As I mentioned in another thread, I had a friend who was taking lessons from a GIT educated player. He gave his students a packet of photocopied information that described picking as the “lock key” system.
The picking motion was described as if you were turning a key in a lock. (!) I played and practiced with this method, adn to this day, my picking motion is a twisting movement
If the wrist is twisting like a key in a lock, if you extend your pick farther away from the plane of rotation, very slight twisting motions in the wrist translate into relatively large pick swipes. If your hand wrist is in line with your forearm, slight twisting motions dont translate into much pick movement. Of course if you look at the (my) hand from the back, it might appear to be moving side to side. I think thats how its presented in CTC, but I still believe the muscle movement is twisting.
I spent alot of time experimenting with moving the hand downward, out of the plane of the forearm, so that slight lock/key twisting movements in the wrist translated into significant pick movement. The angle of the wrist relative to the forearm controls how much pick movement there is. I also experimented in the opposite direction, keeping the hand in the plane of the forearm. Of course, there would need to be more actual twisting
Conceptually, I viewed the arc of the pick like a pendulum. The hand extending (moderately) below the line of the forearm is the pendulum, with the pick at its tip. When the pick strikes the string, it is at its lowest, and when it is to either side, it is higher. If the pendulum is perpendicular to the string, and the pick doesnt pass far through the plane of the string, theoretically when the pendulum is to either side it will be higher than the plane of the string and can pass over.
In my mind, switching strings was the act of letting the pendulum swing farther to either side, clearing the string, then (simultaneously) moving the whole assembly to the next string. In CTC terms, this might be seen externally as upward and/or downward pick slanting, but in my mind I was “reaching over”.
Where I got tripped up was my reasoning of how the string skipping mechanism worked. I spent alot of time trying to make my pendulum shorter so that there was more clearance at both (high) sides. If the tip of the pick is the fulcrum and the hand is twisting behind the pick, then the pendulum is actually quite short and its feasible to clear adjacent strings.
In actuality, the act of downward or upward pickslanting is not coupled to the length of the pendulum, so trying to make my pendulum more compact was not the same thing as overtly rotating the whole assembly around the string.
In practice, I can already do fast decending sixes. I spent a ton of time on asc/dec sequences of fours and can get a moderate/good velocity although it depends on which part of the sequence I am on. And I did spend alot of time developing velocity on a diagonal form asc/dec of major and natural minor scales, but my scale form involves a slide and a swipe. And its not a convenient 3nps organization that can be transposed to different modes, so its not that useful.
I spent thousands of hours and had good intentions, but I never nailed string crossing, probably because my pick motion is based around lock/key and it didn’t occur to me that the lock/key movement is actually the movement your wrist makes when changing its slant to cover an adjacent string. I contend that most peoples picking motion is acutally a mild twist, and that upward/dowward pickslanting is a similar movement, but it deals more with “aim” towards the string. Is the pendulum directly above the string? Or is it aiming at the string from slightly in front or slightly behind?
