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.
