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Quick and easy one-pager on garage spikes with some cool illustrative GIF animation loops to really make this obvious. We also make these for players who hit us up in Technique Critique, and it can really drive the point home in a simple way when you see this in your own playing.
More generally, before I started doing this for a living, I never would have guessed how common certain basic problems are. Stringhopping, for one. It was something I encountered only when trying to switch strings against my (most likely) self-taught USX technique, which I was unaware of at the time. But on a single string I don’t think it really happened. It never occurred to me that some players might learn this even on a single string, on every note, as their actual full-time primary picking motion. And two, garage spikes. Super common – maybe the most common picking problem alongside stringhopping.
What’s particularly problematic about both of these is that they are radical early gates. If they happen, you either can’t play very fast, or you can’t play at all. It’s clear there are probably lots of players who hit these roadblocks early and made significant choices in response: maybe switched to legato / sweeping, maybe switched to keyboards, etc.
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Troy, one (perhaps silly) request. When recording things where we’re going to be analyzing everything about the motion, could you perhaps not wear jackets to the wrist? The Joe Pass video snippet you included in the email for this is an example. There’s forearm rotation going on which is apparent even with the jacket but (and maybe it’s just me) I know I’d like to see that arm.
Thanks again for all the valuable info!
This was absolutely my case - can’t tell you what exactly the problem was, but I was never any good at picking, so I just did a LOT of legato practice.
It works, and it comes with its own vocabulary and style and phrasing and all the like, and you can build a totally viable “style” around it. Joe Satriani actually can pick well enough, and he did this largely by choice.
but, there’s also a reason today that I’m here and I’m unlearning bad habits and building a, maybe not new but certainly expanded vocabulary, of things that work well for the way I DO pick (and, ironically, those choices are starting to inform my legato phrasing as well).
Sweeping, maybe you can be a stringhopper and still sweep, but you pretty much HAVE to fix the garage spikes isse to sweep. And I think I did spend a little while truing to learn some sweep licks and it did seem to actually help my regular picking, so I suspect I was a victim to garage spikes, come to think of it.
Of course! The Primer is very consistent on this. This was a fun thing for YouTube where we wanted to mirror the old Joe clip.
This was also not intended to be a tutorial on how to actually do a USX picking motion. I was clear on that - otherwise this would have been a much longer video. The main takeaway from this lesson is that it really doesn’t matter which USX technique you use, only that upstrokes escape. So for this lesson, the jacket fits! (Ha.)
Finally, I understand that the tremolo demonstration looks like forearm - it is! But that’s somewhat idiosyncratic to me. It’s the only part of the lesson that really uses this motion, and not something I intended anyone to specifically mimic. The two-handed playing is mostly wrist with relatively little forearm, especially on middle and lower strings. This is similar to what Joscho Stephan does. Here is what it looks like - if you watch the forearm you will note how little it actually rotates most of the time: