[Hopeless player here] How to develop some picking speed (no hands synchronization here, just the pure picking motion on one note)?

[Troy]

from the videos I watched around here, I’m not sure whether I do stringhopping or if it’s just the “bluegrass crosspicking” way to clear off the strings

Sorry I missed these clips earlier! Thanks for posting these. It’s a great selection of shots and makes it obvious what is going on. There is a simple answer to your problem:

You are stringhopping.

Your crosspicking form is not actually the efficient crosspicking movement used by players like Molly Tuttle - it is stringhopping. And it is the same as the motion you use for general purpose wrist-oriented playing like in the guitar clips, in other words, also stringhopping. Your tremolo motion is perhaps something else, maybe we could call it stringhopping, but the point is that it is not efficient either, so it’s sort of a moot point what it is.

Your “tense and locked” clip - that is not stringhopping! You’re doing that correct. Either that movement, or one like it but less tense, is what will break you out of this rut.

Your playing is great, you have plenty of musical and fretboard knowledge, but as a few folks have pointed out, to make things more relaxed, you’re going to need to change your picking motion.

Have you watched the intro broadcast on picking motions yet? Most of the basics are covered here:

https://troygrady.com/channels/talking-the-code/introduction-to-picking-motion/

Do not concern yourself with the difference between pickslanting movements and crosspicking movements yet. These motions we discuss here are the core of all of them. If you can’t do these, you won’t be able to play smoothly at any tempo, whether it’s pickslanting or crosspicking. And great bluegrass mando players like Andy Wood are pickslanting most of the time anyway. There is one type of pickstroke (one!) that Andy does which I would think of as a crosspicking movement more so than a pickslanting one, so you can get quite far with just developing fluid “straight line” picking speed.

General note to everyone:

I feel like we’ve dumped a lot of words on @Mando and possibly confused him! This is a common problem, and we all need to be able to look at excellent and clear clips of the kind that he has posted and know immediately when we’re seeing stringhopping movements. Immediately. No hesitation, no guesswork. And targeted advice for eliminating this without writing volumes.

[Misha]

Hey! I’m in the same boat just like you (although I can play a bit faster like 120-125bpm). I’m still struggling at developing speed. I can play in short bursts at 140-150bpm (or about 90bpm sixtuplets), right now my pinky knuckle started to hurt/swell so need to quit and recover, although everything I do looks fine visually (except for some static stuff like my posture etc). You can check out my vids if you want.

Everybody gave you some great advice like eliminating string hopping using rest strokes - that’s a great advice. String hopping seems like the only potential threat for developing speed. As mentioned before, you can try speed bursts like mixing eights and sixteens (4 notes of eights, then 8 notes of sixteens). Also you need to make sure if you’re feeling the right muscles (located in your forearm, if you move your wrist sideways you should see them moving, the feeling should be similar to squeezing a rag). If you feel the tension in a different place (wrist, fingers, elbow, shoulder etc), then there’s something wrong in you static position (wrist angle, posture, the way you are sitting and holding your guitar).

You need a visual reference point for knowing what you need to do. I chosed Paul Gilbert. Also you need to record two angles (from the fretboard and guitar body). Here are some visual things that help me to get closer at getting it right).

1. Make sure that you guitar is placed reliably (ideally it should be resting on your leg without hands involved, if you’re using you right hand just to hold the guitar in place it will cause extra static tension). Another thing that might help is the right leg position, the hip should be aimed upwards, so the guitar won’t slide down and force you to hold it with the right hand (static tension).

2. From the guitar body view, make sure that guitar neck is not aimed too much upwards, because it might make your wrist look deviated upwards instead of looking neutral when in static position (the wrist and the forearm should form a straight line). It should be more parallel to the floor. Try to experiment with your posture without forcing your hands to hold the guitar while not playing.

