I more than doubled the speed of my rotational forearm mechanic in less than five months. Here's how

Great clip! The speed sounds fluid here.

Don’t hate me, but… this looks like mostly wrist movement, not forearm. A higher frame rate video would help, but you can verify this yourself without a camera just by looking at the path the pick travels when you play a pickstroke. If it tends to follow the pickups, or approximately follow the pickups, the forearm alone can’t create that path. The forearm rotates on its axis, so the the pick will move in a plane right angle to the way the arm is pointing. This will generally make the pick cut across the pickups. The wrist can make a windshield wiper-like path, or a more pickups-parallel path if you use flexion and extension. Any path other than these three pure paths represents a blended movement of forearm and wrist. In other words, when you want to understand your picking movement, don’t look for moving body parts, look at the way the pick is moving because that tells you what movements must be used.

Anyway there is nothing wrong with wrist movement, or forearm/wrist blend. They work great. From the clip it looks like there may be some occasional hiccup in there, like a periodically more aggressive forearm movement, or a blend between arm and wrist which is changing. Or it could be the camera frame rate. If you get a chance, do a shot in 60p or 120p if you have it, near a light source like a window that gets (non-direct) sunlight.

If it is indeed the case that some of the notes are being played with different movements than the others, that’s good. That’s a nice concrete thing you can work on, i.e. making the movement consistently one blend or the other. And that will pay dividends in smoothness.

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Hey Troy,

Cool observations - and no hate! I don’t really care what motions I use as long as I am as relaxed as I can be. That’s the entire basis of the technique I have nowadays. To that end I think Gilbert, Malmsteen, and of course Marshall Harrison - the legend of all legends - are my favorites to study.

But yeah, I think I might have confused my terminology. When I say rotational, I don’t mean that super-strict EVH rotational picking where the only thing moving is the forearm in an arc. I mean moreso the Chris Brooks/Yngwie Malmsteen/Paul Gilbert motion where it looks like I’m “turning a key in a lock”, as Gilbert describes. At least when I look own at my arm that’s what I can see. I could never get myself to use arm/elbow since it feels way too tense and like a one-way ticket to RSI for me. I have no clue how John Taylor and others manage to do it at such high speeds without injury.

By the way, I have a Ney Mello DVD where he describes that virtuoso technique is very often a blend of different movements. He actually breaks down every movement. Have you ever seen this DVD? Absolute must watch. I live in NYC, I can USPS it to you if you’d like to study it. It’s really awesome, and I won’t be using it anytime soon.

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Could you share the basic practice routine ?

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Hey Mark,

Sure. I’m doing a HUGE writeup for this forum and I am considering a potential YouTube miniseries on this as well. I have so many thoughts, so stay tuned.

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