Thanks, i will, but the problem is the pick is not escaping the plane of the strings, so what’s the point? i understand the goal is just to find i way that you can play fast, and smooth, and whatever motion it is, it is,… but, shouldn’t i at least be making sure it’s a motion that allows the pick to leave the plane of the strings? This goes back to episode one of the cracking the code web series. If the motion is not leaving the plane of the strings, then regardless of how smooth and fast it is, it will never be usable, right?
The tone here sounds scratchy and more like what you’re want for high gain rock. There’s also a bass component to it, like a low end thump way below the note fundamental. Not sure where that’s coming from. Are you hitting the guitar body somewhere? It could be just the phone camera adding loads of compression, not sure. Are you playing really quietly or at a reasonably audible level?
Bluegrass typically wants less edge picking, i.e. more note and less pick. Can you use a straighter thumb for this and do you get any more note? What about if you lift your pinky slightly off the strings and use a slightly radial wrist bend like Molly does? That’s the pronated form. It usually results in less edge picking.
When things don’t sound right, you have to be aggressive with experimentation to get the sound you want. Getting a good sounding picked note is where this all starts so do some tooling around with these aspects of form until your pick attack / note body sounds like what you want it to sound like.
Ok, tried to improve, i was holding back actually because my wife was napping but she’s gone now.
My question is, isn’t this motion useless being as it doesn’t have any escape from the plane of the strings? I thought the whole point was that you had to find a motion that had an escape route.
Success! Ok that sounds about a hundred times better. It also looks like downstroke escape elbow motion, a lot like @tommo’s form, and similar to what Presley Barker uses:
I would use this and make up some practice tunes that have lots of downstroke escape in them. Of course you could pull out any of the Grier licks in the last interview where you can see he’s doing mostly DSX and play those in between some G chords. You’re already good at spotting when he’s doing that so this should be a piece of cake for you. I wouldn’t worry that it has to be completely DSX, especially if it’s outside picking. Just get a phrase that’s mostly DSX. If you want to modify any of his licks to be completely DSX that’s fine too.
The key is this motion is working and sounds perfect at this speed so this is what perfect feels and sounds like. Now you have a reference. You can slow down a little from here to try to work on accuracy but you’ll always be ping ponging back and forth between this easy speed zone and the slower one where you can work on accuracy more. But never forget the easy zone.
Nice work, and keep us posted.
Thanks Troy. I didn’t know about that kid. Very cool.
i will try to do as you say, but just want to ask one more thing. My whole problem to begin with is that i can’t maintain that smooth motion when i have to change strings. Leaving aside the left hand, just playing the open strings, the motion you see in my video above which you say is good… it doesn’t work if i try to change strings. So, do you have any advice about a drill i can do to learn how to take that motion and apply it to a string change? Because at the end of the day, that was the whole problem for me to begin with, and i still haven’t found a solution.
From what I can see there are no video takes of you using this motion to move across the strings. All these clips show you using stringhopping to move across the strings. So I’m not sure that what you think is the problem is really the problem here. This thread is getting long so maybe I’m forgetting one of the clips but that’s what it looks like to me.
If you can pull apart what David Grier is doing under the magnet and describe it perfectly then you have more than enough know-how to know when you’re using the correct motion on multi-string phrases and when you’re not. So that, plus hand synchronization is the next step here. Get this good-sounding attack and motion you just did and find a phrases or phrases you can use to test whether it’s working, and cobble together some mini songs out of them and starting playing some music that sounds good as you do these little tests.
@jpsychc, I’m not saying I know much, but what Troy and others are saying mirrors a lot of what I feel has happened in my own playing/learning: The better you get at one thing, brings you closer to making improvements at another. Sometimes you get to go straight for what you want because for what ever reason your body can do it, but other times you have to work on something different that offers less resistance, that gets your foot in the door and unlocks 50% of the problem.
For my example - the 2 main contributing factors of my progress with 2WPS/mixed escapes and 1NPS ideas have been… single escape licks and legato!!! 
. Doing these gave me something to work from - a bit of success that I could start experimenting, tweaking and build on. Even though I’m close to some of my goals, I’m now exploring single escape systems more like the Eric Johnson one. Even after 1 day of trying, I swear it has helped my usual picking motions.
Don’t lose the faith my friend and give all this a good go for a few weeks, I’m sure you will have some breakthroughs.
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there is no video of me using this motion while changing strings because I cannot for the life of me do it.
I try even with just open strings ignoring left hand but I definitely can’t do it. Not even once.
Then swipe. Do what you need to do. This is where the underthinkers wil beat the overthinkers like you and me. They either don’t know or can’t understand what the “right” way is so they just get their hands synchronized and go for it. And surprise, smooth motions with good sounding attack and synchronized hands tend to sound pretty good! Have you watched our Strunz and Farah interview? Jorge kills.
And that’s if you’re right that this is a trapped motion which as I’ve written, I’m not sure that it is. But that’s academic. You must get the hands together and learn how to move across the strings with a smooth motion. I don’t care if you hit wrong strings. You have awesome ingredients here you need to take the next step and put them together. Or you will never even know what smooth playing feels like.
I will continue improving the hand sync every day on one string and work relentlessly to find a way to transition the smooth motion across strings. The only thing I can guarantee is that I’ll keep trying my ass off everyday. Thank you.
Don’t put tons of time and hours of repetition into this. This is not a problem of drilling what you’re currently doing. It’s a problem of doing something different than what you’re currently doing.