Hope it might help you. Although I’m not sure, after six years of struggling, it’s still a mystery to me how it’s possible to tremolo pick fast, I guess it’s some sort of psychological barrier formed due to multiple frustrations. I feel that our problem (slow picking hand phenomenon) is not examined enough, I still haven’t seen people who could solve this problem (since such problem is extremely rare). 99,9% of people aren’t having any trouble with (and are not even thinking/struggling with it). If the simplest movement such as picking up and down is causing so much trouble, then there’s definitely something wrong in our hands/mind. But you gotta try. There are some experimental solutions like rest strokes, speed burts etc (although even these solutions come from people who never had any trouble with picking). Sorry for sounding so discouraged and skeptical.

Anyway, good luck, that’s all I can say. I hope that at least one of us will get rid of this curse (don’t know how to call it otherwise).

[Mando]

This is a lot of info indeed, but I wrote all the advices I got down on paper and will make sure I don’t get confused. It appears that first and foremost, I have to change my motion to a more efficient one.

@Troy : thanks for reviewing my videos. Great, at least now I know what I’m doing wrong, which means there is something I can solve. I hope that someday my eye is as sharp as yours and I can help others in return.

I’m gonna watch this broadcast you mention. I thought I would save it for later, thinking it was too advanced stuff and went to Pickslanting Primer and interviews first instead (as well as Talking the Code). Now I know where to restart!
I did try to incorporate various motions discribed in “four essential motion mechanics for picking” but everything felt awkward and slow. Now I know that my technique is wrong so I have to change it anyway, no matter if it takes time to make the new one feel more natural.

Would you recommend one “mix of motions” to start with (Acecruscher advised to add some wrist rotation), or do you reckon it is only a matter of trying a finding what suits you after a while?

@Misha : thanks for the posture advices. I think I’m not too bad on that side, but I’ll double check and pay close attention to it as well.
I understand your idea about the fact that it’s tough to see that most of the solutions to picking speed come from people who never had issues with speed, and I think it is the way things are in many other fields of competence. I found however that this is the great thing about CtC: Troy looks at what naturals do, analyses it and try to make it usable by others (instead of the all the common “make smaller movements, you’ll pick faster”). I also hope we both get out of that hole, but as long as we keep trying, there is no reason why it wouldn’t happen soon!

Well, once again, thanks to you all. I was not expecting to actually get ideas to work with so quickly, and now I’m super frustrated because I happen to exceptionnally have tons of work until Sunday and will not be able to focus full blown on picking till then. But this is fantastic, it means I’m now eager to practice picking and that hope is back in my practice (I usually hate my picking practice because I’ve been unsuccessful at it for too long, but hopefully I get off to a better start now, and I know that improvement is addictive)!

[Misha]

Yeah, no problem. Yes, I was sounding a bit skeptical when I said that “rest strokes” are experimental methods coming from those who never experiences problems with speeds. Troy’s guide is the most valuable compared to everything I heard from my all guitar instructors. The thing that troy suggests is a concrete method, instead of a banal tip (like be relaxed, economical).

I forgot to tell you some things. If some of the things mentioned here won’t work (like DWPS/UWPS). Try something in between (neutral pick slant). To make it happen - try playing 2 way rest strokes (after downstroke rest on the lower string, after upstroke rest on the upper string). Look in the topic called “Paul Gilbert eye view” and look at his wrist position (he’s not DWPS or UWPS), try to copy him. You can try my method (I could actually play bursts at 150-160bpm you can look it in my topic named “Pathological speed limit”),

So here is my instruction that might work just in case.

Start with speed bursts excercise like this one

1. Play eights with rest strokes, after that play 8 notes normally). Rest stroke should guide your pick to make the right trajectory (straight line) and amplitude (also your picking amplitude without the rest stroke should be almost the same as the amplitude of a rest stroke (which is the highest possible amplitude - yes there’s no need to make small movements, distance between 1st and 3rd string while playng on the 2nd string is the most optimal). Also 2 way rest strokes will make your motion as straight as possible (straight line is shorter than a curve which comes from rotation).

2. After that try playing 6 succesful clicks in a row (4 notes per click which would be 24 notes). Or try 4 clicks while playing sixes (6 notes per click).

Start with 50% of your max tempo. When you reach your max tempo - try adding 1 bpm. Hope it helps.

