Has anyone seen this guy?
He says, cryptically, 'I use three muscles - fingers, wrist and arm. This way You can achieve more speed and less tension’
He then goes on to sort of demonstrate each of the movements, arm, wrist and fingers. But it looks to me like when it speeds up it tightens up to just wrist. Whatever he’s doing, it’s super fast, and some of the most aggressive and intimidating sounding picking ive ever seen.
What do you guys think is going on here? Worth talking about?
I definitely think it’s worth looking at. Note also that Paul Gilbert shares his preference for thinner picks, and both seem to have a significant wrist flexion/extension component at high speed, in addition to whatever else is happening. I think that at his “moderate” speeds, he has sort of a “stealth” forearm rotation component happening, though it may disappear completely when he reaches his top end speed.
One other really interesting thing about Darius Wave is that he has the distinction of being one of a small number of people I’ve seen who published thoughts about what we’ve now come to know as “downward pickslanting” before CTC season 2 became public knowledge.
At 21:47 of the video below (published in April 2014), Darius talks about both DWPS and UWPS and the trapped/escaped concept, though he doesn’t expound on their significance or explain the legato escape hatches the way Troy does in CTC episode “Get Down for the Upstroke” (published in July 2014, changing picking forever):
At 26:00, Darius also makes some brief comments about his use of thumb movement when he plays the Paul Gilbert lick, I assume meaning that he flexes the thumb to help the downward slanted pick clear the string rather than swipe it, though I can imagine a person might be able to momentarily even change the pickslant using thumb movement.
I see that too. Stealth forearm rotation.
Doesn’t that Martin Miller guy sort of do this? Seems like he has some kind of thumb/index pivot on the upward to clear the strings. That is if I’m talking about the right guy…
Do you think it’s possible to do the upward pick slant with finger angles instead of angling the whole wrist?
Partly. When I do a wrist-extension-ish UWPS (similar to what Ardeshir Farah does), I still have a posture that looks a lot like DWPS, but my thumb “hooks” around the front of my index finger so that the “finger” side of the pick is pressing partly against the face of the nail rather than just the side of the finger. Because the end of my index finger is also bent slightly the pick orientation stays pretty much perpendicular to the direction of movement (which is a mix of wrist deviation, wrist flexion/extension, and very subtle forearm rotation). But I haven’t yet found a way to do this with the kind of unmistakeable “Paul Gilbert” attack that Darius, Remy Hansen, Russ Parrish, and, well, Paul Gilbert get. I think there’s probably an ingredient to what they’re doing that I haven’t accounted for. I also get my best results with my attempts at this sort of thing when I anchor the ring finger, but they seem to get better results even without it.
I’ve also sort of worked under the assumption that Gilbert’s default slant was mostly neutral or even upward, but watching what Darius does with what seems to clearly be a downward slant makes me reconsider.
Edit: Actually, at about 2:30 of the video MCM started the thread with, Darius appears to be doing UWPS with a ring finger anchor very similar to the Ardeshir-style picking I described above, but he’s able to do it with more authority than I’ve been able to. Not sure what makes that possible (training the wrist deviation component of the movement maybe?).
Edit 2: Chapters 10 and 11 of Antigravity have good demos of @Troy playing UWPS demonstrations, and he achieves it with a posture that looks very DWPS-ish. One thing is that Troy keeps the last joint of his index finger straight. This makes it possible to manipulate the pick orientation in a couple of possible ways: 1) changing the amount of downward/upward orientation of the last two phalanges of the index finger, by doing Martin Miller type MCP joint adjustments, and 2) changing the point of contact between the pick and index finger: with the Troy-style straight fingertip, you can mess with that angle without encroaching on the “nail” side of the fingertip.
Yeah, I don’t know if the movement is exactly the same, but Troy talks about an efficient string-clearing movement Miller does that involves movement at the MCP joint of the index finger.
Hmm. Interesting. Stealth forearm rotation aside, I wonder how long a line they’re able to sustain. When I used a similar approach with wrist pronation I was only capable of bursts of speed. I’d like see a shot of more lines on the high strings.
Edit: In the second clip he talks about rotating the wrist, which seems to be more straightforward than stealth, forearm rotation. I also observe that a rotated thin pick approximates a very thick pick as he says.
I’ll have to look again to see what he’s trying to demonstrate, but my understanding of physiology is that there is no such thing as voluntary wrist rotation (unless we’re talking about “hokey pokey” style wrist circles, which are actually a combination of flexion/extension and deviation). That is, external forces (or momentum, I suppose) can cause rotation at the wrist joint itself, but the only voluntary action that makes the wrist “rotate” in the same axis as forearm rotation is the very action that makes the forearm itself rotate. That’s not to say that funky things can’t happen in terms of external forces, say, from finger anchors, or whether there may be some movement involving say, flexion in the palm that gets described as “wrist rotation”.