The string switch issue for example is your choice in a sense. You simply choose a worse motion for those lines. No sense in drilling that worse motion. Trick yourself into doing the good motion which you already know how to do and is already perfect. This can be done here and there for a few minutes whenever you have time. You’re not trying to run a marathon, you’re trying to learn to do the moonwalk. And you only need to do it right once to start, to give you a foothold.
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Yea I just mean I’m going to spend a lot of effort and time searching for a way to change strings while maintaining the fast motion.
I also will continue practicing bluegrass improv though and transcribing and I have to play the notes in those cases however I can. But when it’s time to practice technique I understand that I’m still searching and experimenting and have nothing to drill (besides handsync stuff)
If it really is true that you hit the adjacent string when you try to switch strings, try making small adjustments to how your arm and/or wrist is positioned to try to get the picking motion off of parallel to the plane of the strings.
But the direction of movement of the pick doesn’t have to be drastically off-parallel in order for escape to happen. It only needs to be just far enough off parallel for strokes in one direction to escape the plane of the strings (of course some approaches, like the Gypsy USX approach, employ an angle that gives a surplus of clearance on the escape strokes).
If you’re interested in a David Grier type vocabulary, pronating your arm a little to try to get the essential motion you have now shifted slightly so it becomes more of a DSX motion could be helpful. Personally, I’ve found that an approach like your example 2 or example 4 has been useful to my experiments with DSX, because the contact with the ring finger or pinky against the body can help regulate your hand position, which may help you discover a setup that gets the pick to move along the line that you want. Another crude way to think about this is to consciously let the side of your thumb brush the lower pitch strings on upstrokes as you figure out a feel for the picking motion. Don’t overdo that, or you could give yourself a blister on your thumb, but some sparse experimenting at that extreme could help you get a feel for a motion/setup that will help you work your way into DSX without the thumb friction.
I really like this metaphor.
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SO, i did what you said and i am able to clear the plane, the problem is i just cant put smooth notes together when i have to change the string. Like, i cant play that smooth motion, and change strings. The problem apparently is not that it’s a trapped motion, i just, i don’t know, i can’t do it. I am trying though. I have engineered some grier licks and made sure they’re all down-escape and i am trying to play them blazing fast, and I’m missing like every other note, but I’m just going to keep trying until i get it once.
I appreciate your comment. The truth is my hand sync is garbage and even if i get one pattern like the yngwei chunk up to 140 bpm 16th notes, i still cant do a foreign one at 110. So how can i be expected to play an entire transciption, let alone do my bluegrass improv which is my primary musical desire and activity, if i can’t hand sync faster than 110?
Ultimately, bluegrass involves a lot of 1nps rolls though, and that requires zero hand sync, and i can’t do that over 110 either, so i think i ultimately need to learn a double escape motion. So here’s my plan.
Stay with dsx motion for now, and write out a bunch of bluegrass parts in that form, and practice playing them fast ONLY, even if sloppy, until i get it. And do tons of general hand sync exercises and patterns as well. until i am able to play fast. And then once i can do that, perhaps i can venture into trying to learn the double escape motion
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Looking through the post above and in this thread, you seem preoccupied, concerned and frustrated with how long are or might take. I hear ya, we have all been there ( I never leave!). Hand synch wont take long to get it to a good level (more than enough to get you going), so don’t overestimate the difficulty of this. You will not have to work on synch for every lick you ever learn. The yngwie one will set you up well to tackle others with ease- its kind of cumulative power.
Good luck and most of all - try and enjoy the journey!
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i honestly don’t care how long it would take. It’s just the endless hours spent trying with zero to show for it that is Frustrating. I understand I’m not supposed to drill speed. I need to get it fast on one string (which i have) and then just use that motion across the strings. I can’t do that. I have spent a ton of time just trying to do that.
What happens when you try to use this motion to do tremolo on one string for 16 or 32 notes, then switch to another string for 16 or 32 notes? I’d take the motion that feels fast and smooth, and attempt that sort of switching with it. If you aren’t able to do that, try the following:
- Synch up your single string tremolo to a metronome
- Make a note of the tempo
- Attempt the switching as described above, at least 6 notes on a string before you try to switch, but more should be easier, up to say 24 or 32.
- If you don’t get a result you like, try reducing the tempo by 10bpm and attempt step 3 again, but take care to ensure that when you reduce the tempo, you are still employing the same setup and motion as your fast/smooth single string tremolo.
- Repeat step 4 until you find a tempo where you can make the changes cleanly.
- Alternate attempts at your original “fast” tempo, and the “slow” tempo you discovered through step 5. Compare how these two versions feel, and how they look on film. Is the “slow” version truly a “slowed down” execution of the “fast” version, or is it a qualitatively different movement? If it’s truly a “slowed down” version, maybe you can refine the cleanliness of the fast version by practicing step 3 at a variety of tempos. But if the picking motion of the slow version looks or feels significantly different from your fast version, you’ll need to figure out how to force yourself to do a slow version that looks and feels more like your tremolo in order for “variety of tempos” refinement to give you results at the fast end.
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thanks - i am trying changing after lots of notes, and i can successfully change strings if i have to play 6 notes per string, usually, but not nearly as fast as my tremolo. Like, i can do it at about 140 bpm 16th notes. So i guess i just n eed to keep practicing.
but when i try to play bluegrass lines that have two notes per string, or EJ sixes which also are like that, it is totally hopeless for now. baby steps i guess. i also just feel like my left hand speed won’t go faster than 140 no matter what my right hand can do, so that combined with difficulty changing strings when it’s not a set “pattern” and i have to change often, is daunting. But at least i have some improvements to build on.