[Troy]

I thought I would save it for later, thinking it was too advanced stuff and went to Pickslanting Prime

This is our fault. We’re going backwards here because this seemingly basic topic is actually pretty complicated. We’re filming and chapterizing this material for the Primer now, and I consider it fundamental stuff everyone should know. In the meantime the broadcast is the latest version of it and a good starter. The main thing you want to understand are the big categories of movement types and the basic arm positions that activate them, either pronated or supinated.

Re: movement type it doesn’t matter. You just need at least one movement of any kind with no hopping and is at least reasonably easy for you. Gotta start somewhere. Whichever one works the best right now is the one I would work on. Every one you learn makes you smarter about your own body’s capability, and more easily able to learn others.

Your elbow technique is currently the closest. See if there are others. You could even try arranging a fiddle reel for even numbers of notes per string with a couple pull offs and doing it with elbow. You will blaze that way and it will get you down the path to feeling what fluidity feels like.

Edit: Even Chris Thile’s fastest playing is mostly elbow uwps so do not fear the apparent simplicity!

[Mando]

Hi there.

My picking progress has been somewhat slowed down as I broke my collarbone while skiing (which now will be remembered as an ennemy to my musical progress!)

I just start to be able to play again and have been experiencing with picking motions. It appears that at the moment, the only one where practice brings any progress at all is the pure elbow motion (which happens to be the one Troy told me is the closest to being correct). Wrist rotation feels accurate but even slower than my wrist deviation picking.

So I’m led to think that maybe the only motion that’s going to lead me to break my speed wall is the elbow one.
I’ve tried arranging a fiddle tune with hammers, slides.etc. as Troy suggested, but it just doesn’t sound right. So I experimented with TWPS which appears to work quite well (I can get throught tunes about 15bpm faster than when stringhopping with my wrist deviation motion, which is quite satisfying for now). It just takes a hell of a lot of planning and I hope at some point I can freely improvise with it, as I usually never play a tune twice the same.

Would you guys say that working essentially on TWPS with a pure elbow motion can be reliable, and not too limiting? This would basically mean this would be my technique for anything faster than 4notes per beat at 110bpm (and so far I can tremolo up to 155 with the elbow motion, which is quite a bit faster).

I guess for pure crosspicking parts (one note per string), pure elbow motion with TWPS won’t work . But in the worst case scenario, I can live without doing these crosspicking parts when playing over 100 bpm

[Troy]

Sorry to hear about the accident!

Glad you’re making progress. For players with stringhopping issues, the number one challenge is learning what a pickslanting movement feels like - any movement - and making it habitual. That’s why the elbow practice is important. You may choose to stick with this approach, or you may eventually develop another. But getting comfortable with any pickslanting movement helps you know what things should feel like when they’re working correctly, without mechanical inefficiency. This makes it easier to learn other movements, including crosspicking movements, because you have something to shoot for.

The new Andy Wood interview is up and I’d recommend checking that out - it’s two hours of acoustic guitar and mandolin, with targeted discussion of the different movements Andy uses:

https://troygrady.com/interviews/andy-wood-acoustic/

In particular you’ll notice that his fastest mandolin playing is mostly two-way pickslanting. You’ll see the telltale forearm twitch as he quickly switches orientations and back again. Andy is a textbook “primary” pickslanter in this respect. As you can see in Andy’s vocabulary, he doesn’t really do continuous one-note-per-string roll stuff on mandolin that often. If I ask him he can do it, but when he’s blazing through standards like “Big Mon”, it’s mostly scalar.

And of course, at some level, we’re really dealing in semantics here. What would happen if you just make the two-way pickslanting motion multiple times in a row? Wouldn’t that be crosspicking? Andy does do this. I pulled out this clip as a very brief illustrative example:

https://troygrady.com/interviews/andy-wood-acoustic/clips-guitar/manzanita-crosspick-rotation/

Really, the only difference between this and “crosspicking” is semantic. Andy tends to make this movement only intermittently, inside of pickslanting licks, so we call that playing style “two way pickslanting”. But that’s just a choice. There are players, like Jimmy Herring, who use this movement all the time for scalar stuff, crosspicking stuff, you name it - so that’s his “crosspicking” technique.

Tomato, tomahto. You gotta start somewhere. Getting good at any of these movements opens the door to others. Enjoy the journey!

