Hello everyone, I last uploaded around a year ago. I still have much the same problems with picking and haven’t made much progress. However, I have found out one piece of information about myself: I like a thick (1 mm to 1.14 mm), round Dunlop pick.
My first question is this: Is my arm position incorrect? I always feel a lot of tension in my shoulder and back when I play. Here’s two pictures of what it looks like currently:
Second question: My thumb often tilts on the pick when I am playing. Is this a bad habit? This happens subconsciously for some reason. Here’s two pictures of my tilted thumb:
Final questions: When my pick’s axis is perpendicular (not tilted to the left or the right) I have much more trouble picking; however, when it is tilted so the tip of the pick is slightly to the left, it feels much smoother. Should I be picking like this? Outlined in my video I show the difference between these axes. When I change the axis, suddenly I can do USX, which is weird because I’ve never been able to do it. You can see me subconsciously switching to USX in the video.
The other question, highlighted in the video (you can see me struggle), is that I have trouble picking on the low strings, but less trouble on the high strings. Is this because I am having a constant anchor in the center of my wrist / fleshy pad of the thumb? How are you supposed to anchor?
Last question: How I can prevent my upstrokes from garage spiking? I always grab the string too much on upstrokes and then it hits the frets, causing buzzing. To counter-act this, I have been subconsciously tilting my thumb (see pictures above), but that doesn’t seem quite right to me.
Anyways, here is the video link (it is poor quality, and little hard to see; I don’t have an excellent film setup).