Hi all, I’m new here and just getting to grips with the insight offered.
I spent years ingraining a downward pick slant and have now realised that this only becomes efficient when we are adhering to an upward escape…Quite a revelation.
I was wondering if there is a shift when playing chords or double stops as these generally use both up and down escapes. I find myself playing with no angle in order to brush across multiple strings Although I still get stuck at times on the upstroke.
I couldn’t see any sections on 2/3 string chord strumming in the course. Ay advice appreciated.
You’re talking about strumming chords like in a rhythm guitar sense? What type of music? For acoustic type stuff I’d check out the Andy Wood “Acoustic Workshop” interview around the one-hour mark where we talk about strumming.
Andy is a strum master. For this type of playing the main thing to understand is that it’s a motion that blends wrist and forearm. The wrist motion is flexion-extension oriented, like a “revving the motorcycle” motion. You’ll hear Andy refer to this at various points. But it’s blended with the arm motion so it’s more like a dance move, where everything flows together. You can get a nice look at this in the Magnet footage.
Try not to worry about “pickslanting” here, per se. It’s not really about that. And try not to parse out this joint is doing this one thing, and this other joint is doing this other thing, and so on. It’s about getting this overal flowing dancelike motion to happen by trying to do all of it, and seeing if you can get it to feel smooth and look like what Andy is doing. This is generally true of all rhythmic multi-string strumming whether it’s electric or acoustic.
If you’re talking more about playing double stops on two strings, fast, you could do that like Andy is doing it. Or you could do it like Eddie does it here, with just wrist or elbow motion by itself:
This is mechanically simpler. He’s just sitting ont he bridge here and using either wrist or elbow or both to move straight aross through the strings. No dancelike flowing here. That’s fine if just need to play on this one group of strings. Refer to the elbow motion or wrist motion sections of the primer for the general form he’s using.
Thanks Troy, This is great. My strumming is in the context of more funk and jazz styles so both of these techniques are great.
I realised that my up strumming was less smooth due to the pick angle being less than the down strum.
Really useful video thanks.
