Hanky Pooh Picking Tooh

@Troy what kind of picking is this? I know guys, I pick too hard. It’s partly red light syndrome for the CTC clips… for some reason. :bear:

https://vimeo.com/266585677

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Looks like crosspicking to me.

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That would be awesome if I am doing it right. That is how I am alternate picking lately. When I can’t sweep.

When I try to do crosspicking, the overall movement and hand position is very similar to this, though I wouldn’t be able to do Steve Morse or Andy Wood speeds with the amount of pick attack you have here. And I think there are some spots in your video where downstrokes don’t “escape”, but it doesn’t really matter as long as they escape when the line you’re playing requires it, and you seem to escape whenever you need them to in the video.

Note that subtle shifts in hand position can make a difference: I find when my forearm is more supinated with this kind of motion, downstrokes don’t always escape, and it becomes more of a DWPS thing, but when I use a flatter forearm (or even slightly pronated) is becomes more “crosspicky”. At high speeds, I think my pickstrokes are less curvy than in your video, but the essence of the movement is still the same. I’d describe mine as a sllightly more pronated version of what you’re doing, where it feels almost like UWPS that “magically” clears on upstrokes without really thinking about it (it actually seems to come from a subtle forearm rotation that helps lift the string slightly on 2nd half of upstrokes and lower it back down on the first half of downstrokes). I wouldn’t worry about that unless you find lines where what you’re already doing doesn’t work for you, but if you do, maybe my comments will give you some ideas to experiment with.

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Cool Fry, I guess it’s a good sign that my movement is close to cross picking? I would hope this doesn’t look like all of my other alternate picking videos where Troy says it’s hoppy. This video above is what naturally happens when I try to flat pick Swybryd exercises. Experimenting.

I want to get inefficiencies out of my alternate/crossing. If I just can’t do it, I’m gonna put all of my playing time into economy and swybryd picking.

In other words, if my alternate/cross picking still looks bad, I need to quit practicing it. I’m wasting my time. I’ll never be the guy that throws the 90mph alternate fast ball. If I want to alternate pick for a particular sound, I can do it. But I just can’t get the efficiency right it seems.

Do you think the efficiency will naturally improve if I keep pushing my speed limit with metronome?
:bear:

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Hard to say. I think like with other techniques, it’s more about experimenting and finding a simple “fast” movement that can clear the strings how you want, and then working on “harnessing” that simple fast movement to develop the kind of more complex lines you’re interested in. That is, the foundational work of figuring out a recipe for the movement that you recognize the feel of, and that escapes strings the way you want it to, gives you a template for correcting your own technique when you go on to try to apply that movement to other lines.

In my own crosspicking experiments, the main source of ineffeciency was clearing the strings by more than I needed to. I’ve been striving to have a movement that’s as close to flat as it can be while still clearing the strings. At least for me, that results in a movement that I think has less of a visible “twisting” component than what’s in your video. There’s still a twist, but I think efficiency is highest when the twist is as subtle as it can be while still providing enough curve totion clear the strings. Like I said, for me, it feels almost more like I’m doing UWPS, but with a very subtle forearm twist on the second half of upstrokes and the first half of downstrokes.

And as a natural DWPS guy, I feel like my “intuition” in the moment about string clearing is distorted. That is, I tend to assume I need a more supinated position to clear the adjacent string on upstrokes than I really do. So for crosspicking, I set myself up in a way that my intuition tells me my upstrokes aren’t going to clear the adjacent string, but they generally actually do.

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Yep, when I flatten my palm the upstrokes are still clearing. So if I take more curving out of the strokes I should get more speed? With crosspicking it only curves outward on one side of the stroke right? So by me coming down like a pendulum, is that hoppy? If so, why does Andy refer to his picking as the pendulum of death? That is what it feels like I am doing… lowering a pendulum on the strings.

Ok here is something else I just did… lol, I am playing a passage with the left hand only, as fast as I can, legato. If my picking can match that speed, then would any hoppyness matter? @Troy is my pick video above hoppy? A Yes or No is cool. You’ve already told me the long version. lol :bear::+1:

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I find that for me, the flatter is feels, the faster I can do it. It’s still a “pendulum of death”, but since it’s a small section of the radius of a very large pendulum, any “twisting” of the arm is pretty subtle. There’s still a virtual pivot pount that your the pick’s movement is working around, but rather than being an obvious big “scooping” movement, it’s kind of a downward slanted movement on one side, and an upward slanted movement on the other, but the way you switch between them softens the corner at the bottom so it’s sort of like an almost flat “v” shape but with the “corner” at the bottom rounded off, and the flatness of the “v” means that the corner wouldn’t have been all that sharp to begin with. In the forum thread about @Troy’s recent wrist-based crossingpicking youtube video, he talks about how that technique feels to him like it’s only wrist deviation, yet it still clears the string in both directions.

