Does anyone else use arm movement as well as wrist

Playing Technique
#1

I pretty much pick the way I strum - a loose wrist with a bit of arm movement to help everything along. I actually find this a lot more comfortable than just using the wrist. Anyone else do this? Any disadvantages? It looks like Martin Miller does this and also Guthrie Govan when he’s playing fast.

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#2

Yeah, the arm got a bad name for many years but I find it actually pretty useful to help the wrist. Moreover it is very hard to do string tracking using only the wrist!

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#3

I’m not completely sure what I’m doing tbh, but I think it’s most wrist-based. I actually have my wrist anchored on the bridge and can get (“track”) to all 6-strings pivoting from there. So I guess that would be mostly wrist deviation.

Now when I decided to work on crosspicking rolls couple months ago I started doing something different, with more forearm movement in the mix. Not that I was aware of that in the first place until I posted here. Also I did glide (or better said wiggle) more from my anchored wrist which couldn’t stay put. After putting more work on that I figured most of these forearm movements were unnecessary (and actually causes less fluidity of motion and that wiggling wrist). I did work to get rid of them and I could recover a much stable wrist pivot. But I do need a bit of forearm kick for downstroke when changing string ascending.

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#4

What is string tracking?

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#5

This is really subjective… but I’ve found that a picking stroke that is sorta a less articulated version of a strum feels good… and helps keep my form relaxed. This is why when I warm up, I always like to strum and then single-note pick. It feels very natural.

However… I do not use my elbow at all for single-note strokes… unless I am going above a certain speed… somewhere around 170 BPM 16th notes is where I start mixing it in.

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#6

That’s pretty much it - strumming always felt far more natural to me than picking, so I just tried to make my picking feel as much like strumming as possible. Also, I was never able to make my pick consistently go in the right position with just the wrist movements (did both arm twisting and wrist deviation) without using the knuckle connecting my thumb to my hand, which was ok, but was hard to make consistent. Here’s an arm player who sounds as fluid as any other player I’ve ever heard.

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#7

Just browsing through older conversations, saw this, and thought I should mention our most recent live workshop, all about blended wrist + forearm motions! Definitely worth checking out for some detailed explanation / tutorial on just this topic :slight_smile:

Arm angle and wrist deviation problem