I have a great many problems

Ok, so I just simply do not have a natural flair for guitar. That’s an understatement. I have practiced for about eight hours a day for three years and focused almost exclusively on picking, and I STILL can’t figure it out.

First off, the back-and-forth wrist movement that people use - only with finger movement or arm movement do I see that it’s possible to use this technique without going the completely wrong direction. My current technique is basically a combination of arm movement and this loose wrist. Basically, I solo the way I strum. The other thing with the wrist deviation movement - I have no idea have to do that with downward pickslanting. I can’t explain it, I just can’t do it. It just turns into the arm twist movement and I HATE that movement.Usually a good way to get the pick snagged in the strings. I’ve tried doing this thing where I flatten my knuckles, but it’s very awkward:

Anyway, if you have any advice, please do send it this way. I desperately want to learn this instrument, but despite how much money I’ve spent on it, I’m genuinely on the verge of giving up. This next link is one way I play. But it’s one of many. I can’t stick to a single style, because none really work.

EDIT: below is the closest approximation I can get to the dwps. Maybe it’s ok but it’s a little messy at times. But I’m just gonna put this down as a reference. As you can see, still plenty of arm movement.

Next is crosspicking. Conceptually I actually have no problem with it, but the wrist anchor I use is problematic - I find it very hard to shift position once any flesh is on it. In general, I use very little anchoring - I actually find the feeling of anchoring inconsistent when I want to move my right hand around. Once again, fair bit of arm movement.

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This is not true is it? Please do not do this! You’re setting yourself up for serious injury. There is no benefit to this much practice time in a day, nor is this much practice time necessary to learn basic guitar motions anyway.

For now, please don’t practice any more than 40 minutes a day. If you’re not seeing results, it’s because you’re not practicing correctly. We’re working on some “how to practice” type material which will greatly clarify the approach I personally use when self-teaching new motions.

For now, I’d simply encourage you to practice in very short sessions of a few minutes here and there while attempting to play at top speed using the motion you want to learn. That’s it. Top speed. If you can’t do it right at least once really fast and a little sloppy, then you certainly can’t do it correctly any slower. That’s the truth.

As you do make these attempts, keep an eye out for any sudden feeling of smoothness which might indicate you’re doing it right. When you experience that, you’ve just done something correct. If you’re not experiencing that, then the attempt didn’t work and you should try something else.

Do not repeat motions that aren’t working, you’ll just make them permanent. Instead, think of learning a new movement as a process of making repeated attempts to do that movement correctly while searching for that feeling of correctness.

That’s it! We’ll be back with more detail on this approach. But please, please, please, put down the guitar and don’t play so many hours in a day. It’s tempting fate. And really killing the fun of things for sure.

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@Troy, During the time period in your life when you were spending the most time per day practicing guitar, how many hours a day were you practicing then? Were you making decent progress then?

My first four years of playing I practiced about 3 hours a day and made good progress.

That “few minutes here and there while attempting to play at top speed” doesn’t include warm-up, does it? Do you mean that several times a day he should warm up for a while and then play at top speed for a few minutes here and there, or are you saying warm-up isn’t necessary when practicing in that way?

The OP stated “I have practiced for about eight hours a day for three years and focused almost exclusively on picking…”

Pretty sure Troy’s comments/suggestions are specific to the OP developing his picking mechanic, not guitar practice in general.

If you’re asking about when I was a kid, I never did traditional repetitive exercise practice. We’ve dramatized this in the animated series a bit. It felt unnatural and never produced results. I always felt guilty about not doing more of this, like I wasn’t eating my vegetables or something. Of course the random jamming and screwing around is what led to the pickslanting breakthrough, which took five years, but happened instantly one day when it happened. That is basically a longer, drawn out version of how real motor learning practice works when you do it deliberately.

Re: warmup I honestly never do it. I’m not the guy to ask about that. What is warmup, how long should you do it, what is the difference between warmup and practice? To me it’s just the first few minutes of practice that don’t feel as loose. That’s about the extent to which I think about it. These are all good questions.

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Hey @Troy, I really appreciate your concern - other than days I was playing other instruments (I play bass and trumpet professionally), it was very often that or more. All day, genuine obsession, often skipping meals because my terrible playing was hurting me more than the hunger pains. Lost a noticeable amount of weight as a result. It’s been a real problem. Problem is, I cannot give up. I feel incredibly guilty doing anything else, and I can’t get any real satisfaction out of anything other than this and improving my vocals (also going terribly). I will not put down the guitar unless I’m at least as good as I was when I picked it up, and not worse due to experimenting and then subsequently forgetting what worked. Much like singing, I also think what causes my playing to feel good is something entirely different to the actual cause. I’m uploading another video to further clarify my problem, but basically, I just don’t know how to move my pick in the right direction without putting myself in a very uncomfortable position. I’m just not very kinesthetic. You’re right, it has killed the fun of music, but it’s still all I really want nonetheless.

We’ve discussed this before, but any time you start to tie your personal happiness to your playing ability, that should throw up a huge red flag. Lots of forum users have weighed on this as having been destructive for them. I would really recommend trying to get a handle on this somehow, including speaking to people you trust and/or professionals if necessary.

