Help me fix my picking

Hi. It’s not a “hey look, I can play Yngwie licks” thread in disguise, I promise. I need help with identifying differences between my old and new picking technique. I’ll try to keep my story as short as possible. tldr: what is my hand doin:

I started playing when I was about 12, then after something like 2 years I got into playing Vai, then Malmsteen, then Becker, etc. I never played exercises, my hand was naturally adjusting to stuff I wanted to play. I wasn’t a very patient learner, so my approach was a bit Shawn Lane-ish (playing stuff as fast as you can and then naturally cleaning it up after some time). It’s sort of a mix between alternate, legato and economy and it caused me some serious problems after going out of my shred cave. It’s a bit like this, when I used to play a 3 nps scale descending, I’d use economy picking. Even if there happens to be 4 notes per string somewhere, I’m still able to do this, play g with a downstroke and d with upstroke, for example, then continue the economy picking movement. When playing ascending 3nps scale I’d skip some pickstrokes and replace them with hammerons/pullofs to always switch to a new string with an upstroke. I could play 4nps chromatic exercise when starting on an upstroke, but starting with downstroke I’d have to hammer on the last note of the 4 notes in the first group to hit the new string with an upstroke again. I gathered a few clips, I’m not able to play at the moment, so that’s the best I could do.

The problems that I have with this technique is that it completely sucks when it comes to playing rhythm, I have no control over dynamics when playing on clean channel and it caused me serious problems with timing in slower tempos. I started studying jazz a few years back and playing swinged 8ths turned out to be a serious problem too. The best solution I came up with was relearning whole right hand technique using pure alternate picking. And there is a huge difference between the stuff I want to play now and wanted to play as a 15 years old bedroom shredder. I practiced some Pablo Gilberto DVD exercises, violin stuff to practice string crossing (Bach, Paganini, Dont), riff from Symphony X’s Inferno and some other things. Also, I basically didn’t leave the house for 2 years and played jazz standards, constantly using alternate picking in a musical situation. The best example of my new technique I could find:

The trouble I have now is playing 16th notes faster than 120bpm is just impossible. I can barely do that after a long warmup. When I was a kid I didn’t even have to practice to shred, but as a grown ass man with 10 times more discipline I’m barely progressing. I can play over some uptempo jazz stuff in my head, but picking hand prevents me from executing it. It made me so frustrated that 1,5 month ago I started to play Paganini’s 5th caprice from 30bpm at the beggining and every time I played the whole piece correctly I increased the tempo by 2,5bpm trying to reach 120. It took hours, and I never reached it, instead I haven’t been able to play for a week now, because my forearm hurts.
I thought that maybe someone could tell me what parts of my hand I’m actually using and why does my new technique feel so much different. I can’t tremolo pick a single string with alternate, while it feels really comfy in slow tempos. I always thought I’m using mostly my wrist, but now I think maybe in my old technique I played upstrokes with elbow and downstrokes with wrist. The pick angle is different, but that was a conscious decision, because of a more warm, jazzy tone I wanted to get. The other difference I see is that I might have been planting upstrokes in my old technique, while with alternate picking both hands are synchronized most of the time. I was trying to acheive that too, because planting cuts off the notes value a little bit and I want my playing to sound as legato as possible even with picking.
After writing this post I managed to record a closeup video.

Any feedback is appreciated, thanks in advance.

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Well, maybe not Yngwie licks, but that “Viking Swing” clip is pretty great! I don’t think you guys are intentionally trying to melt our faces under the guise of looking for help, but damn if you don’t do it more often than not.

This is a long post and I’m not going to sift through where you went and where you are now. In general, your technique is great and I have zero issues with it. I think a lot of people would be pleased to play with the smoothness and moreover the creativity you’re displaying here.

If all you really want is to add some more single string motion speed, then sure, we can help you do that. We’ve had many threads on this subject recently, including threads about shutting the metronome off and working on motor learning smoothness.

Here are a couple off the top of my head:

In general, your motions look fine to me. In the first few seconds of the first clip, you actually demonstrate the two core types of picking motion we generally teach. The first motion, at 0:00 seconds is your pickslanting movement. Then at :07 seconds, you switch to a crosspicking movement.

