Here’s a cool little comparison we just filmed which was both instructive to film and to watch. For those still trying to sort out picking motions in your mind — and that probably includes all of us including me! — this is pretty much exactly what the different varieties of alternate picking look like when lined up back to back:
It was challenging and instructive to do this and try to get them each to sound as similar as I could, without looking, and making sure I could tell by feel when I was switching from one to the other. For simplicity of comparison, I’m doing them all with wrist motion and keeping the arm more or less in the same, or very similar position all the time to reduce the number of variables.
For the crosspicking motion, this is a very good reference for what optimal form looks like. You might look at this and think, that’s crazy, it’s too large and too high. It is not. It feels very smooth to do this, and it feels like the margin of error here is thin. In other words, I don’t think I could actually do this any flatter at this tempo without hitting something. If I speed up it might flatten out a little. But I cannot go flatter at this speed specifically.
Also, I am intentionally making a motion that is large enough to go past the surrounding strings, as a test that I am truly avoiding those strings. This means I am putting some power into the pickstroke so that it travels farther in the alotted time. That’s how motion size is controlled. However, because this motion is efficient, it’s not a prohibitive amount of power, and the notes are not being slammed with attack. That’s why large motions are not “wasteful” as we were so often told. Economy is a ratio of what you put in versus what you get out. In this instance, I am putting in the minimal energy necessary to get this large motion. Any other picking motion that is more vertical than this would require more energy per pickstroke travel, even if it were smaller.
Also, note that the motion is already traveling approximately three strings worth of distance. This is why I am able to transition smoothly from playing on a single string to roll playing across multiple strings, with no perceptible change in feel. Obviously, a single-string motion is not the same as a motion that plays notes on different strings at different distances apart. But the key is that they are close enough that they feel the same, and smoothness is optimized. This is the bluegrass way, and it is why that method of learning produces the alternate pickers that it produces, whereas the rock way produces players with a different set of capabilities.
I realized after we did this that I forgot to include the “trapped” pickstroke that you’d use for sweeping. So we may do this again in a slightly fancier format including that motion as one our “Two-Minute Tutorials” like we did last time. We’ll put that up if we do it.