This is where things like the forthcoming EMG study on @milehighshred are interesting, because they can identify the actual muscle action involved (though from what I understand, John doesn’t use the kind of “quiet elbow” movement we see from Darius). But Andy Wood has been interviewed by Troy, and seems to accomplish the same trick Darius does. I’d definitely love to see the results of a followup EMG study with Andy.
By quiet elbow do you mean wrist-only? @milehighshred does this at ‘normal’ shred speeds in the 200 - 240 bpm range, and above that transitions to elbow-only as he approaches hyper speeds. He’s been doing regular practice vlogs on his Facebook page demonstrating ladder / interval type workouts which are worth a scan for anyone interested in this subject.
Ok, cool. For some reason I thought he used elbow at more than just “hyper speeds”. And yes, by “quiet elbow” I was alluding to wrist-only. All the more reason to look forward to “Science of Speed” I guess. 
Though the release date for you guys is constrained by the academic folks’ need to publish first, right?
And I guess I’ll have to take closer look at what John’s been up to. I had been thinking of him as strictly an elbow guy, and for that reason hadn’t paid a lot of attention to what he’s been posting on the various “social” platforms (nothing personal, @milehighshred 
) .
There’s elbow tension when John moves his wrist for sure - that much is obvious just looking at the huge BRD flex he gets during wrist picking. But Andy Wood also speaks about this in his interview. It may simply be that wrist movement requires some kind of isometric power-up from above.
Thank you for the promo!
If only I had an appropriate Master Shake quote for this… but I don’t 
When I teach people how to play fast, I advocate learn how to thumb pick first. I also teach the idea that we have 3 picking speeds - walking, jogging, sprinting. Speed is subjective and those speeds will be different for everybody.
A few students have asked why you don’t just practice elbow picking during slow playing and practice. I tell them it’s because you don’t walk with the same mechanics you do sprinting. Not only would you look bloody ridiculous “sprinting” at a walking pace, it would be very energy inefficient. Not only that, but elbow picking drastically reduces your accuracy, as I’m sure most people on this forum already know.
Even though I talk about 3 ways of picking (thumb, wrist, elbow), they certainly don’t stay separate for long. The thumb and wrist (for me at least) move together a great deal of the time. Depending on what I’m playing, how well my endurance is feeling, I will even get the elbow to help out with the wrist+thumb movement.
And, depending on if you’re playing single notes vs 2 note + chords, my picking mechanics will begin to differ again! Forearm rotation happens a lot more for me when things get strummy.
IN CONCLUSION!!! Even though I advocate learning how to pick as fast as possible, for those who wish to learn it, you need to learn to get that elbow moving - I advocate ACCURACY FIRST! The elbow style of speed picking is a last resort due it’s huge loss of accuracy. I only use that tool to produce the sounds I want when my body feels it is necessary.
This is something I’ve been noticing in my own playing and would love to see more analysis of. When my DWPS/rotation is “clicking,” there’s definitely upper arm tension at intermediate/higher speeds that’s not there when I’m playing slowly with strict rotation only. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the “missing piece” when people talk about a 160bpm “ceiling.”
You’re right about that thumb flex. However, I found it quite uneasy to use that same flex to go (in DWPS) from a higher s to a lower s (in a “inside the string” fashion).
Yeah, I really haven’t tried to tackle primary down 2WPS. My DWPS one-way technique is pretty firmly engrained, and since most of my “role models” in 2WPS seem to be primary up, it seemed logical to me to spend most of my 2WPS efforts on primary up. Point being, for me, thumb flex is more of a UWPS or 2WPS thing (which is a primary up world for me), and any thumb flex I have in my one-way DWPS is very small.
Thanks @Frylock. That’s an interesting point. Yeah, where does the motion originate, regardless of what it involves once started? I wrote something on a thread somewhere about turning a key. I regretted it immediately afterwards, but I suppose I was trying to express something that starts in the hand and manifests in the forearm. I don’t know–shaking water off of wet hands? I do perceive a fulcrum point somewhere in or around the wrist. Once it’s going though, what’s the motor that keeps it going?
I’ll definitely have to check out @milehighshred’s 5280 take on things.
p.s. @Troy, I’ve gone back and viewed the Pickslanting Primer “Reference” so that I won’t keep encouraging the use of problematic metaphors when posting.
This guy has some of the most crisp technique I’ve ever seen. He sounds like Paul on steroids to me.
Unbelievable thumb control!