How to stop stringhopping

Technique Critique
#1

It was an absolute revelation when I first learned about stringhopping. Despite hours of disciplined practice (for two years), I struggle playing leads faster than 95-105bpm (16th notes) for reasons that were somewhat mysterious to me. Now it’s no longer a mystery.

In another sense, though, I’m in a similar place I’ve always been in where guitar-playing friends would tell me that I had to relax. It wasn’t that I doubted the advice but that I didn’t know how to follow it. Like, how does one practice being relaxed?

So it is with stringhopping. I’m generally more conscientious about my picking motion thanks to CtC, but I still don’t really know how to practice breaking my natural state of suboptimal motion. That’s what I want to know: what exercises should I be doing to evolve?

Thanks.

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#2

I’d like to summon @jzohrab!

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#3

To be honest it doesn’t look like stringhopping to me, it looks like elbow motion. It also looks like you are not contacting the guitar with your wrist, more like floating above the bridge, is it true? What happens if you place your hand on the bridge, roll a little bit to the thumb side and try to play as fast as you can?

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#4

It looks like you’re using elbow motion. Do you feel like there’s any difficulties with your current picking motion? What happens when you try to go fast? Have you tested other motions, either on guitar or by doing the tabletop tests in the Pickslanting Primer?

Even if elbow motion feels good to you, it might be a good idea to keep experimenting with motions that are very different than the one you’re using now, since it’s easier to avoid old habits that way. Maybe you’ll pick up a nice secondary motion for yourself. Or maybe you’ll find one that is flat-out the easiest for you to do, for now.

Also, something that I believe is connected to learning what efficiency feels like: for the beginning, don’t worry about musical correctness or try to avoid errors. Don’t react to random errors, instead react if the motion feels janky. Prioritize motions that let you pick relatively easily, without micromanaging.

In my experience it’s easy to accidentally start messing with a picking motion that already works, if there’s one or two mistakes here and there. You can iron out mistakes once the motion itself is smooth, mostly relaxed, repeatable and sounds good overall.

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#5

poof!

Oh, here’s a soapbox, let me climb up on it … :stuck_out_tongue:

Hi @uncleschaeflit, I’ve posted a few things before on relaxation but here’s a new one with summarizing some of them:

These are all ideas for you to try out, and see how they feel for you. I’ve had good luck with these exercises, hope they’re useful for you too.

Cheers! jz

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Working on my alternate picking -- help?
#6

@jzohrab was very helpful to me in another thread with his video on relaxing the picking hand. You should really check that out, OP.

I’ve also been discovering that tension has a lot to do with mental attitude. You shouldn’t be “trying” to play, you should play. What that means is that guitar playing shouldn’t be like trying to play the roullete, gambling whether you will pick the right notes or the wrong notes. You should have a feeling of control over your playing. That lack of feeling of control breeds insecurity, insecurity breeds anxiety, and anxiety breeds tension. I used to attempt things that I wasn’t quite ready to do, and only recently I’ve realized that that caused me a lot of trouble. It’s better to take a step back, figure out what might be causing that tension, and fix it, than trying to force your way through it. I can feel a lot of tension just for being slightly unconfortable with a certain passage. If I take a more patient approach and discover exactly what is causing me disconfort, and then work on that, I find that a lot of tension dissipates naturally, because I’m no longer lacking so much confidence in my playing and have developed some degree of control.

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#7

Astute observations.

  1. I feel like I’m mostly able to avoid stringhopping during tremolo picking but not when playing an actual riff. This vid is 95bpm (16th notes):
  1. You are definitely right about the floating. I’ll try your suggestion later.

Thanks a lot.

#8

It doesn’t feel difficult, but I also can’t go very fast with it.

I did the tests with normal results. Now, to your point, it makes sense to really try those motions out on the guitar and not focus too much on errors. Will do. (I had been trying different pick angles but not different overall motions.)

Thanks.

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#9

You are the man! I have read your entire website and will start trying this stuff. So, so nice to have actual exercises. It’s been a general complaint of mine that across the many internet guitar teachers none of them actually teach you how to practice. You are the exact opposite. Incredibly refreshing. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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#10

I buy this logic. How, though, do you apply it when what’s causing you discomfort is simply a passage being fast?

