Everything you need to know about crosspicking

Sorry, just to clarify further, there’s never really a point where the movement is “only” one thing or another above or below the string. There’s always overlap of some kind, otherwise the hand would need to make an instant directional change and that’s really not possible. The amount and nature of the overlap is reflected by the arm position. In a parallel setup, you can do a pure deviation movement over the whole range of motion. And in a 90-degree setup - either supinated or pronated - you could have a pure flexion-extension movement over the whole range. They wouldn’t be crosspicking because pure wrist crosspicking would not be possible at those orientations. But these are the inflection points.

At every point in between those inflections, you have a blend of RUD - radial ulnar deviation, to use the academic abbreviation - and FE. In the case of Steve Morse for example, he’s toward the supinated end of the spectrum, so in his movement, FE goes almost the whole way. RUD appears above the string. In Molly’s case, she’s pronated but closer to parallel, so deviation goes the whole way. But again there is overlap and FE continues a little below the string. If you were to pronate even further, you would eventually arrive at “reverse Morse”, where FE is going almost the whole way, but RUD now appears below the string. It’s fun to experiment with these things just to help you understand what’s really going on, but you can indeed “reverse Morse” and it sort of works.

In Molly’s case, again, she’s closer to parallel it’s going to look deviation-y. However she can indeed flex a little below the string because of this. And she may do that, along with a tiny amount of forearm adjustment to reach farther, such as during these back and forth inside picking type sequences.

Again, all of this assumes she’s using a wrist motion pathway. If she adjusts that to be somewhere between a pickups-parallel path and a wrist path, then you will definitely see some forearm involvement because the wrist along can’t trace that path.

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I would add to this that the more ‘sudden’ the change from one mechanic to another… the slower your max speed will be. So I think blending is an important concept for speed.

I think there is a tradeoff. The more sudden the change… the sharper your curve can be… which make is easier to clear strings.

On the opposite spectrum… you can do a double-escape where there is a huge amount of overlap, where all your mechanics are roughly working together at mid-swing. This is what I do. The upside is you can go really fast. The downside to this is that the escape time and height is minimal, and its pretty tough to do… requiring multiple mechanics working together with a lot of precision.

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Troy, what do you mean exactly by ‘reach farther’ ? Is it to get to upper strings more easily whilst maintaining anchoring, or is it to lift up the pick a tad bit more for clearance ?

Yes that. But to such a tiny degree I wouldn’t even bother mentioning this if I were teaching someone. Molly’s arm barely moves when she does these patterns.

In general I’m happy to answer these “inside baseball” technical questions on the forum but I think sometimes observations like this which don’t necessarily have significant impact on actual learning might get read into prohibitively when trying to “figure out” movements. From my experience so far, I think when it comes to most (all?) picking movements I personally know how to do, I’m pretty sure most people can get 80% of the way there with basic guidance on placement and very general, hands-on-style guidance on how to move. Lots of great guitar teachers on here have already done that work in their private teaching. We’re just hammering out what that basic guidance should look like in our instructional material.

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But there is any kind of guide to Xpicking in the horizon?
We already heard about it, but something like you can hold the pick this way and concentrate in doing this and that… Or you can hold the pick this other way and etc…

I worked a lot in copy the Morse Grip, and I think that I’m achieving Xpicking with that approach. But now I’m working in doing this with my “normal” grip. Sometimes I think I’m doing Xpicking and sometimes I feel it’s 2WPS or Hopping. Hard to say…

Probably will be the next “bang” in the guitar community when the “Cross Picking Manual” arrive.

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Got it! Works like magic! Thanx!

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I made a web toy to help visualize all this stuff. Check it out:
https://pickbotpick.netlify.app/

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Very cool. Can you add finger motion? My technique relies on it quite heavily.

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That’s awesome!! Total grasp of the concepts there. Are you a developer?

Looks like you’re using three.js. Leap Motion has some js integration which we’ve tested. You can get a basic model up and running quickly. Unclear how much they will support this moving forward though. We’ve done some testing with Unity as well:

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@vnjksnv: That’s totally cool!

FWIW the ‘pronated crosspicking’ preset looks a lot what I’m doing.

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Unclear - your old clips appear to have gone dark. However from what I recall I think it’s possible you’re trying to do the supinated Andy-style movements with a parallel arm position, and this is potentially what’s making you feel like you need to introduce forearm motion.

