DWPS - not enough supination vs not enough rotation

Technique Critique
#16

I suspect what’s happening is that your movement isn’t “strict” 903 wrist movement, but is some shade toward a “902” movement, with slight wrist extension at the end of downstrokes, and slight wrist flexion at the beginning of upstrokes. The pinky gliding along the pickguard “pushes” your wrist off of the strict 903 axis as you move through a downstroke. This is why your thumb can be closer to the guitar face at the end of a downstroke than the beginning of a downstroke, but your pinky remains at the same “height” above the guitar face both at the beginning of a downstroke and the end of a downstroke. In theory, you could accomplish the same thing through some sort of contortion of your palm or fingers, but that doesnt appear to be the case here. I guess the same result could also be accomplished with forearm rotation, but if there is any forearm rotation in your case, it’s very very subtle.

@adamprzezdziecki , I don’t know if my interpretation of @shinjuku 's picking helps shed any light on your picking for you. I guess one way to look at it is that if you can’t find a way to get strict 903 movement to have escaped upstrokes, maybe experimenting with something more 902-ish will be more palatable to you than adding forearm rotation. Looking at @shinjuku as an example, I’d say the more supinated your forearm posture is, the more a 903 action will tend to have escaped upstrokes, but also the more problematic the “where does my pinky go if not through the face of the guitar?” question becomes, and @shinjuku 's video shows one solution: the pinky slides along the guitar face, and the overall movement takes on a bit more of a “902” character.

#17

Ha, no wonder. My main 7 is a Suhr Modern flame top in Bengal Burst. You have good taste. :slight_smile:

#18

Trying 902 leads to stringhopping, upstroke is still not escaped so I’m subconsciously trying to add flextension to it and we all know bad things happen then. When I look at my dwps now I feel like the problem is whenever I try to play a little faster, flexion upstroke-extension downstroke starts to become main source of picking motion. Maybe I’ll try practicing slow to try get rid of that.

#19

Thanks for the analysis Frylock. I wonder if the minor modification to the 903, which you attributed to a slight wrist flexion at the beginning of upstrokes and slight extension at the end of downstrokes, is actually instead caused by a slight amount of forearm rotation. Either way I suspect this minor modification to the 903 and the supination of the forearm would be what is causing the escaped up pick strokes and trapped down pick strokes.

[EDIT] I should add that the strange noise of the string is b/cos I have the phone lightly resting on the strings as I’m holding it in position with my left hand - no magnet unfortunately.

#20

When you attempt escaped upstrokes with a 903 or 902 movement, if the upstrokes aren’t escaping with the “9 o’clock” movement then your posture isn’t supinated enough. The essence of escaped upstrokes is that the pick gets closer to the face of the guitar on downstrokes (trapped direction) and further from the face of the guitar on upstrokes (escaped direction). It seems that the heart of your difficulty with wrist-oriented escaped-upstroke picking is that the movement of your pick is too close to “parallel” to the face of the guitar, hence strokes trapped in both directions. For an example of the kind of path that can work, take another look at @shinjuku 's video.

Alternatively, if you want to explore a more forearm-rotation based approach (as in your second video), I think the key is finding a way to get the rotation motion to feel smooth even without holding the guitar or the pick. For me, one way to get that motion to feel smooth is to flex the wrist more. Even if you don’t want to have a gypsy-jazz type of wrist flex in your playing, experimenting with it can help you latch on to what a smooth forearm rotation can feel like, and give you a starting point for developing a forearm rotation motion with a posture that’s acceptable to you. Another thing that I personally find helps me have a smooth/fast powerful forearm rotation mechanic is using an “ulnar deviation offset” with the flexed wrist (in addition to being flexed, my wrist is deviated toward the ulna side).

I found the Ben Higgins video below had some helpful ideas about developing a smooth/fast forearm-rotation motion:

#21

see my post from 20 days ago lol. from the mouth of two or more witnesses…

Can you help me in my picking quest?
DWPS Help - Stringhopping?
#22

Sorry for the delay in responding — saw this thread a while back but we’ve been swamped. In short, a video is worth 1000 words:

I’ll give you the words too. The doing of this is very simple and physically easy, but deceptive. If you use the setup where the entire right side of the hand rests on the strings, and the wrist is lightly flexed, you will get a blend of wrist and forearm that looks like this:

This is the “Doug Aldrich” style of motion which is super common, some version of which Ben Higgins is (probably) demonstrating in that clip. Tons of players use this. So many that you may think that some type of forearm component is mandatory for executing an upstroke escape picking motion. It is not. It’s the arm position that is giving that to you. When you rest the entire right side of the hand on the strings, you are blocking the ulnar side of the motion. The only way you can go is radial. And the radial side of the wrist doesn’t go very far. Ergo, you won’t have much travel unless the arm gets involved and starts turning.