By the way we have Andy coming up to the studio the end of this month and we’re going to try and do a live broadcast help session with him and get another good look at all these basic motions and how they work on both guitar and mando. We’ll put that on the homepage when it’s on the calendar.

[RockStarJazzCat]

I can pick relaxed at about 4 notes per beat at 110 bpm.

Just going to throw it out there that back in the eighties (nineties?), Guitar Player in a “how to” on speed, somehow came up with sixteenth notes at 112bpm as something to the effect of what everyone should be capable of. Not sure how they came up with it, but thank goodness for all that points to that being extremely low! Wondering now if this was the average ceiling for “fast stringhopping.”

[jpsychc]

Can I just say, as a fellow bluegrass guitarist who is stuck at the same speed. Practicing tremolo picking literally doesn’t do anything to help with this problem. Picking speed for bluegrass flatpickers has nothing to do with the picking speed “patterns” that are taught with DPS or 2wPS or whichever type of pickslant. Those techniques are basically like “here, practice your tremolo, now slant your pick and you can change strings”. Blue grass isn’t like that because it isn’t a bunch of repeating patterns, you have a play melodies where the number of notes per string constantly changes and there is no repeating pattern.

i can tremolo 4 notes per beat at 180bpm easily, without breaking a sweat. It does absolutely nothing to increase my ability to play bluegrass lead, at all. Troy was on here telling me that some really good bluegrass guys use UWPS when they go super fast, liek David Grier, and that i should adopt that, but the problem is that i cannot improvise over a melody, or play any fiddle tune with UWPS.

The truth is, if you look at Grier’s videos, he doesn’t utilize UWPS conciously as a tool for playing. His pick just happens to slant in that direction, when needed, instinctively, and likewise when he’s changing strings after an up stroke he uses downward pick slanting. And sometimes, even when it looks like uUWPS, (like in wheel hoss), it’s actually only during part of the phrase and then as the rest of the phrase develops, the slant goes away, but that isn’t mentioned in the video. Fast flatpickers do not play with a pick slant, they rock their wrist back and forth, and depending on which string they are trying to get to next, the pick slants in whatever the most economical way is, for that particular moment. So deciding to try to approach bluegrass from a specific UWPS or DPS perspective, isn’t going to actually work. What you need to do is just be able to do crosspicking patterns with a wide stroke where the pick dips down at just the right time, and as you speed up, the size of the stroke decreases, and the pick does little slanting manuevers depending on what’s happening. But none of that is intentional and it can’t be figured out that way. You can’t go in and mark which note has which slant. You just have to get used to rocking your pick back and forth and hitting the string you need to hit, when you need to hit it, and then as you get faster, and faster, maybe slants occur here or there but it’s just your natural instinct in trying to get to the next note.

So, for a bluegrass player, practicing tremlolo X minutes a day doesn’t accomplish anything at all. I can tremolo extremely fast, but i am still a lousy 108bpm bluegrass flatpicker. The one has nothing to do with the other. You have to practice flatpicking the actual improv and melodies that you’re going to be playing, and not practice some patterns or tremolo or one particular method of pick slanting.

I have practiced Beaumont rag, according to rough calculations, for over 100 hours this year alone, and the speed will not budge over 108 bpm. This is likely just my physical maximum capability and thus i will never be able to alternate pick bluegrass higher than 110. Maybe 115 for certain types of songs where it is easy to incorporate hammers and pulls. Or, maybe there is some solution, but whatever it is, practicing tremolo and then pick slanting patterns doesn’t even move the needle a single percentage point.

I had a lesson recently with an accomplished bluegrass guitarist and he absolutely does not pick slant, he focuses on large swings of the wrist to get used to developing the accuracy to dip down to hit a particular string during the course of a stroke, and then you speed that up little by little and when you want to go REALLY fast the pick strokes shorten, but there is no tremolo type movement or consistent pick slant pattern that is possible.

Some people are just not physically able to alternate pick bluegrass lead. really fast guys can do it at like 170. I’m desperate for 130 bpm which is medium bluegrass speed, but it is never going to happen, even if i get my tremolo up to 240bpm.