#11

Yeah practicing is an art … I think it’s all about intelligent experimentation, discarding superfluous tension, and consistency. Troy touches on experimentation in a few videos, and for me the relaxation has been critical because I was terribly locked up. And consistency, because for me practice is about telling your brain what you want, and the improvement happens over time, when you’re not playing! Funny how it works. Cheers and post here or DM me if anything isn’t clear in the material. Cheers! Z

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#12

@uncleschaeflit, I think @Mr_Samsa said it well:

I agree with this. To put it another way, I think the feeling of control is you trusting your relaxed technique. The feeling shouldn’t come from the fact that you’re simply trying your hardest to make the music go right at all costs. Maybe there can be a tiny bit of that, but it shouldn’t be the foundation of how you play. I think something detrimental happens when we try to play something we don’t yet control, while attempting to make sure there are zero mistakes and picking errors.

I’m not saying don’t strive for perfection. But try to do it in a way where you first look for relaxed techniques that you can repeat easily and do them fast, instead of forcing your way through something, like Mr_Samsa points out below:

I also agree with this:

Finding out what discomforts you is likely very helpful and can remove blockers. It’s also just another way to say “try different picking motions, grips, arm positions, picks, etc”. But it highlights that you should do it by feel. Is it smooth enough, do you feel a speed limit, do both pickstrokes sound and feel similar enough? It can take time and lots of experimentation, which takes patience. But once you figure out what goes wrong and when, then you can change your approach.

I doubt that discomfort comes from something simply being fast. Can you elaborate? In your normal speed down the strings video, at about the 3 second mark, you clearly stop stringhopping - so you already know how to let go of the inefficient motion. It’s mostly a matter of recognizing and recalling it at will. Keep going between different motions!

#13

A few possibilities:

  • use “chunking” to reduce the amount of “stuff” you need to deal with when playing a fast section. Focus on the “target notes”, and let the rest take care of itself.
  • part of the discomfort may be mental tension, which then becomes physical tension. A possible method to work through this is to review it mentally: do you know all of the notes cold in your mind? Can you imagine playing it, just doing mental practice? Can you inwardly hear all of the notes, or an idea of it? (Audiation is a very tough skill, but if you practice a fast section enough you can perhaps memorize the sound).
  • “Too fast” can perhaps be localized to just a few notes in a passage – maybe :slight_smile: – so you can work on just a small section.
  • Sometimes you need to decompose a problem section, eg practice hands separately. If your fretting hand can’t keep up, you’ll hit a wall.
  • I can’t speak from much experience about things at very high tempo, but can say that speed comes from experiencing it, however briefly and even for short passages, and then gradual acclimation as your mind and nervous system synthesizes everything. So, practice something hard, really hard, for a short duration, and then take a break. During that rest period (especially sleep), things get organized.

Yep, and that can be rough because honestly when you’re starting a new thing you might not know how to experiment! fyi I worked on en Eric Johnson hybrid picking lick for about 2 months. I had the right rough ideas, sort of, but my practice time was prolonged because I kept doing the same thing thinking it would work itself out. When I started changing it up, doing “slow-fast-slow-fast” practice and really paying attention, was when everything started working. Another fyi: I’ve been working on a crosspicking thing for months now, and same story, so I’m making some drastic changes there now as well, which is really effing annoying. :stuck_out_tongue:

In short – well, too late for me to say that, after a phone book’s worth of my blathering to get here :smiley: – keep the spirit of interested, relaxed, no-pressure, fun investigation, keep tweaking, and see if anybody’s notes or thoughts can inform your own discoveries.

Anything helpful there? Let us know what kind of thing you’re getting stuck on. Cheers! z

ps - I might sound like I know what I’m saying, but nothing is prescriptive – everything above is for you to test out in your own practice and explorations.

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#14

Perhaps I shouldn’t be the one giving you advice when I’m also struggling with my technique, and I don’t want to give you the impression that I know more than what I actually know, but I can tell you about the process I’m going through, small ideas about how to practice that I’ve been trying to follow and small discoveries I’ve been doing along the way.

