Hello!
Long-time free content consumer, first-time poster. I’ve been playing since I was 15, and enjoyed some local success being in bands with some very talented folks, some of whom went on to be Actual Musicians now, which is cool. I always had a pretty good ear but my picking hand was just sort of this floppy, muppety, flailing mystery that I couldn’t introspect until I came across the CtC stuff on YouTube. If I couldn’t play a line before, I would just shrug and go “guess I can’t play that for some reason”, now I can say “oh, I can’t play that because my usual USX approach isn’t doing the trick, I’ll need to sneak in a legato or rearrange the notes-per-string” or something like that. I like being able to do this, so, for that alone, thanks CtC! I managed to win a free month trial of the paid material by solving the Cory Wong challenge on Instagram, and while work’s kept me busy and not able to really dive in head-first like I’d like, a lot of the stuff I’ve found in here with the time I do have has been pretty enlightening!
Lately I have been dabbling with bluegrass and even bought a cheap mandolin at a garage sale. My early impression of this is that a lot of stuff is going to feel and sound really unnatural if I don’t get pretty skilled at crosspicking - I can rearrange some stuff to fit my USX, but at the end of the day it seems like it’ll be best if I can meet in the middle and at least get some of this double-escape stuff figured out.
I have noticed when trying the material in Troy’s video about Andy Wood and Molly Tuttle that it’s very difficult for me to find this arm position where the 9-0-2 or 10-0-3 wrist motion comes out; I’m scuffing up against neighboring strings. What’s weirder is, I think my picking hand has already anticipated this and at some point in the last 25 years developed a weird way of trying to compensate, and I’m not convinced it’s any good because it leaves my picking hand feeling off-kilter.
I’ve found that, when I’m trying to do the forward roll in the aforementioned video, my thumb and index fingers keep instinctually pulling back on the pick with my fingers, sort of like a pinching motion, drawing it back into my hand when trying to switch strings. It doesn’t happen at slow speeds, but when I try to play a forward roll at tempo, the hand immediately starts yanking on the pick, pinching it back and away from the string in an attempt to get free of the plane of the strings. It’s not really a string-hop, I don’t think the motion is very wrist-heavy, it really feels like I’m just pinching on the pick.
I know some players do finger actions to clear the strings, like Martin Miller. But this doesn’t really feel very controllable, it leaves my picking feeling really chaotic and off-balance. I’m not really getting the sound or control I want, just kind of flopping on my strings like a tuna on the deck of a ferry. I got the distinct impression from Troy’s material that feeling tuna-esque was undesirable.
Is this pinching a normal feeling? Is this something I should roll with? Or something to try and root out?