Forearm rotational Picking with DWPS

Playing Technique
#1

Hi,

I had been previously playing with a sideways wrist picking motion. I have found that with a forearm rotational motion, i can achieve higher speed and accuracy. I have some questions regarding this.

Firstly, how does one mute the top strings? I had been doing this with the palm but not sure how it would work in a rotational motion.

Secondly, does one have to play with one style of picking motion throughout. Would it be inefficient to switch between wrist picking and forearm rotational picking for different parts?

Thanks alot!

#2

Are you asking about forearm rotation that looks like in EVH’s tremolo technique, where you have a single point of contact with the forearm on the guitar body? There’s no muting in that technique. You can also do a variation on this where the right side of the palm contacts the bridge and strings. Very often this version of the motion uses some amount of wrist motion too, and isn’t pure forearm. You can get muting on any string with this approach. The first thing I play in this video is uses this forearm/wrist blend, and if you look closely you can see how the palm is contacting the strings:

Re: changing techniques, EVH is once again a textbook example of this. He has a wrist technique, a forearm technique, and an elbow technique, and he switches between them in somewhat idiosyncratic (Eddie-o-syncratic?) fasion depending on the line he’s playing.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks alot troy! This explains all my queries, and yes i meant the rotational technique where the palm rests in the bridge. I think u referred to it as yngwie rotational picking in one of your videos.

#4

That video was wrong in its overall description of what was going on so we took it down from YouTube. The motion I was using there is really a blend of wrist and forearm, and not the pure EVH-style forearm.

#5

Thanks for the clarification.

#6

I just wanted to show my way of using rotational and muting on the high strings. Maybe this is not all forearm but it feels almost the same muting or not muting. I just lean more downward with the hand and maybe flex the wrist a bit more.

It also really helps for me to have space for your right hand fingers on the guitar. Because of this, I removed the volume knob and moved it a la the Gilbert Ibanez model.

5 Likes
#7

I was going to ask you about muting on your picking motion thread. Instead I logged in and found this here:)
Thanks for sharing. Could you also show me
how you would mute unwanted sound on higher strings while doing an ascending run.

Thanks!

#8

If it’s a palm muted sound your after, simply put your palm across all the strings and you wont have any problems muting all the strings at once. This can be hard though, it at least was for me, if you’re used to use the arm to track strings. I have worked quite a long time to get my hand to stay at the same spot and track the strings using wrist motion instead a la Gilbert. Since I haven’t seen your playing I don’t know what your setup is.

2 Likes
#9

Thanks for this.
I am actually looking to ascend a pattern while muting the the strings which have been played. So its not palm muting all strings but only muting the higher strings (which have been played). So each time i change string, i need to mute the higher string.
I am struggling with this with my rotational dwps.
I think i use my arm to keep track of strings.

Here is a video

#10

Ok I got it. This is of course a bit trickier. But from watching your video I can say right away that you need to move your picking hand closer to the neck of the guitar to be able to mute the strings with the palm. Your current setup is very Gypsy-like which of course is a great style, but I could never get the muting to work that way. I know Troy has videos where he plays this way with a lot of distortion but have no muting problems. Marty Friedman is an other example.

So I’ll just show the way I have solved it for me. In the video, I first show the way it looks like you’re playing. Then, I move my hand closer to the neck and put my palm on the lowest (in pitch) two strings (ie E and A). This probably will feel a bit alien to you if you haven’t tried it before. It might change the angle of your arm and wrist.

But this placement is key to have e solid muting of the low strings when ascending. In the end of the video I show how you can just lift up the palm from the low strings if you need to play them with an open sound (not palm muted). As soon as you start playing the D-string, I lower my palm onto the low strings again to mute them. This is the way I do it anyway. There might be other ways that would work better for you.

1 Like
#11

Thank you Qwertygitarr…that sounds like a clever way to tackle this. I will practise this and adopt the technique.