For the wrist-based version of this, the right side of the hand does not rest on the strings / body. The watchband area of the wrist rests on the strings / body. This is the pivot point. Flextension-wise you want no flexion. Too much and you’re back to the right side resting on the strings, which is the wrist/forearm setup. We want wrist motion only, so we’re doing a straight wrist with no flexion or extension, give or take a few degrees. And the supporting fingers must be out of the way of the motion. No body contact or you won’t be able to move ulnar enough to give the wrist its range of motion. This is why players like Andy Wood do the raised fingers.

Now, center the deviation range of motion. But here’s the trick. The center is not when the wrist is at zero radial and zero ulnar. The center is actually when the wrist is about 10 degrees ulnar. Roughly when the thumb lines up with the radius. Again, the wrist has more range of motion in the ulnar direction, so to center it, you have to be slightly offset ulnar. It may feel “ulnar” to you. It’s not, it’s centered. It may not feel very supinated to you either. But it will be.

That’s it. From this position, No arm will be necessary and you can just pivot back and forth. It should feel easy and fluid, and you should escape.

The new Primer material we are filming now will have an extensive verbal / visual version of what I just wrote, along with the same for downstroke escape and double escape.

Give that a shot and see how it works out.

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I have been trying so hard and have made no progress!
Speed Picking Critique Needed!
#23

Is there then no way to palm mute?

#24

With this form you wrist-mute. That’s how it’s done. If you tilt a little further than what I’m demonstrating here, you can get some right side contact for muting if you prefer to do it that way, but then it’s not double-escape form any more and you’ll need to tilt back to get centered again.

If you use a more extended grip, then your double escape form becomes more supinated and you can have ulnar-side muting.

If you use a max-supinated form you can get more ulnar-side contact, a la Steve Morse, but you’ll probably need a middle finger grip to reach the strings at that point.

Those are the options for wrist-only motion and muting.

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#25

This is a revelation. Actually muting with anything other than the ulnar blob is something that never even crossed my mind, thanks!

#26

Thanks. When you say to center the motion does it mean that the moment you hit the string is when the thumb lines up with the radius?
I’ve also watched the 2-minute crosspicking tutorial again and the first thing you show is to extend the wrist slightly. Is your wristband area contacting the body behind the bridge, not on the bridge? If I’m flat on the bridge and I extend my wrist, I pick air.

#27

Yes, give or take. Meaning you just want to be moving back and forth around a comfortable center point, and that center point may not be where most people think it is. Obviously, for something like a repeating shred-style pattern that takes place across a couple of strings, you may not [edit: sorry “may not”] be moving your whole arm back and forth on phrases like that. So you are not going to be hitting the string exactly in the center of your range of motion every time. But you’ll be in the ballpark.

Wrist extension is just set to whatever height reaches the strings given all the other variables in play, like the ones you point out, plus grip, pick exposure, etc. This isn’t critical. What you don’t want is to roll over on the side of the arm and flex the wrist. That puts you into forearm-wrist territory.

TLDR: Slightly ulnar with nothing else remarkable, really - there’s not much to it.

#28

For more on this, you can check out the recent Andy Wood workshop interviews, both electric and acoustic, where we discuss this in detail. And of course plays this way, and we actually had him point to the different parts of his hand that are muting the string. They are all in the middle somewhere, either between the heels, or slightly more toward the pinky heel.

I think this is something that players who play this way don’t think about, because it’s just wherever they are touching the instrument, which they have always done and don’t think of as special.

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#29

I’ve watched both those interviews, actually, but it was a couple months ago before I took a semi-voluntary guitar break. I must have just missed the bit on muting. :slight_smile:

This little tidbit was the key for me, by the way: implementing it just today has transformed my 902 explorations from “idle excursion” to “wow holy moly this works.”

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#30

Right on! Results, that’s where it’s at.