That’s it, you’re done. With those two movements you can play a huge variety of stuff. You can become more aware of them, and make them smoother and faster, by following the advice in the threads I linked to, or by watching some of our instructional stuff where we outline exactly how those movements work and how to do them. Here’s our getting started path for doing that:

https://troygrady.com/start/

Otherwise, great foundation here. I see nothing wrong with your latest clip but if you want to become more conscious of your straight-line speed, that’s a quick and dirty for moving forward.

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Wow I loved your jazz playing in the Viking swing clip! Those smooth sweep arpeggios in perfect time and note clarity sounded totally fantastic and inspiring. Effortless, like a perfect combination of Yngwie and Gambale techniques. I know you really wanted help, but I’m just in awe.

Thank you, once my hand recovers I’ll definitely try some of MiM concepts. It’s good to know that some people enjoy my weird ideas. Playing Viking Swing was far from effortless actually, especially those huge intervals stolen from Paganini.

Hey there! You have some really awesome videos!

Reading this and watching your first video, it seems to me your “new” picking style might be stringhopping (using the same muscle on both pickstroke). If this is the case, you probably won’t be able to alternate pick much faster than 120bpm 16ths with this technique.

I don’t have precise advice for you as I am currently trying to solve this problem in my picking, but I suggest you look at other Technique Critique thread on the forum which have great tips and a lot of good information that might be able to help you more than I.

Hi. My hand is healed so I’ve been experimenting with my picking for about a month. The advice I can now give to someone who wants to learn pickslanting would be…

CHECK IF YOU USE THE SAME MOVEMENTS WHEN STARTING ON UPSTROKE AND DOWNSTROKE

My natural orientation is upward pickslanting and for many years I’ve been mostly starting my picking on an upstroke. Then I started to learn all the jazz stuff and the most efficent (I think) way to play alternate picked 8th notes in swing feel would be downstroke on the long 8th and upstroke on the short 8th. Most jazz players do that when playing alternate. It turned out I use completely different mechanics for that, the worst one. Thanks for wasting 3 years of my life, stringhopping! So what you should do to ensure you do that right is to check if you can tremolo pick starting on upstroke, downstroke with both upward and downward pickslant.

The first segment is something similar to Guthrie’s 32nd note strumming. Now it’s basically effortless, until my old, wrong mechanics kick in and spoil all the fun. The second segment is chromatic excercise with upward pickslant, effortless too.

Cool, I know how to do pickslanting now. The problem is… all the years I spent on jazz improvisation I’ve used strighopping and I’ve built most of my musical vocabulary on that. I don’t want to throw that away. Even in that Viking Swing clip you can see that I use a lot of 1NPS stuff. I’m currently working on my solo album and there are things like that that are even faster and I’m having a really hard time playing it. The only thing that would fix that is crosspicking. For the last two weeks I’ve been using trial and error practice for hours and I still can’t figure out the right movements. I’m trying to tweak my old movements and try new ones but nothing seems to work for me at the moment. Here are a few questions regarding crosspicking:

  1. How is crosspicking similar to funky strumming, movement wise? Is strumming more like straight line (pickslanting) or u shaped? I can’t really tell myself when I do it really fast. I’m just looking for a movement that I already do that could be my kernel of crosspicking.
  2. How is pickslanting similar to crosspicking? Does it feel almost the same? Correct me if I’m wrong. If I’m supinated with downward pickslant, deviation movements stay the same as in pickslanting, the upstroke already escapes so I have to mix deviation with extension on a downstroke to make it curved. Then to get back to the starting point I need to mix deviation and flexion on the upstroke. Am I getting it right? Are these movements like deviation + extension really happening together or is one preceeding the other?
  3. Can you tell from the video if I am actually using deviation? When playing fast I feel like I’m locking my wrist and using mostly elbow.

Picking sucks, man.

To just answer the third question, to me it looks like elbow movement but, as Troy often mentions, picking is often a few motions working together. Is it right that you’re going for wrist deviation but you feel like you’re doing more of an elbow thing?

It sounds very powerful and convincing anyway! :slight_smile:

To be honest I’m not really going for anything in particular, I just went back to playing with the movements I’ve developed when I was 14 or something like that, I’m doing it more by the feel rather than thinking about movements consciously. I think it’s always deviation + elbow, but at faster speeds elbow does most of the movement and wrist moves because of the impact with strings rather than using muscles.