Desperately struggling with Forearm rotation

Technique Critique
#1

Hi everyone,

I’m hell-bent on getting forearm rotation down. Yet, I’m struggling with it, even after a month of practice, I can only get to 50 - 60% of the speed Troy is at on the single string exercises. And the movement doesn’t feel right, it feels very forced. It’s like I don’t have enough room to perform this movement because of my palm resting on the bridge. Or I can’t seem to make the mental or physical “click” for proper forearm rotation while resting on the bridge.

Stretching my arm out in front of me and attempting to swivel in a rotational way (as exampled by Troy in the picking primer and volcano seminar) gets me up to a much higher speed as opposed to my palm laying on the bridge and attempting that same movement.

I can tremolo pick Eddie Van Halen style at a much faster speed, feeling like I’m not limited by any space, but that’s not what I’m after.

First thing I do in these 2 videos is my regular tremolo-picking form, which I’m guessing is wrist deviation.
Second thing is my attempt at forearm rotation. You can tell it’s very jerky and starts to tense up when trying to go faster. If I’m even doing the movement correctly at all.

Below you can see my EVH-style picking. So I think I have the physical mobility to perform a fairly fast forearm rotation, just not when my hand is resting at the bridge.

Can anyone give any pointers on what I’m doing wrong? Is this a mental or physical block? It’s really demotivating at this point so any help is appreciated. Many thanks!

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#3

Welcome To The Struggle, My Friend.

:bear:
“this post was barely 20 characters long”

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#4

I find that if I want to literally rest my hand on the bridge, I need to have a bit of a wrist flexion/extension component to the movement, even though there’s still a major forearm rotation component. Try taking your EVH tremolo and bringing it closer to the bridge a little bit at a time to see if there are small adjustments you will “naturally” make as the wrist comes closer to a neutral position.

Another trick would be to let the guitar body hang lower, a la Nuno Bettencourt, and have a wrist thas is still flexed in the EVH tremolo style, but is “tilted” over onto its side to rest against the bridge.

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#5

I largely agree with Frylock.

To my eye, it is physically impossible to do pure forearm rotation with heavy palm bracing. When you freely rotate your forearm, the radius and ulna both orbit around a common axis at their center. When you hold the ulna fixed by hard bracing your palm on the bridge, the ulna can’t move, so the radius orbits around the ulna. For this to work, you must incorporate another fundamental motion (for me it’s elbow). Adding an additional movement isn’t necessarily a problem, but I find that the hard bracing adds a degree of resistance to my rotation that slows me down and makes everything harder.

Once I switched to light palm bracing, the problem disappeared. Now my palm brushes very lightly back-and-forth on the strings or bridge while I pick.

At first I worried that the change would result in less accuracy, but I’d say my accuracy has actually improved because string tracking is easier. It felt less accurate at first, but that was just the learning curve (which lasted a day or so).

I also worried that I would get noise from open strings ringing, but instead I found that light-pressure palm muting works better for me than heavy-pressure. This is true for muting open string noise and for aggressive muting for riffs and staccato lines. It sounds tighter and is easier to play, which was surprising, but cool.

For what it’s worth, I often lightly plant the backs of my fingers on the pickguard (‘feeler’-style), and they move while I play as well. I also hard-plant my forearm on the guitar edge. This planting doesn’t cause the same problem because it’s so close to the elbow, so the ulna is held in place by the elbow joint. When I tried light forearm bracing, I found that my string tracking got sloppier.

Hope this helps.

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#6

Thank you for your feedback. Yes, heavy palm bracing might be one of the factors that’s holding me back. By default, the side of my hand wants to anchor on the bridge and not leave. This gives me the feeling that I can’t “rotate” far enough and my hand wants to break through the bridge, figuratively speaking.

But as you advised, and is visible in Troy’s video, ideally the side of the hand anchored on the bridge should not be so “glued” to the bridge and be able to move a bit more freely. Will definitely try to focus on this. Other feedback or views on this is still greatly appreciated!

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#7

It’s funny–when I play the Air Guitar my natural go-to movement is forearm rotation but I can’t do it on a practical level to save my life. Since I have some spare time over the holidays I might take another crack at it using the advice you’ve been given here. String muting and anchoring are the main reasons why it hasn’t worked for me, I think.

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#8

I find i’m struggling with these same issues. I’ve had injuries to both of my arms in the past and I have had to focus on the athletics of picking and fretting. When it pertains to picking, I get the rotation aspect and don’t have that much trouble until I get into higher speeds. Downward pick slanting definitely works for me and I’m seeing some improvement. And I’ve found that when I fan my fingers on my picking hand, I have a lighter more accurate touch and able to palm mute quite well. I think we all must discover what our bodies naturally want to do and focus on improvement. I definitely have trouble with string tracking at higher speeds. And probably the greatest issue I have is my third and fourth fingers on my fretting hand do to a past injury. They just don’t want to move in sync with my first and second fingers and my picking. But I’m determined to overcome this inconvenience. What it all boils down to is the hours logged in practicing basic movement using a metronome to gauge our improvement. And also know that frustration is all a part of it. You have to push through it. I promise you, that every great lead guitar player out there dealt with these kinds of things. They just pushed through until breakthrough came. I look back to even 5 year ago when I was really struggling with all of this and see now that I have greatly improved. I really feel like I am on the verge of the greatest breakthrough I’ve ever had. I even quit the corporate job lifestyle and started working for Uber so that I could choose my own schedule and work around days when I am having the most inspiration. Keep in mind, some days will be good and some bad. Don’t let that hinder you. You are only human!

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#9

I sort of made a discovery while watching the Cascade series. As Troy does the close up on his picking hand, I noticed that he rests or anchors his 2n, 3rd and 4th fingers on the body of his guitar while lightly palm muting the strings as he picks. I tried to match what he did and it felt really right. I noticed I had more control of the DWPS and could actually feel the picked note between both of my arms. At least that’s what it feels like. I felt like I had more control and accuracy at moderate speeds. And it help me more with string tracking as well.