Even if we place happiness concerns aside, what I can tell you for sure is that extreme practice time like what you are doing is actually hurting your progress. There is strong evidence, both in research and also anecdotal evidence from elite level players, that this type of approach not only doesn’t work, but degrades performance. Your brain can only absorb so much. On top of that, if you don’t practice correctly, your brain won’t absorb anything because repeating the same broken stuff for hours on end isn’t teaching it anything.

If you are going to be super focused on skill building, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that, at least be super focused on what experts think is the best type of practice. This is sessions of no more than 40 minutes, and no more than a couple of those per day, with big gaps of time in between, and frequent breaks in the sessions themselves, structured around varied attempts to do things correctly based on a visual or feel reference, and not continuous playing for forty minutes straight.

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I’ve definitely used this as a short term crutch - say, going through a breakup, “well, maybe if I was a better guitarist so-and-so-would have stayed with me” - but even then, it was with a full behind-the-scenes awareness of the fact that I was lying to myself, my dating life was (largely) unrelated to my music life, but that it let me feel better because I felt like I was at least doing something productive, and that further even if I knew there was no actual correlation, the short-term gains from getting a bit better at guitar were worth it anyway.

As it turns out, being a happier, more well-balanced, grounded person is actually more effective, not playing faster shred solos, but that’s neither here nor there. :rofl:

Being fair, I have had a bit of that, but being a guitar player has been my ambition for half of my life. To really give it your all and cover so little ground is heartbreaking in itself.

I was a headhunter for 15 years. People came in all the time with the “do what you love” mentality. I actually think that’s terrible career advice. People convince themselves their destiny is to do all sorts of things. They want to write the great American novel. They want to be a trader at Goldman. Each year, magically based on whichever new discipline was the hot one, that’s what all the grads came in wanting to do. My favorite was all the people came in that year saying they were super interested in credit derivatives. This was like a year before the crash. Point being, what they were looking for was usually for arbitrary reasons, and it was often pretty transparent to see where these ideas came from. And very often their goal was in direct contravention to a thing they were demonstrably much better at and where there was actually more hiring activity.

So I always say, don’t do what you love. Do what you’re great at. Do what’s working. Those things are much more observable. Every time you deliver a toast at a wedding and everybody is rolling on the floor, you know you’ve probably got some comedy skills. If you’re great at multiple things, lucky you, pick one!

Even if you’re not the best in the world at something, if it’s the best of all your skills, that still matters. It’s the thing you will get farthest at with the least effort and very likely the most enjoyment. It’s great to do stuff well, I understand that, even if it’s just in your own little niche of life. Somewhere out there is the best damn plumber in Skokie Illinois and that guy gets a thrill every time he welds up some perfect joint on a copper supply line and photographs it for his Instagram page. More power to him!

I’m not saying don’t do what you love at all. But I am saying, leaven that with some reality and assessment and you’ll carve out the smoothest path possible.

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for gods sake, can everybody shut up about this guys happiness, i have the same problem with my picking, my technique looks very similar, and i DO practice 8 hours a day, i know short bursting sessions are more effective and all, but can somebody just dissect whats wrong, i cant for the life of me get rid of string hopping.

If you’re string hopping then you’re using the same muscle groups on both the upstroke and the downstroke. Most often the repeated movement is wrist extension. In other words, the solution to all your problems is to stop using wrist extension on both upstrokes and downstrokes.

The problem with this is that your brain doesn’t really know what to do with that information (at any picking speed you care about at least). So while it’s interesting from an academic standpoint, it isn’t really actionable.

The solution, as @Troy explained in this thread, is short burst of experimentation. Tweaking all kinds of variables (supination, pronation, anchor point on guitar, anchor point on bridge, amount of edge-picking, more or less rotation etc etc) until you find a movement that works. Once you find it you stop. Literally giving yourself a cookie here might be beneficial, to stimulate the reward circuits and the concomitant neuroplasticity that goes with it, but most likely you’ll be so happy you ‘nailed it’ that this happens anyway.

Then later you come back and you try to capture that movement. After doing this a while you can get the movement any time you want and you’ve won.

Why not give this a try? Total of 45 minutes a day for two weeks. It can’t hurt right?

Since you’re such a hard worker it’s very important that you understand that less is actually more here. You brain can only absorb so much of this kind of complex motor learning per day.

Because you’re spending 8 hours a day doing it.

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Hey, first of all, please keep it respectful; it’s fine to disagree but telling people to “shut up” is not a productive way to express that. If frustration with playing / technique gets to the point of affecting happiness it’s not exactly off topic to talk about it. @Troy and others have posted more specific suggestions re: technique and how to practice, too.

A couple suggestions to expand on Troy’s post above, if you’re in a similar situation of practicing hours a day and not getting results:

Go through our “Getting Started Guide”, which has detail on how to try out and recognize various picking motions, establish one that works, and get more feedback as needed:

If you’ve gone through that material and are still stuck, you may also find it helpful to search the forum for things like “practice routine” or “stringhopping” or “speed” or “hand synchronization” or any particular problem areas, and see what’s worked for others. There are hundreds of good discussions on the forum but may take some searching to find ones most relevant to you.

You can of course also post a video + questions to #technique-critique at any time and we’ll do our best to get you helpful feedback. If you’re not able to post a video you can browse other #technique-critique posts and see if any replies to others’ posts may be helpful to you as well!

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