DWPS - beginner questions re picking

Hi All!

First let me start by saying thank you to Troy for creating this incredible material! As many others I have given up on trying to master picking ages ago. Hopefully with help of you guys I can improve my picking technique.

Ok, so this is where I am at now:

  1. Tremolo picking - I can pick with 16 notes with metronome @ 140 accurately. 160BPM on a good day. Although @ 160BPM i tend to tense an most movement seems to be coming from the elbow and is hard to control. At 160BPM or higher I am unable to sustain it and i gets sloppy pretty quickly. My questions for point no.1 are:
  • how to develop quicker and controllable tremolo picking?
  • where should right hand movement come from at speeds over 140BPM? It seems that I tense and all comes from elbow. Wrist seems to be the most natural and controllable movement but hard to maintain at higher speeds at the moment
  1. Playing DWPS patterns (such as below clipe) - 16th notes up to 130BPM are what I can do it cleanly and easily. Then between 130-150 I can get it if I am warmed up but it is not consistent. 160 is my top speed for DWPS (and tremolo picking too) - but only at short bursts and only 10%-20% of the time it is clean.
  • how do I build speed up from clean and accurate 120-130PBM in 16th notes.

Also my observations regarding picking:

  1. It seems to me that picking technique (I may be wrong) is completely different for speeds of 150+ in 16th notes. It feels different and it does not feel like the same technique that I use for 120PBM but only faster. Is that possible or correct?

Finally this is a short clip of me playing some DWPS in 16th sextuplets pentatonic shapes @80-90 BMP. Please let me know if it is looking ok. I am aware it is not always clean.

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Hey, it looks good to me man. The other guys can give you more of a technical analysis. Iā€™m new to the techniques. I would experiment with adding a little flexion to the wrist to see if that compliments the DWPS at all. You could also see if gripping the pick a little farther toward the tip would help with keeping tight and clean. What you are doing is fine IMO though.

:bear:

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