Dumb crosspicking question. Stringhopping?

[Drew]

@hamsterman

Well, that sounds like me as well. I’d say keep it up. One thing I’d suggest is to do that kinda messy practice with a static fretting hand, at least initially. Later on you can do all the fretting movements as well.

You sounded like this looks, too?!?

I thought about a static hand position and even tried just playing muted strings with no defined notes… But, well, one, I think the fretting hand movement seems to help with the string-tracking somehow…? And two, well, that would sound like absolute garbage with distortion, and when I’m playing my Strat, I LIKE distortion.

I’ll just come at it two ways - full-tempo “damn the fretting hand!” picking practice, as well as gradually working up from, oh, I can probably play this cleanly around 120-140 or so, and just racheting up the tempo gradually thhere to pull the fretting hand up to speed.

I also tried this Satriani style, reaching over the neck with my picking hand to mute the strings, and tapping them with my fretting hand - a Strat probably isn’t the guitar for this, especially running into an amp that isn’t all THAT distorted, but maybe on one of my RGs that would be a good way to get the fretting hand movements up to speed.

[hamsterman]

I sounded horrible, worse than a train wreck. The left and right hand link is very deeply embeded in our muscle memory. I kinda had to really strip everything, because I kept swiping out of habit. I turned off all gain, and stopped all muting… but that’s a bit extreme. 120-140 bpm, is impressive for playing clean. I struggled early on to break 100. It felt so foreign.

[Drew]

Not perfectly clean (and there’s at least one point where I’m doing something that looks suspiciously like a TWPS wrist rotation), but this was a 5-string pattern I hadn’t tried before maybe 5 minutes before shooting this (ages ago when I still had some illusion of learning to sweep I tried sweeping this, but without a repeated note at either end it felt weird) and it’s relatively clean, I guess.

One thing I have trouble with at faster tempos is muting - stopping the notes I just played from ringing out. Any thoughts, other than repetition?

[hamsterman]

Looks good. I have issues with muting and high speeds as well. It’s gotten better, but I still feel I need the distance between the palm and the strings to create speed, and I am not even sure why… other than it kinda allows for a MAB-like mechanic.

One weird thing that has helped me with the fretting/timing was going back and forth between sweeping and x-picking. It’s weird, but it helps kinda make everything ‘click’

[JonJon]

One weird thing that has helped me with the fretting/timing was going back and forth between sweeping and x-picking. It’s weird, but it helps kinda make everything ‘click’

like this? hehe

Rick Graham, sweeps Glass Prison then alt picks it

[Acecrusher]

It’s more or less the right motion, just a little too vertical, which is why I’m able to do it at the speeds you’re seeing there but not quite the Tumeni tempo speeds.

@Troy, I have a question about that for you. When you say “too vertical”, I wonder if you’ve ever tried measuring what degree angle “too vertical” is. Do you believe that what is too vertical varies among different players, or is there a certain limit, for example 75 degrees and above, that qualifies as being too vertical for anyone to be able to reach the Tumeni tempo speeds?

[Troy]

I wonder if you’ve ever tried measuring what degree angle “too vertical” is.

Yes. The players with flat motion suitable for doing both escapes, like Andy Wood, Molly Tuttle, and Mike Stern, use an escape trajectory of about 15-20 degrees. Any more than that and you will start to feel speed limiting and/or arm tension.