So to me, it helps to think of crosspicking as a flattened “v”-shaped movement comprised of different mechanics on each leg of the “v”, and where the transition between the movements “rounds off” the bottom of the “v”. And again, making the movement as close to being “flat” as possible while still clearing the strings in each direction.

Edit: Watching your video again, I think you’re even closer to doing what I suggest than I was giving you credit for. So I’d say you’re on the right track (pending the possibility of @troy rebutting everything I’ve just said :wink: ), and the points I made above might help you refine it.

And if you haven’t already, check out the MiM interview with Albert Lee to see how his crosspicking works. There’s probably some good stuff for you to rewatch in the Teemu interview too, though I’m a little fuzzier on what’s in that one.

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This looks fine to me. I wouldn’t worry too much about what to call it. You have some fully escaped pickstrokes going on here. Maybe not all of the pickstrokes are that but that doesn’t really matter - the real world is often a complicated mix of pickstroke types with a mix of physical movements behind them. The only thing that matters is whether or not it is working.

When it comes to these kinds of movements the most informative test we have is whether you can do it quickly and still have it feel smooth. Doesn’t have to be perfectly clean, just smooth. If so, then it’s working, keep doing it. Like Andy I’m also a fan of occasionally trying going to go faster than you can go cleanly just to see what the movement looks like - this can provide clues as to what things are working well and what things aren’t.

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I have been wondering for a while how to test this idea systematically. A Gedanken experiment I came up with is to:

  • Check how fast one can play repeated downstrokes on a single string, for example by doing the Master of Puppets riff for a couple seconds, going all-out. Suppose the result is 16th notes at 120bpm (I wish!).

  • Check if the (potential) crosspicking movement can be used to play something like a 3-string roll significantly faster than the above (e.g. 16th notes at 135-140bpm).

Could this make sense? I must say I didn’t try it because I have a phobia of repeated downstrokes!

Common sense tells me that if an inefficient motion (consecutive downstrokes) can take you that fast, a more efficient one (alternate, crossing the string up and down instead of hopping it) would take you to 240bpm easily. I’m not sure that is true at very high speed, but IME that’s true at moderate/high speed.

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I see what you mean for tremolo-ing on a single string, but I’m not sure this doubling up translates directly to something like a 3-string roll. My idea was to use the all-downstrokes experiment to estimate the maximum hopping speed - but I agree the model has its limitations!

@Hanky_Pooh by the way Hank, the visual impression I got from the video is that the movement became more “bouncy” after you said “this is the opposite”. Before that the curves of the pickstrokes looked more gentle. But I’m not sure this necessarily implies hopping!

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I don’t think it translates directly. Single string and 3 strings rolls have different ‘dynamic’ I think. the momentum of changing direction is different. Now I’m not saying you are wrong but I can’t see any logic in there. And furthermore when you execute a roll with crosspicking you kind of elude the limitation of stringhopping. It’s a different motion. Generally speaking I don’t really think that the better you are at string-hopping the better you are at executing motions which are NOT string hopping. It might be true to the extent of training muscles, but that does not help to correctly execute a motion. Like weight lifting alone does not make you a good archer.

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Ah no but this is not what I had in mind, sorry! I was thinking that if I can crosspick BEYOND my maximum hopping speed, then I can be sure I’m not hopping, no? Or maybe I misunderstood something :sweat_smile:

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Ah… get it. Sorry for me misunderstanding.

Indeed I’ve had similar ideas, to check if I’m not stringhopping. But I’m afraid it can be more complex than that. For example on a 3-strings roll you might do correct crosspicking for most string changes, and one hop somewhere.And that go unnoticed if you don’t have closer look.

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So you mean to check if your crosspicling motion is effiecient?
The check should work, just I’m not sure if it makes sense.

I think when you do it ‘right’ you just feel it.
In the end crosspicking should work at the same speed as tremolo (until a point where the tremolo movements are just too small to move from one string to another).

I work on that the other way round, I start playing on high speeds, which works fine but isn’t accurate (hopefully yet). Then I try to tune that motion so that all escape strokes really escape without changing the basic motion.
I get it clean that way for a couple of bars, but it’s really hard to cycle it and to understand which small changes are the difference between clean and sloppy.

… hopefully one day :grin:

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Thanks Troy :bear::+1:

@Frylock This gives me an idea guys. My priority in the picking above is to avoid swiping at all costs. Oh, I can speed that bitch up, but I’m probably gonna swipe. I’m gonna try flattening out and swiping on purpose, then slowly put curve in it. See what happens from that approach.

Thanks for the feedback
:bear:

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Thanks Tommo! What happened is, when I started on that opposite pickstroke, the string crossings felt like ALL inside string changes descending. I can swing the outside string change pendulum flatter when descending.

:bear::+1:

do you feel the “normal” way (the first one) is easier for you than when you go “opposite”? while they both sound awesome, I felt the normal way was a little smoother.

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Thanks @uglijimus yeah, I just reversed the picking to flip the string changes. The normal way is my comfort zone. I needed every bit of that picking knowledge for today’s upload guys. Thanks! :rofl:

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