Hey! Thanks for posting. This looks great. You are using wrist motion, and it is the Andy Wood style of wrist motion specifically that you’re doing. We call this the “supinated” form because of the arm position, resting mostly on the pinky heel. This results in a slight tilt of the arm. It’s not supinated to the degree that you might recognize in something like a Gypsy player or Marty Friedman, but it is supinatd nonetheless. This is the form used by Andy in bluegrass, DiMeola and McLauglin in jazz, and many others.
In this playing style, the arm is largely stationary and the hand moves back and forth at the wrist joint, generating the picking motion. In this case you’re making a double escape motion which is what you want for this type of playing. But with this style, you may also mix and match the specific wrist motions (upstroke, downstroke, and double escape) without really being able to tell the difference at first. That’s fine. Try not to nerd out on that.
As far as speed the only way to get it is to go fast while ignoring accuracy. Moving the hand at the target speed is the first step. You can always slow down the faster form to get accuracy, but you can’t speed up the slower form to go fast, because it might be wrong in some subtle way that you can’t perceive.
So start trying to move your hand at the 140 tempo even if you miss most of the notes. That will teach you what smooth / fast feels like. Then slow that down a tiny bit and see if you can get some more notes. You can keep flip flopping between these various speeds. The slower speeds teach you accuracy. The faster ones remind you what it’s supposed to feel like when done correctly / effortlessly. Cleaning this up is the “long tail” which takes months to a couple years of finding every possible picking pattern, playing little licks / etudes with them, running them through these various speeds, and seeing if you can get more notes correct over time while maintaining smoothness. That’s the process in a nutshell.
Great work so far!
