Hey guys. I’m a long time player that plateaued years ago and have been stuck and frustrated with my slow playing ever since. I was hoping the reverse dart thrower would help speed up my down picking and that I could use that same grip to learn how to pick from the wrist to speed up my tremolo picking. But after lackluster results with this, it appears that the elbow motion would be best for me since my elbow motion tests had the highest bpm by a wide margin. What is the best way to implement a picking technique that utilizes the elbow motion and corresponding grip. (I also have no idea which grip to use for this or can I still use the trailing edge dart thrower?)how would I go about learning how to down pick with the elbow motion? im really bummed out after hoping to have a breakthrough and would really appreciate any and all suggestions from the community. Thank you!
Here’s a clip of my inefficient dart thrower down picking and wrist tremolo picking. I know disclaimers are a bad look but I made these a day after attempting to implement the change. Not sure if I should work on these longer to see what happens or switch to the elbow motion since my previous habits were to tremolo with a locked wrist…just not sure how to downpick now if I make the elbow motion my primary technique.
So my first thought here was to look at Jeff Hanneman of Slayer, thinking he’d always been elbow, but it seems that only started to happen towards the end of his tenure - I watched video of War Ensemble from 2010 where he’s all elbow (honestly looked pretty effortful), but then some vids from '92 and '98, and he’s mostly wrist.
I think the difficulty with all-downstrokes elbow would be the requirement to engage something else, like the rotator cuff, to not alternate pick.
I think what I’d do in your shoes is go ahead and use elbow for alternate picking, learn some various patterns to play, and then experiment with different ways of trying to get wrist going on for the all-downstroke stuff. Right now I think your downstroke wrist motion has too much flexion/extension and not enough side-to-side devation.
That’s some excellent feedback. I really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to check out the clips and provide detailed examples. I’m a big slayer fan so I’ll def take a look at Jeff. War Ensemble is another song I can only dream about playing. Right now, master of puppets and blackened are the two I really want to get down. I’m using master as the current measuring stick . So I should focus on the side to side movement and less bouncing up and down on the strings? I’m trying to stay conscious of that but it’s still going on. Practice practice tho.what’s really driving me nuts is that I’ve been putting a lot of time into this but I never had any real direction until I joined CTC two weeks ago . Thanks again my guy.