Exercises to improve playing with minimum amount of the pick's tip

Playing Technique
#1

Hey there!
I’ve noticed that when I get to a certain speed, I start hitting the pickup or body more often. When I see Troys slo-mo vids it is clear that he’s really only hitting the strings with the very tip of the pick, and I think that most “fast” players are doing that very well. Of course it becomes even harder to do if I’m standing or even walking while playing. So I’m wondering if there are suggestions on how to practice that and enforce better habits/technique in that regard?

#2

Hi Kerphelio!

So?
As long as it doesn’t impair your playing or your sound I wouldn’t bother. Afraid of scratching your guitar? If you want to get rid of “the problem”, then try to just pick with a little less force, that will reduce the pick travel distance. But i wouldn’t spend actual time on working on that.

Thomas

1 Like
#3

What Thomas said. This sort of problem is one that irons itself out with proper practice. In retrospect it was like the “pink elephant” of guitar technique problems. The more I thought about it, the worse it got.

#4

I hit the guitar all the time. Especially when I’m doing my “dwps” technique with rest strokes. David Grier also hit the guitar in his latest interview, right at the end of his take on the bluegrass tune “Wheel Hoss”. He complained about it afterward but I told him I thought it was great because David is obviously a great player, and this was more of a fun “oops” moment during live playing.

So one thing to point out is that hitting the guitar doesn’t mean you’re getting too much pick on the string. It just means your picking motion went too far. You can use very little pick on the string and still hit the instrument body if you go too far.

Another thing I’d point out is that we’ve looked at a lot of player-submitted videos on here over the past couple years, and I haven’t really seen many good examples of players using too much pick on the string. We’ve seen lots and lots of examples of players doing things like stringhopping. And we’ve also seen lots of examples of hand synchronization problems. But the “too much pick” problem is one we actually don’t see very often, if at all.

I think it’s still an interesting question to ask how people learn by feel to get the correct pick attack. But it’s worth pointing out that this may be something that most players eventually learn, and may not be as problematic as some of these other issues that we see more often.

#5

Thanks for your responses guys - definitely some food for thought!

Maybe I should be a little more specific! In this particular case. I’m working on getting Steve Morse’s ‘Tumeni notes’ up to speed. I’ve been using the first two parts of it as picking exercises for years, so I’m pretty familiar with playing both sequences at maybe 50% of the original tempo (I’m at about 75% now). What’s interesting to me is that I had found the only way to play this was by something that I myself thought of as ‘wide, swathing and totally inefficient picking motion that somehow still works’ - which in CtC terminology has since been neatly been as ‘cross-picking’. :smile:

Now in regards as to why do I think hitting the body/pickups is a problem - it’s not for fear of scratching my guitar. Heck I’d take pride of that sort of scarification! :wink:
No, it’s because of several reasons:

  1. I feel that it really does hurt my flow. At the very best it’s distracting, but more so it’s a physical obstacle. I mean, I’m not talking about an occasional hit, I’m talking about hitting a hard surface about 50% of the time once I go past a certain speed.
    Considering that - in a nutshell - CtC is a community concerned with “not getting stuck between the strings”, I think that “not getting stuck on your pickup” is something worth working on, no?

  1. I think it clearly indicates a loss of control and precision. I’m aware that playing slow vs fast automatically changes you technique, but I’m talking about playing fast vs playing at the top of my speed.
    Upon further reflection, I think that - as Troy said - I’m going further with the pick than I need to.
    Specifically, instead of a smooth, flat bow it seems to me I’m basically starting to dive-bomb into the string, at something more like like a V-shape and going too far while doing so. So the question is how to remedy that.

  2. It might very well be the effect of tensing up when getting close to my current physical limit, but I’m not sure how to improve on it, as micro-controlling such subtle aspects of a motion is difficult, and clearly ‘practicing it slow’ isn’t fixing it.