My picking technique is pretty bad, and I want to improve.
But since I know these approaches of alternate picking I don’t know where to begin to practice them.
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It depends on your answer to these questions:
- what tunes are you learning?
- what parts of these tunes do you find difficult to play?
I would highly recommend posting a video of your current technique in order to get some feedback from the experts on the forum. Once you do that, you’ll be able to get advice on how to begin to incorporate the different approaches into your practice regime and also find out what areas you are good and bad at and what you especially need to focus on.
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This all looks great. The phone frame rate is low, so it’s hard to see the movements you’re making. A phone upgrade would fix that, though I understand this is not always the cheapest route.
The economy stuff sounds great - wouldn’t change anything. Don’t see any stringhopping in your alternate approach, wouldn’t change your fundamental hand movements at all.
You’ve got the “outside” Gilbert sounding pretty good. Can’t really see any forearm movement so you’re probably doing what we would call a “crosspicking” movement, where you’re using two kinds of wrist movement. It is very easy to do this and not be aware of the movement, since it can be done without an “obvious” pickslant in the sense of “a pick which appears slanted”. Can you do the “inside” Gilbert movement, where you start on an upstroke, or does that feel awkward?
If you can’t do the inside Gilbert movement, or you can’t figure out how to extend the scale pattern across more than two strings, this is the subject of the Antgravity seminar, as well as parts of the Pickslanting Primer. I don’t want to be that guy who’s like “buy our stuff”, because that’s not really what we’re about here. However I think the simple answer to your question is that everything mechanically appears to be working great, so there’s no problem we need to fix here. You just need more learning, which is not a thing we can really do in a forum thread.
It’s about a year now since I got the pickslanting primer, 9 months since I subscribed to MiM, and some things came quickly, some came slowly, some I’m still plugging away at (like, the RR thread today finally pushed me towards nailing that descending pentatonic pattern AND something about I was doing there subtly changed the way I approach the string and that for whatever reason helped me with EJ 5’s with a little sweep, which until today always felt a bit like trying to eat sandwiches with shoes on my hands or something).
Anyway, what I was going to say before my digression is that the hardest thing I’ve found to learn/grasp is not any particular technique, but how to spot whether I can’t do something because I don’t know how to do it properly, or because I haven’t practised it enough, or because I’m trying to do something you can’t do (or can be done an easier way). That last one is really common by the way if you ever learn anything from online tabs, some of which can be note-perfect recreations of songs with fingering choices that might suggest never having seen a guitar before, and some which can have really subtle ‘mistakes’ that can render a passage unplayable until you move some notes from one place to another.
It definitely feels like I’m just naturally getting better at this over time, anyway.
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Thank for your answer Troy!
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Again, this all sounds great, and think there are a lot of players out there who would like to be able to sound as smooth as you do on these patterns!
When I said “inside” Gilbert pattern, I was referring to the four-note pattern, like the first one you played, where you have three notes on the lower string and one note on the higher string. Except starting on an upstroke, so the single note, on the string by itself, is a downstroke.
If you haven’t worked on those patterns, then two-way pickslanting is one way to do that.
However, again, in the general sense, I’m not seeing any real problems here. You sound great, and if you find there are things you don’t yet know how to do, that’s just a matter of knowledge. It sounds like the mechanical stuff is working very well for you so far.
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Thank you all for your responses.
I tried the four-note pattern started with an upstroke and for me it’s even easier than the outside approach
And thanks for your time and for this space Troy.
Excellent. So then whatever your original question is about knowing when to use what technique, if you don’t know the answer, it doesn’t appear to matter too much!
Instead, find a friend with a phone that can do 120fps and upload some high frame rate clips when you get a chance. You might be doing some cool stuff that both you and us can learn from.
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Man, would love to see a high quality footage of your picking. As the other members pointed out, you seem to already have a nice and smooth technique.
I am not well placed to give you advice as you clearly have a better technique than mine. But if I were you I would focus on the licks that fit my technique and work on making them perfect. And you are not too far!
Even the greats like Malmsteen have a preference (with or without knowing it) for a certain type of licks that fit their technique.
Looking forward to more videos from you!
Cheers \m/
Lots of cool techniques in there. Agree that mechanically there’s lots of good stuff going on, and it becomes mainly a matter of getting a grip on which techniques work best for which licks. I think Gilbert himself often uses a fairly neutral slant for 2-way pickslanted licks, so you’re probably in very good company with the approach you’re using there, and the some of the upward slanted stuff looked a lot like John McLaughin. I also think it would be interesting to see you try the Gilbert 4-note lick in the way @Troy described above.
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Thanks for your advice man!
It took me so long to achieve this level, because I’m a self-taught guitarist, my early stages basically were trial and error.
Sometimes I gave up, and then tried another kind of exercises or methods.
If you ever feel that you’re getting stuck, don’t give up and try again.
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