Hi,i been working on DWPS for sometime,so video 1 and 2 are examples of top speed and kind of clean playing for this lick,the third video is faster but a bit out of control but it feels more relaxed in the hand maybe for me,so anyway any advice on anything is welcome.
Im my opinion the diagonal that the pick should be doing in and out of strings it is not correct since i can hear the note on the string below the one i,m playing sometimes,also i,m tensing the hand and and using my fingers too to move the pick,and a few other things but i think you 'll see things i can’t see for myself .
I don’t know man I’m not a mechanics expert but I can play this lick very very fast and I see no meaningful difference between what you’re doing and what I’m doing. I think this is a good example of just practice more. Your form looks textbook to me. If things feel more relaxed a certain way, go with that.
Hi! Thanks for posting, and good work so far. I think the first order of business is asking what picking motion you’re trying to use. Wrist? Forearm? Combination? It’s not totally clear to me from these clips. These motions all look and feel slightly different, and part of the journey is learning to determine by feel which one you’re doing. It sounds like you’re already experiencing a little of the challenge of that, when you describe the motion changing as you attempt to go faster.
Have you watched our intro to picking motion talk yet? That’s this one:
I know it’s long, and we’re working on cleaning this up right now, into smaller, bite-size lessons that are easier to follow. So apologies from us on that. In the mean time though this is a reasonably good overview of different wrist, forearm, and elbow motions.
In your case, since you’re working on the Pop Tarts lick, I’d recommend trying out wrist motion and also forearm motions and seeing if you can get any of them to happen. If one doesn’t work right away, maybe another one will.
When you get any of these motions right, you will not feel tension. Things should move relatively smoothly, even if it’s only for a few seconds before you “lose it”. We did a blog post recently on Eddie Van Halen’s tremolo technique that includes some thoughts on this process of trying to get a new, unfamiliar motion happening. Here’s that link:
The idea here is to go for it near your top speed and see if you can trigger the feeling of speedy smoothness. It won’t happen every time. If not, try to change something about your form and do it again. Sometimes this is just mental: changing what you’re thinking about can help you find a smoother way of moving.
It’s a hit and miss process at first. When you have brief “a ha” moments where you think, wow, that felt really easy, and then you lose it right afterward, that actually means you’re getting somewhere. If you think of it like a game or puzzle, that will help put you in the right mindset.
As you make these different attempts to get it, you’re also listening for when things start to sound good. For example, I’m hearing a little bit of a staccato sound in these examples, not sure where that is coming from. It could be the fretting fingers lifting before the next note arrives, or it could be something with the picking side. You could test this by just picking on a single note and seeing if it still sounds staccato. If it does, it could be fretting related. Either way, again, what you’re looking for is for a feeling of speed and smoothness in the picking hand, for for each note in the fretting hand to ring out fully and clearly, right until the next one arrives.
Hi Troy! ,yes i watched the picking motion intro but i’ll do it again since as you said it is not clear to me what kind motion i am doing,i feel it like a combination of wrist flexion and extension with some forearm and fingers movement,i’m trying to avoid the fingers part because i does not work and it is tensing my hand.
When i see your video playing this lick i see wrist deviation (may be wrong about it) but my hand it is in a diferent position i think,i am trying to feel wrist deviation in my practice.
Anyway i’ll check the intro on picking motion again.
Aha, gotcha, thanks for doing that. I will put that on us again since we could use a more user-friendly format where it’s easier to part out the instructions for each movement. Is this the motion you’re going for?
Of the motions I do, this is the one most similar to what you’re describing. It’s mostly wrist, with a small amount of forearm, done from a supinated arm position. In the picking motion talk, the instructions for doing this start at about 59 minutes and go until about 1:13. The instructions for doing it are pretty decent and I don’t imagine we’ll add too much to this when we re-film. But you never know what we may come up with as we get feedback from players who are attempting to do all these motions.
What I will suggest is that this motion should feel effortless and loose. One way to try and get that feeling is to think about making a larger, strummy motion that feels like you’re throwing the pick along a pickups-parallel pathway. Not that you’re specifically trying to make a large movement, but think about the kind of looseness that would involve, like throwing a ball type looseness. And now imagine that the path of that throwing motion is in line with your pickups.
In other words, don’t think about turning the arm. Don’t even think about what joint you’re trying to move. Just let that be whatever it it’s going to be. Instead, think about the path you want the pick to travel, more or less parallel (roughly) to the pickups as I’m doing it in this clip here. And think about doing this fast.
Learning motions is all about giving it the old college try. It’s not really about repetition, per se, since repeating a thing that’s not working won’t generally make it start working. Instead, taking multiple cracks at this, trying it different ways, attempting to simulate what you’re seeing in these clips until you feel it click.
Ok,so i been working on (wrist deviation+forearm rotation)for a week or so,thanks for telling me exactly where to find it in the video,this is is where i am at now :
The right hand movement (wrist deviation+forearm rotation) is there i believe when i play just one note,it feels very relaxed ,when i play the lick it feels diferent,not bad but not so easy Âżmaybe synchronization is not there ?,Âżdo i need some work on synchronization? , i am not so sure about how to work on synchronization.
Also i am touching the second string ( B string) sometimes with the pick.
On the pop tarts lick i seem to loose the forearm rotation maybe?