#31

By right side of the hand do you mean the knife hand part of the blade?
I’ve tried to figure out DWPS using Wrist only motion but for some reason it seems to defy me as I’ve always used that knife edge to rest on and it feels likes something has been blocking me and the pick has been getting snagged on the Strings. I’ve actually been noticing that my hand has gotten more and more pronated (now to where I rest on the thumb pad when I am playing Lines)

I’ll have to try this “watch hand positon”. Do you happen to have a picture that could highlight this area: just something with a giant red circle that would give a visual of what part of the wrist goes on the body of the guitar for this type of playing.

#32

Yes, I mean ulnar side / pinky side of the hand. Whatever your arm position is, there is some way you can move the wrist that will move it away from the guitar’s body on the downstroke, and away from the guitar’s body on the upstroke. And it’s not always going to be strictly deviation or strictly flexion/extension. It depends on the arm position, which is influenced by the grip. Or vice versa.

If you can hang out for a couple weeks we should be able to get the Primer material on this subject up. At least some of it. We’re doing wrist by showing the four most common arm positions and grips, from Molly-pronated to Morse-supinated, with the grip that matches it, and showing how to do each of the basic motions (USX, DSX, and… 2SX?) in each of those positions and grips.

It’s a lot variables but they really are all different ways of playing the guitar and to understand wrist, you need to understand the concept of what makes them all work. We’re doing our best to make it as clear, practical, and useful as we can!

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#33

This point about the difference between moving either towards or away from the players body with the wrist is crucial and something I missed due to my emphasis on content(what was being played) as opposed to how it was being “accomplished” that is to say played or attempted to be played as for the most part my playing has been attempts and not actually playing as I would witness in some others and occasionally myself.

I had formerly assumed that I wasn’t fast enough in my alternate picking or for that matter legato riffs especially pentatonic triplet riffs on outside string changes(usually over 2 strings), except at very “moderate(and I mean very moderate)” tempos. No amount of practice was going to make it happen because the movement away from the body towards the string(whether coming or going to an upper string and back), was always going to be top heavy. So now that the smoke has cleared this movement can be gauged knowing the range of motion has as you have said an offset(by about 10 degrees from what is considered centered or at least neutral.
It took a while to unpack the jargon but I did get the message.

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#34

There is more to say here that I realized later after I wrote the original reply to the response to the original post.

When we are talking about alternating movement the ideas generated become discretely quantized into opposing and equal motions with in this case the wrist, but this not true and has never been true. The only reason this really hasn’t been questioned is because most who play a plucked stringed instrument with a “flat” object(on both sides of and in between strings) don’t generate enough momentum to warrant the need for better technique, since getting the pick across the strings is doable. Once you get to more complex especially faster paced playing everything and I mean everything changes.
The levering of wrist side to side, elbow and shoulder movement all have uneven offsets when moving in two directions, which is of course a shorthand for elliptical movement. The wrist and elbow have these offsets in opposing directions which makes sense.

What I saw after I started to understand this is that the so called Two Finger grips are not based on the index finger being supported by the middle finger. It is the Middle finger supported by the index finger that is at play. How do I Know this, because that is a way to remove the offset in wrist deviation so as to make upstrokes and down strokes easily divisible and repeatable. I could not understand why the EVH pick grip seemed at least in part easier than the index finger grips any of them, but I see the intuitive “logic” at play here. This means as well that the Steve Morse(one of my models) pick grip can be understood as a middle finger grip which is Supported by the first finger and NOT the other way around. I had almost no success with two finger grips because even though the pick was more easily controlled in one sense(held onto with more authority), the actual motion back and forth through the string was much more difficult as I had it backwards(index main grip middle support), when it was and is the other way around.

It has to be understood that for naturals the process happens so fast they don’t realize it as a process, because once the alternate motion/motions are smooth/articulate the observations just given disappear into a more generalized feeling of expression, that is to say holding the pick and playing with the first two fingers.

Now once this is done index finger grips can become much easier as the implications are physically appreciated as a kind of embodied "fact. This so far is what I have been able to appreciate with speeds close to presto uwps and dwps with out testing escapement yet. Stay tuned.

#35

Hi all. I think I’ve arrived somewhere near wrist + forearm xpicking territory. I’ll try to record slowed down vid tomorrow.

Not much to see there regarding to picking path. I just wanted to show you my position and ask if you guys place your hand differently on the guitar when uwps and dwps (Troy calls it approach angle, I think). It feels different than stringhopping but I still get RSI type of pain on the ulnar or radial side of the forearm, depending on how I place it on the body. Centering the motion might be my problem here.

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