Honestly, given your interest in this subject I would recommend you take advantage of the free trial and watch the broadcast we just did. It’s the most up to date presentation we have on doing these techniques, including extensive slow-motion walkthroughs of Andy, Molly, and David. It will clarify much for anyone who’s attempting to learn bluegrass movements with wrist techniques.

Kind of. But I had a couple of light bulb moments working on crosspicking, and it did affect the way I do it.

The first thing is that I realized that by ‘nesting’, combining or skipping forward and backward rolls on all 4 string positions (that is : 4 x 3 strings set) you open up an amazing possibilities of patterns. That, plus combining single strings lines with the same crosspicking approach (or its 2wps variation/reduction) gives you that lush bluegrass sound that has eluded me for years… and a lot more than that.

The second thing is that to be able to do that I needed to reconcile a couple of things in my playing, especially when playing on the lower strings. And I’m clearly pronated when it comes to pick the lower E and A strings. So it kind of ‘gave’ me two approach for the roll : one that is pronated, wrist deviation with almost no forearm motion, and one which is more a parallels set-up with a forearm ‘kick’. The forearm version is especially relevant for certain things IMO, like when you do fast double inside change (the stuff Andy Wood does all the time).

Now I’m scratching the surface on this, but it’s a lot of fun, and again, it opens up amazing possibilities of playing, in a very logical way… but you already know that, don’t you :wink:

Thanks for reminding me about the trial. I’ll check this out. But anyway the advices you gave on this were amazing and already plenty.

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Hey Troy - Sorry it’s taken so long to respond. I’m not a pro developer, just a hobbyist. Glad you like pickbot. Let me know if you want me to add anything.

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Will this work for Steve Morse stuff? Or like the glass prison arpeggios?

Hi Troy, thanks so much for the office visit! It was great!
A few questions:

  1. Do you personally prefer double escape picking (cross picking) using the wrist as shown here and discussed in our session, rather than forearm rotation (more like Jimmy Herring)? If so, why?
  2. You mentioned your own practice on double escape from the wrist- do you have any idea how long it took you to get it to where it is now?
    Thanks!
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No preference. I teach motions for a living so I have gone out of my way to learn sometimes entirely different approaches that look and feel different but accomplish similar things in the end result. And sometimes, like the Gypsy stuff, those motions do lead to a slightly different kind of vocabulary, which is cool. So I will switch to that “mode” when I want that vocabulary. But if you’re already doing a certain type of motion, and it’s comfortable, I don’t see why you wouldn’t just use that general type of motion, and slight tweaks on it, for everything. It’s just the path of least resistance.

I don’t know. First, because the process of learning to do anything is so commingled with years of doing interviews and trying to figure out what various players are doing, that I couldn’t tell you when the “figuring out” process stops and the “learning to do it” process even starts. There’s no clear division. And that’s even if you suggest that I have completely learned all these motions which I would suggest I really haven’t.

More generally my answer is that you’re basically already doing it. You have both wrist motions already, and when you switch between them in the middle of a phrase, shazam, that’s a double escape motion you’re making. You’re just going to learn to do them from a slightly more similar arm position so that making different string change can become less deliberate and more automatic. And then you’re just using “wrist motion” in a very general sense, and not really single or double escape exclusively. Which again, is kind what you’re already doing.

If you look at someone like Steve Morse, who is a “double escape” player, you’ll notice that it’s not double ecscape all the time. Take for example this phrase:

Switch to the slow motion recording, and also drop the speed slide to 50%. That will give you 12% slow motion. And you’ll see that some of these pickstroke are double escape, but others are downstroke escape with upstroke rest strokes (!), and still others are upstroke escape with downstroke rest strokes. So what you’re looking at here is basically “wrist motion” as a general base of operations. That’s really what you’re shooting for here — not one particular escape or another.

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This is my problem. You say once you have the right setup there’s not any other way to move other than string hopping. But when I set up, I end up string hopping. I don’t know
How to change that and playing at fast speeds it’s not as if I can consciously think about the path of every single stroke, because as you say, once you set up that way and just attempt to deviate it should happen automatically. Or, it doesn’t, and you string hop, so then what? I am stuck at 100 bpm for months , but have been playing guitar for 15 years so i am super frustrated.