Gary Boyle - interesting technique

I just discovered this cool player (going down the 70’s fusion rabbit hole), interesting picking motion. Is there a name for this? It interesting because it looks like there is no wrist movement, just fingers.

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Troy looks at it here, mentions Yngwie’s earlier motion, Cesario Filho and Takayoshi Ohmura:

I think Gus G uses it as well:

I tried to get it going in my own playing but I think my motion is coming from a different place, the motion looks too small to me:

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Very interesting - that’s the motion. It seems very economical - small tight motions. Watching you I would say you’ve got it.

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This is my primary motion too, it works well for me.

Any tips for getting any volume/attack with it? Mine is super quiet :slight_smile:

Interesting find! I haven’t seen him.

I was going to link to the Primer video on finger joint motion, but @Jacklr beat me to it. The point of that video was not so much a tutorial but to say, if you’re coming to us with a fully-formed technique of some kind, and you’re trying to identify it, this might be what you’re doing, so here are examples of what some of them look like, and what types of escape they generate. A lot of these techniques look like USX to me, but we’d need closeup video to know for sure.

We have to be careful when thinking about economy. “Economical” just means a joint motion is physically easy and goes fast. Strumming motions are some of the most economical motions you can make, and they are physically large relative to the distance between the strings. And some small motions feel laborious and aren’t economical at all.

Also, there are players who can do finger motions very fast (220+) where the small size of the motion seems to make it harder to get from string to string at those speeds. i.e. The notes on adjacent strings don’t get hit, so the technique basically becomes tremolo at that point. Or maybe the technique can move in a continuous linear direction but can’t do the jumping around you could get with a joint that has a larger range of motion relative to the string spacing.

We need to film more players up close who do these things. So we have more questions than answers!

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