I purchased The Magnet DIY kit recently and decided to do a review on my experience with building it (ha, I suck), and also using it. Overall, I’m glad I made the purchase. The later portion of the video I show some footage and reveal just how helpful it is in determining issues with picking technique.
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Great job on this!
That first string change you’re not really hitting the string by accident, per se. You’re just playing an even number of notes on that string so you can make the string change cleanly. It doesn’t happen to be the same as the number of notes you’re fretting. But the point is that there is a difference between this and a “mistake”. Your hand is actually doing the upstroke escape motion correctly. Likewise, when you get to the lower strings you’ve switched to a downstroke escape motion. And that actually looks pretty good too, even though some string changes work / don’t work.
What I’m getting at is you have the beginnings of these two motions, and individually they look good. When you see randomness of this nature that usually means you haven’t figured out by feel when you’re doing one or the other. And it makes me want to see what happens when you tell your hands to do only one or the other, to make sure they are individually smooth and consistent. If they flip-flop even when you’re trying to just do one of them, then the individual motions themselves are not fully baked yet, and the name of the game is working on single-escape (aka “one way pickslanting”) phrases until those motions are dead smooth and you can switch them individually, for entire phrases, on command.
If possible, one other thing I’d recommend is rotating the phone to landscape. This will give you more of a view of what is going on with your arm. That’s how we film everything nowadays. Not sure if that will work given your phone’s camera placement in the center but you can give it a shot.
Again nice work on this and thanks for doing this. I think you’re already seeing some insights here with the closeup footage.
Just so everyone knows, we don’t make any cash off this. Whatever it costs is whatever it costs - you’re ordering the parts yourselves.
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Awesome! I will definitely give your suggestions a try and perhaps post an update some time down the road.
Where is the kit sold?
By the way Troy, I have no clue if you’re still planning on bringing the magnet to mass production, but if you do – one idea that would be great to promote it is by offering a free online web app where you provide users with a variety of guitar lick challenges, so that they can record and post their attempts.
This could serve as an interactive community where users can see what experts are doing and what their strokes look like for given licks. Commenting, rating, etc. included.
On my other main channel where I teach web and app development, I posted an unlisted video of a prototype for something very similar:
Anyhow, just an idea!