem like your picking motion is faster/smoother on downstroke or upstroke?

[DJ_Ddawg]

So there are two crosspicking motions that one can do? One is a Forearm Rotation Movement (Supination and Pronation) and the other is a Wrist movement approach that combines deviation with Extension/Flexion.

And correct me if I’m wrong but the wrist approach also has to have a pickslant? (As seen in the Albert Lee videos)

I look forward to more videos on this subject

[Troy]

That’s a good takeaway so far, clearly you’ve been doing your homework. In truth there are a ton of movements. For just about every possible way you can hold a guitar, there is some slightly different combination of wrist and arm movements that you can use to generate a pickstroke that escapes the strings at both ends.

If you check out the live broadcast on picking motions, it’s similar to the situation with forearm rotation, where you end up with a whole spectrum of movements, some more “wrist-looking”, some more “arm-looking”, and every point in between depending on the specific path you want the pick to travel.

Now it may be that in some of these approaches you could say that the pick appears “slanted”. But I try not to worry about that. Instead, pickslanting is probably best understood as a style where half the pickstroke is above the strings and half is below. And crosspicking is a system based on pickstrokes which start and end above the strings. I know we’re probably guilty for promoting the “slanted appearance” of the pick as determinant, but it’s really about the path it follows as it moves. We’re learning as we go!

[hamsterman]

Just took a look. I think your form is great… accurate and sounds nice as well.

If your goal is to get faster… I would agree with Troy your up against a speed limit, and you would have to switch from a ‘pecking’ v-shape to more of a swinging u-shape. But that’s a tough switch, and you sound great already… and I think you can probably master a majority of cross-picking tunes with your current skill-level.

As far as playing without any slant. Its quite a learning curve… you really have to ‘unlearn’ a lot of techniques as well… but its doable… and it makes picking nearly impossible things possible.

[JakeEstner]

thanks man! Long story short, I’d like to be able to play these figures at about 150-175, as 16ths, and this tops out roughly 105/110 (without much recent practice). It’s not something I obsess over, but I feel that at that 11- notes-per-second" ratio I could more or less play whatever I wanted. Faster than that wouldn’t really be necessary for most of the things I ‘hear’ and play.

I play a lot of jazz I guess you could say, and the tempos can get into the 300 range with the expectation of the player being able to comfortably improvise with 8ths. Right now there’s a lot of jazz vocabulary I can play at that tempo, but I have to work out really specific fingerings and slur placement for me to be able to execute the stuff cleanly. With the cross picking thing I’m imagining I could just more or less just play the notes without complex re-arrangements.

And would be cool to play a bunch of other stuff in those higher tempos…bluegrass, violin music, etc.

[hamsterman]

thanks man! Long story short, I’d like to be able to play these figures at about 150-175, as 16ths, and this tops out roughly 105/110 (without much recent practice). It’s not something I obsess over, but I feel that at that 11- notes-per-second" ratio I could more or less play whatever I wanted. Faster than that wouldn’t really be necessary for most of the things I ‘hear’ and play.

I’ve gotten the one note per string alternate picking up to those speeds, but it took some time. I’ll try to get a video of my technique up shortly.

The way I built it up, was tremolo picking where I would play a single string… but the strokes would swing/curve beyond the stings on either side with each stroke. Its a warmup for me now… and its pretty much my speed limit (its about 170 bpm). Its a really good exercise… because if you hear more than one tone… you know your doing it wrong. Maybe try it out… and see how it feels.

And another cool thing… you still CAN play faster than 170 bpm with the technique, by doing a ‘pseudo’ two-way pick slanting technique where you basically only pick the full stroke when you are in the process of string switching. I started doing this about a year ago… and my 3 note per string shredding sounds so much better.

[JakeEstner]

That’s very cool, thanks for the tip! I will try that. Can you tell me a little bit more about your evolution of tempo with that type of figure? Like, before you were into this particular exercise you mentioned, were you topping out similar to where I am, or was it always faster?

[hamsterman]

For single string stuff… I used to be a ‘pecker’… or ‘hopper’ like Troy says… and I was slower than you… I probably topped out at 90 BPM 16th notes… and I wasn’t as reliable or as clean as you are. If I needed to play faster than that… I would just do DWPS and economy picking… and that didn’t sound that clean either. That was about 2 years ago.

I’ve since completely abandon both DWPS and economy picking. Well, I still do sweeps… but I always try to practice arpeggios using both sweeps and alt-picking.

[JakeEstner]

This is all super interesting to me. Would love to hear more about this transition. I’d imagine you’ve written about it before - did you keep a log here or elsewhere?

First questions that pop into mind: So now that you’ve developed the crosspicking stuff to such a high level, you do more or less everything with that, or sweeping? Another way to phrase, why did you abandon dwps and economy? Also, what kind of music do you play - so, what type of lines are you working with?

[hamsterman]

I really haven’t written about it… especially since I’d really need video to explain it… which I will do shortly. I kept a log of BPM speeds for everything towards the first few months. I still have issues with outside picking alternating between 2 strings… its much better than it was before… but it still would be my weakest link… at about 135 bpm… but everything else is up to speed.

I play 99% with that same crosspicking technique… and 1% with sweeping. Oh yeah, I still use hybrid picking for softer, slower stuff… and I still love legato for smoothe stuff. The reason I abandon DWPS/economy picking… was because the new technique just sounded better… and made playing so much simpler and more reliable. Having multiple methods is great… I can still do old methods for demonstration purposes… but that’s really it.

I didnt originally intend to do this… It was originally going to be a technique that I would only use for the one note per string playing. But when I used it for two and three note-per string riffs… it sounded so much better… so I stuck with it. Again… I gotta make a video to show all this.

I try to play a little bit of everything. I like Eric Johnson’s stuff of course.