New to the forum here & will be posting my picking for critique soon, but I thought I’d share this video that gave me a big breakthrough with my tremolo picking. I always had trouble keeping the looseness in my picking hand & would get caught up on the strings when they weren’t single string lines. I saw how Ihsahn has this side to side mechanic & found it odd, & decided to try it. Not sure why but it fits like a glove for me. Not getting tired either while playing entire songs with tremolo picking.
Is this mechanically “wrong” so to speak? Like if it works it works, but is there more to the eye here from the more experienced guys who understand the CTC methods?
It has to do with keeping the angle of your picking motion consistent while changing strings. If you keep your arm totally stationary while doing these types of strums, your picking motion, angle (and subsequently, the FEELING) will be completely different as you move from higher to lower strings.
This player is using upstroke escape, or “USX” wrist motion. It’s two things. It’s motion at the wrist joint. And two, it’s motion along a diagonal so the pick can move from string to string without hitting any of the surrounding strings. USX motion creates a zig-zag path when moving from one string to another, as per our handy dandy GIF here:
USX motion can be created with a variety of joints. He just happens to be using wrist motion. The two are not exclusive to each other. As a general category of picking motions, USX motions only work for multi-string licks if you play an even number of notes per string, so that the last note on every string is an upstroke. That’s what he’s doing in the tremolo lick at the end. That’s why everything is units of four, starting on a downstroke and ending on an upstroke. This way, the string changes always happen during the escape stroke.
This may be what you’re doing, or it may not. You might be using some other joint, and you might be making a different motion type (i.e. something other than USX) with that joint. There is no single correct picking motion or motion type. All the most common joints used in picking motion, including elbow, forearm, wrist, and fingers, can all be done fast, and they all do different types of escape motion. If you haven’t read through that section of the Primer yet, that will give you a good big picture overview of how picking motion works.
Is there a specific issue you’re trying to address in your own playing? If so, put up a clip of your technique and we’d be happy to take a look. Otherwise if it’s working, it’s working and I wouldn’t necessarily go looking for issues just yet until you figure out that you have one!
