It’s weird and funny at the same time. Okay. Once again: sorry for my english ^_^’
Last thursday I was playing my guitar. Actually I was just playing a fool as usual. I was a bit tired, so instead of playing some songs or licks I was just picking random strings, fretting random frets and listening sounds my guitar made. Very productive ))
Then I decided to make movements I didn’t do before. I moved my pick in a direction perpendicular to regular direction. Obviously I had to use fingers. So my pick moved down+to neck, instead of down+to bridge. This motion gave me a funny feeling so I continued. It was kind of relaxing ) It was not my usual movement, I had never practiced it, hence it was obvious to me that this movement was useless in a real playing. So I played a scale slowly using this motion. It worked. I played faster. It worked. I turned on my metronome and played 160bpm (my limit for 3nps scales)… It worked. It was messy, sloppy, but it worked.
I was curious. I tried to play fast different licks, patterns. The movement felt unusual but not awkward. And there were no that feeling of struggling and stucking pick which I usually have. It felt just as I don’t have enough accuracy. There was almost no string resistance. Or, more correctly, it was, but it was consistent, predictable, and first time in my life I felt like downstroke and upstroke became similar.
It was strange. The least thing you expect from an unfamiliar movement is improving your playing. But after couple of days experimenting my speed did improved. Hell if I know how!
3nps, 2nps… everything became more predictable, more controllable (is this a word?)
After some experiments I found that when I was playing fast I was actually doing two movements: my regular wrist movement + perpendicular finger movements. Which led to the fact that my pick was moving almost perpendicular to strings.
I checked teemolo speed. Nope, it was 150bpm max with pure finger movement.
I decided to try to make that kind of movement with my hand, not with my fingers. I tried different postures, and came with strange one: with my wrist joint high above strings. It worked, though I didn’t like the absence of muting. Then I looked at my posture again… It was MAB’s posture just wth a pinky instead of middle and ring fingers on deck. Nevertheless I returned to more ‘flat’ posture.
It still looks strange to me. You’re just trying to make fun and then - boom - you have your skills improved. Indeed guitar picking is full of surprises.