@Troy I was wondering do you have anything to say about Jason doing index thumb moment to change pick orientation?
Iām a bit sceptical about this. Thumb + index forms the basis of my picking technique, and although I donāt have small hands, Iām not sure the knack involved is connected to hand size (although the amazing Pasquale Grasso does have really long fingers!).
No doubt Troy will point you in the direction of the section in the Pickslanting Primer on thumb + index motion. It does look like Jason uses a blend of this and wrist motion. Iāve seen Steve Vai do that sort of blend tooā¦ and while others use just a bit of thumb + index for articulative reasonsā¦
The size of you hands increases the picking area.
The grater the picking area the grater the expression. You wana slap? You need a long arm. Wana slap with a short? Lul.
You can wait if you have small hands, thatās does not increase the hit.
That is going into different areas of expression, but the leavers are the same. You want something expressive, itās better to have a long leaver.
I havenāt looked at Jasonās playing in huge detail, what do you want to know? But in general, using fingers for changes in pickslanting / pick attack is super common and Frank Gambale is a great example. Thereās a whole section on this in our feature on his technique:
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Iād love to know jasons attack against the strings, as I mentioned I see him doing hard index and thumb movements. I have posted before how he changed from dsx to usx, that is very weird.
From what I can make of this post, it sounds like you have already made your mind up on this one.
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I canāt be drunk n post sorry ignore me
100% agree. My trailing edge āGypsyā motion goes straight to the floor. In contrast, If I want to engage in palm muting and what feels like a more controlled motion, adding some more āhorizontalityā helps me achieve that, including a more supinated posture, which I was not looking for but was interesting to experience organically.
So, this is going a little far afield, but I DID take a few moments to film some video today. I donāt have a great eye for this stuff, still, but:
Full speed:
Slo-mo after a second or two:
Comments:
- Vibrato is FUNNY slowed down!
- the first couple notes are a little irregular and it looks like my hand is trying to do somethng other than straight back-and-forth there, but it settles down pretty well after that. Iām not hearing a pronounced unevenness, I do think this is smoothing out nicely over time. Really, I just - whatās the line from the Matrix? āWhy do you eyes hurt?ā āBecause you never used them before.ā
- as far as how this āfeels,ā thereās definitely too much tension in my arm and when I concentrate on keeping it loose it does flow a little better. Didnāt film that, Iām afraid.
- in the Gilbert 6s stuff at the end, thereās way more legato than I would have expected in there. Not even escape hatch, some times several notes in a row. Interesting. The first few notes are an absolute cluster of sync issues, it cleans up a bit after that, but then in the descent thereās a few notes in a row at a couple points where I donāt hear the click of the pick at all.
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The size of you hands increase the picking area, so if you have bigger hands you can do more with little. You can pluck more with a smaller area relieve to you size, just like how usain bolt traveled more distance with relievely the same effort.
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I donāt think thatās actually that much of a factor since alternate picking, at least, is a cyclical motion. You might be hitting the string faster, but it doesnāt change the frequency at which the direction of the pickās motion changes to sound another note.
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