Hey all, here’s tommo from Italy (now living in the UK). Physics researcher and guitar hobbyist.
Among other things I’ve been a big fan of the VinMan for many years. Discovering Troy (and his team’s) work finally allowed me to approach some of his tunes! Having loads of fun practicing (my partner a bit less 
) and I’m looking forward to learning more!
Hi Tommo. What sort of picking techniques do you use when playing Vinnie’s tunes? Do you use Vinnie’s elbow picking mechanic?
Mostly yes, but I think there’s also a bit of wrist in there and probably the occasional finger movements to help avoid strings. Also I swipe the s£$% out of some difficult passages 
For reference I can try to post a raw take of morning star that I recorded a few months ago… but I am a bit embarassed 
Would love to see your playing. I admire anyone who posts their playing - I can’t play any Vinnie Moore at all.
Oh I realised I can’t post the video here… but I have a youtube cover of overture 1928 where I use roughly the same mechanics in some bits of the solo (for example the run at approximately 2:03):
Nice playing! You are so smooth and clean with the elbow mechanic.
Awesome playing
You should check out Carl Roa he has a definite elbow mechanic as well.
Are you downward pickslanting all the time Tommo?
Thank you both for your kind words this is very encouraging \m/
With the elbow mechanic, which I prefer when playing 3nps, I think I am ‘primary upwards’, and only when needed I briefly rotate to dwps. It can be quite tiring though when the rotations are frequent, so I am now also studying the primary dwps orientation with rotational mechanic. I also found that rest strokes can be used to change orientation with a bit less effort.
I think Vinnie plays mostly uwps too, right?
Indeed! In the Antigravity seminar Troy says that many of the great 3nps players (including Moore, Batio and Di Meola) are two-way pickslanters with primary upwards orientation. I wonder why? Troy on the other hand can play all these 3nps things with primary downward orientation, which looks to me more relaxed and allows him to get a great attack!
I took a bit of a break from the purely shreddy things and had a go at Bolero 3 by Strunz & Farah (or a linear approximation thereof).
It was quite refreshing 
Not perfect but I realised that obsessing on getting a 100% correct take does not bring me guitar happiness.
Thanks a lot to Troy & team for the great work on Soundslice, made the learning much easier.
Great playing, @tommo! Especially impressive tone and phrasing - it’s very nice to listen to! I’m curious how you approached the task of learning the piece. How did you commit it to memory? And how did you stay motivated to learn the whole thing? I often get frustrated when I try to learn a big piece (like this one), and then I sort of lose motivation after a while if it isn’t really coming together.
Nice work!
-Greg
Thanks a lot, you made my day
It took me a while to learn the whole thing (just below 2 months I think), and I was also a bit frustrated with the slowness of my progress, at least at the beginning. I would go to the soundslice thingy once in a while to take a break from shreddy stuff practice, doing a mix of listening, slowing the video down, looking at the tabs, looking at the players’ fingers and also using the ear a bit. In all this, I tried to play along both parts at 50-70% speed and see how far I would get every time. After a while I started recognising the logic in the soloing and in the chord progression and the whole thing started to make sense (it does help that I studied a decent amount of jazz theory, even though I can’t apply it very much).
By the way, it is amazing how many cool melodies these guys created out of a few triads and scale shapes!! I am starting to see how the greats all manage to think somewhat “simply”: instead of getting paralyzed by the concept of a million scales, they seem to use little bits and pieces of them in the right places.
I decided to move here my attempts/comments on the Mike Stern lick, to avoid cluttering the MiM section:
I tried to fight my fear of 1nps picking and gave a shot to this lick. I noticed a few things that helped at least in my case. By no means I think I can play it so well that I can go around lecturing, but maybe these observations may help people who use a hand posture similar to mine and/or are at a similar stage of technique development — conversely I would also be happy if anyone noticed something that may be holding me back when playing the lick. Thanks my fellow coders \m/
This is awesome. “I cannot do it much faster than that.” -> You’re doing it about as fast as Mike does, and it looks pretty effortless. Now just come up with a couple chord shapes that are not these, and you’ll have a lick that nobody has but you.
Great work here.