@Shredd elaborated further on what I’ve tried to say. I believe that if we approach a fast passage like “oh crap, here it comes, I hope I get this time”, we’re doing it wrong. All those guys and gals that can pull off completely crazy stuff don’t look like they are struggling at all. The goal is not to make it through a difficult passage, but to make it feel easy somehow. I often get in the habit of trying to go faster than my ability allows, and I may be able to pull it off, but I feel anxious and tense doing it and more often than not it is sloppy. But what I find is that once I start to get things under my control, it’s like my body begins functioning in auto-pilot. It’s like it tells me “hey, you know what? I’ve got this. Stop worrying so much and let me do my thing”. I think the key is to find a way to let that sensation become the norm in your playing. I don’t think fast passages are much different than any other kind of passage in this regard, your body will be able to get that fast passage with less difficulty once you start developing a sensation of control.

Of course, how you actually do it is the tricky part and it comes with a lot of trial and error. I try to be really mindful of my body. Is there unnecessary tension? Where? How much? When? How do I release it? What is causing it? Sometimes it’s not what you think it is. For example, sometimes I feel tense at one note or passage, because of the following or the previous passage, and I could be misled into thinking that the passage where I feel tense is what’s really causing me trouble. Let’s take whatever passage is causing you trouble. Is it the right hand, or the left hand? Or both? You can try, for example, developing your left hand first, so you can focus on the right hand later on. You can slow down, play it really slow and without a metronome (so no need to play at tempo, in fact I would advise against it. I would use the metronome more as a test of your ability, so I would practice the passage first no-tempo, and only later on using the metronome to see if it’s working). Take the right hand now, for example. What happens if you try to play it at tempo? The tricky thing is that the technique we use to play fast might not be the same we use when we play slow, so we might need to experiment a bit with it, we can try to find a fast motion that might not be entirely accurate at first, and then slow it down to work on that accuracy and bring the speed up again later. Does it work? If no, why?

I would say it is a very experimental process, and it is also a very physical process and it helps to have a good awareness of your body and the smallest physical sensations that you might feel. I think it’s a good idea to do some body scanning type meditation exercises, as it might help you become more sensitive to your body. For the very same reason it’s a good idea to have a comfortable, healthy posture, not only playing guitar but other times as well. If you don’t, if you’re routinely telling your body to ignore any discomfort, pain or restlessness it might feel, who’s to say you’re not doing the same when you play guitar? It’s all interconnected, good awareness of your body outside the practice room will lead you to better awareness of your body when playing guitar. Unfortunately, there are a million ways we ignore our bodies in our day-to-day life, from the very first day we go to school and have to sit down for hours and hours, to when we work day jobs and also have to sit still for hours or stand up for hours, stay up even if we feel tired, etc. I think playing guitar, or any instrument for that matter, is a call to get back in touch with your instincts, learn to listen to your body again and try to overcome decades of social conditioning. Perhaps that’s why it can be so difficult :slight_smile:

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#15

I thought it was gonna be way weirder than it was. I may very well be faster and better with that technique. Big props.

To make sure I’m doing what you intended, rolling my thumb back gets me picking with downward escape. That make sense?

#16

I’m able to do that with tremolo at a comfortable speed. Once, however, I start tying to play a passage >95BPM, I naturally devolve back to stringhopping. I’d also say that I find playing a riff to be much different from tremolo picking.

#17

Yea, I’ve noticed this concept a lot in your writings and videos. I’m incorporating it. (I cannot do the linked at 120BPM, but I’m trying parts within the overall phrase.)

#18

I’m finding it useful, hope it gives you some ideas.

#19

All well said. I relate so much to fearing the fast passage. When I’m best able to solve this it comes from practicing at, say, 80% speed and then playing at 75%. Feels so easy. I step up from there until I’m at 100%. Of course, I get that this runs against the wisdom at CtC about starting fast, but I haven’t found a way to make that wisdom work (yet).

I also hear your point about what works at 75% may not work at 100%. I don’t have a solution for that aside from some of @jzohrab’s chunking stuff. Still, it’s just so hard to start at 100% (or above) with something that is already stretching my ability.

#20

Not really, that would be the case if you were using wrist deviation. The thing is, you need two contact points and that thumb side hand placement seems to be working really well with elbow technique, at least for me. Batio has that floating hand elbow movement but he also rests on his fingers on the body, also ending up with 2 contact points. You can try out his version of the technique too.

I explained it here, the video is in Polish but you can see what I’m talking about by just looking at a few seconds of the vid at 3 minute mark. Regardless of how your forearm looks, your elbow can only flex and extend in the same direction. That’s why it’s always DSX.