Discovering “Picking Depth”

Playing Technique
#1

I was looking over a few Claus Levin videos last night where he casually mentions “pick depth”, as in how much of the plectrum is used to actually pluck the string. He goes into little detail about this, but just mentions achieving an even resistance on both your down and up strokes.

For such a small and simple detail, I have discovered this to be quite profound, and immediately noticed inconsistencies in my own picking depth, which I believe have been subtly contributing to tension and holding my picking hand back from developing dexterity.

On top of this, I have found over time that my picking hand can only execute tremolo picking of a decent speed when placed in a strong upward pick slanting direction, with the thumb/palm area anchoring on the lower strings or the body of the guitar. I now realise that the reason this is effective for me, is because it puts my picking in an advantageous position to achieve a shallow and even picking depth.

It’s amazing how quickly you can adapt after becoming aware of these small points of attention.

Has anyone else had any findings in this particular area?

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#2

I find it’s easier to use only a little bit of the pick, but I’m not sure if it matters that much to be honest. Troy seems to use quite a lot of pick when he’s using DWPS, and Joscho uses a fair bit of pick too.

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#3

Yep with one-way pickslanting I find that pick depth is almost irrelevant, one can do it by feel depending on the desored attack. Maybe for cross-picking (and to some extent two-way PS) the control of pick depth becomes more important (?).

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#4

Steve Morse and Albert Lee use quite a lot of pick depth when cross picking. :stuck_out_tongue:

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#5

to me thats one of the things that i started playing around with for another reason.
with higher pick depth it seems to me the snap of the pick can be used to esacpe easier from the strings. that way the slaint-amount can be reduced to almost zero which makes twps or crosspicking way easier.
unfortuntately i’ve no setup to capture my playing but by looking while playing it seems i personally change pick depth according to string changes … which doesnt mean a lot since i’m not the hell of a player :smiley: