Crosspicking Troubleshooting - Swiping Adjacent Strings

Recently, I’ve been casually working on the basic roll pattern from the “Crosspicking with the Wrist” live seminar from last year. It seems I’ve always had a rudimentary crosspicking motion from early on, but I figured I’d devote some time to formerly developing it.

I’ve been struggling with what I’d call clearing the strings cleanly. Meaning, when moving from an upstroke to a downstroke, I’ll often catch two strings at once almost like a swipe. Instead of the curved pick path, it appears that the pick path tends to flatten out if I don’t really concentrate on accurately articulating each pick strike.

Forgive me if this has come up in other threads, but I’ve been digging through them and haven’t found any good discussion on this. I’m wondering if anyone has had experience with this issue and what your solution was. I suspect that my arm and hand position is off, i.e., too flat, and that I’m not producing enough extension on the downstroke and deviation on the upstroke.

Thanks, guys.

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I’m just speculating here, but I would guess that you are probably too flat, and you aren’t escaping enough.

I really couldn’t tell you exactly what movements to change, but what worked for me was actually just drilling myself on my weak transfers using 2nps patterns. And also, doing a lot of two string alternation, specifically on my weaknesses (for me it was outside).

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I was playing around with this again last night. My time is very compressed giving me only an hour or two in the evening to maybe pick up the instrument. That’s probably plenty of time, but my mental energies are spread fairly thin.

I still couldn’t quite get it cleanly last night. My downward escape, i.e., the 0 to 2 movement, is still pretty flat. The 9 to 0 movement is hit or miss. Things tend to flatten out more the longer I play. If I don’t really watch, I’ll just be swiping one big motion across the space of three strings. It’s definitely not smooth, yet. There is an upper bound for sure at the moment.

There are other incidental things, like my pick grip tends to move around from side+pad to less so, my forearm tends to flatten out, and I find that if I don’t watch it I make a big swoop with a rotated wrist from a downstroke on a bottom string in a group to the top string in a group for an upstroke.

By the end of the session, I did try your suggestion of just alternating between two strings, both inside and outside. Inside was significantly easier than outside, where the pick was easily swiping adjacent strings in both directions. Probably should put up a video.

Thanks for the continued help!

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