Gilbert's upstroke exercise

Playing Technique
#1

Hello everybody, have u seen this:

I can’t really spot the mechanic behind it, but i tend to believe that it’s wrist deviation, hence the sense of fatigue.

I can do it all day with forearm rotation, so it’s so strange that such a gifted player like him doesn’t do this movement the easier way…on the other hand, doing it his way is effectively a good exercise to strenghten one of the two component of his main mechanics, the deviation, indeed.

What do u see? What’s Master Troy’s opinion on that? :slight_smile:

1 Like
#2

I think it’s a blend of both deviation and rotation.
But I think the pickstroke is of minor interest here, at least concerning stamina.
It’s the escape motion that causes fatigue, one directional playing requires even more escape motion than alternating (cause the downstroke isn’t allowed to hit a string), so mechinacally what he does is probably stringhopping.
If you do that with forearm rotation, what do you use to escape on your way back to the bottom of the string when the rotation is ‘resetted’?

1 Like
#3

I do flextion to upstroke and extension to reset the pick inside the strings.
I’m in a supinated position, of course, Paul isn’t that much.

#4

Hmm, isn’t directional playing always “string hopping”? Show me a way to do this without, meaning without one up-down motion per note, no matter how it is produced, and I’ll be playing MOP in no time.
This fast downstroke stuff is still kind of a mistery to me. I can play the Verse-riff of MOP for maybe two or three repitions at album speed and then I tense up. But maybe I just needed more practice…

Hetfield said in an interview that when starting Metallica they all outbid each other in speed terms by calling each other pussies for not being abley to play certain stuff up to speed :wink: So I know what Hetfield thinks of me.

1 Like
#5

That is an ecellent question, and I don’t know the answer, which is the reason why i used a pretty inprecise explanation :grin:
Theoretically crosspicking escapes in both directions, but I’m not sure if you can use it because the reverse stroke has to escape BEFORE it hits a string.
I’m pretty sure that at least something like crosspicking could be developed to do the job (which probably’d be also crosspicking :joy:), but up to now I never saw that.

#6

Can you post a video of that?
This is a pretty complex motion, and in fact I didn’t see that without stringhopping so far.
Which doesn’t mean it does not exist.
Maybe you have discovered a new ingredient?

#7

Paul’s great at these all-up / all-down riffs. No I have no evidence of forearm being somehow better at this than wrist. No matter which method you choose, the pick ends up tracing a circle. Here’s Brendon Small, who is also great at this:

Brendon is not a forearm guy either - all elbow and wrist. However you will note the circular pathway. As far as I know, there is no other secret than this, since, as has been pointed out, ignoring half your alternate picking motion is inherently inefficient.

#8

I think the thing about Gilbert’s technique is recognizing that it’s not strictly wrist deviation: there’s a subtle wrist flexion/extension component that I think is important. I think it relates a little to the Andy Wood-inspired video @Troy posted a little while ago about wrist-oriented crosspicking.

#9

You can’t lift out of the strings to create the circular movement of all-up/all-down riffs without the 360-degree movement capability of the wrist. Or even the angled trajectory of uwps much of the time for that matter. Paul looks like a supinated player, so he would have to be doing a deviation / flextension blend to play an escaped downstroke. There also may be bits of forearm and fingers in what he does, can’t really tell. Still one of the more unique techniques around, all these years later.

1 Like
#10

That ‘upstroke warm-up’ reminds me the ‘Total Electric Guitar’ video when EJ talks about his ‘bouncing’ technique. He would play something like a pentatonic lick only upstroke.

#11

Some time ago I used to practice typical metal riffs with only upstrokes (MOP, Number of the beast,…). It’s really hard to do at first. I got quite a lot quicker, but it still felt awkward. Of course I didn’t do that, because I wanted to play that way, but to improve my overall picking. Sequencial upstrokes is something that could be needed with 16th rhythms, perhaps the “gallop-rhythm” shifted by one 16th.
I stopped doing it after a while, because I didn’t see much benefit on my overall playing and had better things to dedicate my sparse practice time to, but I can recommend trying it for a while.

2 Likes