Hey everyone! Over the past few years I’ve tried on and off to get double escape motion to work for me but I was never able to make much headway any time that I tried.
I recently decided fuck it I’m learning this damn technique no matter what it takes. I’m happy to report that I’ve made major progress. The motion is starting to feel very smooth, relaxed and way faster than before. Thought I’d share this victory with everyone.
Sounds great!
Did you do anything differently in recent times that you feel led to the breakthrough? Any adjustments that made it click?
I’ve heard that somewhere before… 
EXCELLENT playing, that sounds great and looks effortless! I second @jptk and would love to hear what you did to get it to this level. Maybe also, what you were doing that wasn’t working out.
I’m struggling with crosspicking for a few years now. What was the major breakthrough?
Thanks guys! Yes, I had to change up my approach in order to learn the motion correctly.
At first I kept hitting a brick wall where it would feel really tense and I couldn’t go any faster. For me that was 125-130 bpm 16ths while playing these 1nps lines.
What I ended up doing was setting the metronome a little bit faster than my max and then just kinda tryin a bunch of random movements in my picking hand and just flailing my hand around trying to make it work. It was really awkward for a bit but eventually I stumbled into this feeling where I noticed it felt lighter and smoother. It’s tough to articulate what it was but It felt like my forearm was twisting more than it does in my normal motion. After that it would be hit and miss for a few days. Sometimes I could get that smooth feeling and other times not until it got in my muscle memory.
My main advice would be to try to play the Crosspicking lines fast and pay a lot of attention to how it feels in your hand. If you notice it feeling tense or like you can’t go any faster then try just randomly moving all the joints in your wrist, fingers, and forearm while you pick and your brain will figure it out eventually.
I’ve been doing that and basically cap at like triplets at 180bpm. When I try and do triplets at 195-200bpm like in the video I just start swiping and can’t clear strings and can’t do it very long. I don’t think I’m doing stringhopping. If I posted a video do you think you could give some feedback? You have the supinated DX I’m trying to get.
Right on. Yea before I got this I would cap out at triplets at 180 too. The fact that you can’t do it for long makes me think you just don’t have the motion right yet. It was like that for me too but now that I’m doing it better it feels like I can do more than a couple reps at those tempos. I’ll check out your vid
Here’s my crosspicking, Crosspicking - YouTube. You can see when I speed up it gets much messier. My dwps is a lot better, can do 16ths at 180 when warmed up: 16ths 180 bpm - YouTube
Dwps sounds sick dude. The Crosspicking doesn’t look like string hopping but obviously you’re not getting the notes as clean. I’d say you’ve gotta make some change to your set up or your motion. I wouldn’t worry about trying to do a particular one or a specific player’s technique just experiment and embrace random trial and error. Especially If you’ve been going at it for a year already the way you’ve been doing it and haven’t got the results you want.
When you say randomly moving the joints around can you elaborate? I tried that and it seems like I’m creating more tension etc most of the time from my already existing technique. Is it more methodical than just making spastic motions? Great playing btw
Yea I don’t mean spastic per say but just trying to get some new element involved in the movement. Like more forearm, more index finger movement etc.
On mine in slo mo I can see my index finger that holds the pick tends to extend out on the downstrokes. Might be worth trying. It wasn’t something I was trying to consciously do but I see it happening in slo mo
Interesting. I’ll try that, I don’t see much forearm involvement in your video.
Dude! Awesome job! Sounds great, hahah I had given up on crosspicking, but now you’ve inspired me to take another run (again)! Totally cool, man!
I thought it would be helpful to post a close up slo mo of the motion so anyone wanting to learn it can see how it looks up close.
Thanks, how much edge picking do you use? This video is helpful
On crosspicking licks I notice I’m a lot less aggressive with the edge picking compared to the other stuff I play. It’s not something I have analyzed in depth but it looks like I use just a tiny bit of edge picking for the double escape
I just want to know where these cool acoustic pieces come from, I know none
I’m noticing you flex your thumb/index joints when doing the upstroke and extend them when using a downstroke. Was this intentional? I try that motion every so often and I really feel like there’s something there but I need to spend more time committing it to muscle memory. Great video !,
Yes I noticed that thumb/finger motion as well! It wasn’t something I tried to do intentionally but as I was getting it down and watching it in slow mo I saw the thumb and finger moving. It was just something that happened subconsciously. now that I’m aware that I do it I definitely try to consciously lean into the finger motion.