Is choking up on the pick harder for uwps?

Playing Technique
#1

I’ve noticed that when I play, I tend to not choke up too much. When trying to choke up more, the inner skin near the thumb rubs against the strings because I prefer a pronated approach.

Dwps are more supinated so their inner skin doesn’t rub against the string as much I would imagine.

So when I choke up on the pick, I’m forced to run more against the strings than when the pick is a bit further out from the grip. I am experimenting with my pick grip, and will have to learn to get used to the heavy rubbing against the strings if choking up gives me much more control.

What’s everyone’s thoughts on this?

1 Like
#2

My general thought is that choking up has become over-rated due to the popularity of the “standard size” Jazz III, which to a large degree forces you to choke up because of the limited amount of grip area. There can be aesthetic reasons to want to choke up, but I think a lot of people choke up in order to try to regulate how deep their pick attack goes into the strings. I agree 100% that finding a way to regulate the depth of your pick attack is important, but I think people get blinded into thinking that choking up is the only way to do it. When you’re still learning to regulate, maybe there can be value in that, but once you have a feel for consistent movements, I think it’s better to use tactile reference from finger or wrist anchors to let you regulate the depth of your picking attack. This opens up a ton of different possiblities for pick grip to experiment with for different purposes once you aren’t locked into using a particular grip to manage the depth of your attack.

While Michael Angelo Batio often uses a choked-up grip, the nature of his finger-anchored “bridge” arm position is such that if your pick is rigid enough, you can achieve extremely precise regulation of pick depth on the string even with a ridiculously large amount of pick sticking out of your grip.

1 Like
#3

Ok I’ll ask the dumb question for others who are lurking! What is choking up?

Like, I get from context that it means having less picking sticking out, but less than what? Some other way that a person really wants to play, which has “too much” pick, so they “choke up” and use less? What is that other “too much pick” way?

I’ve started asking players more specifically about grip in the more recent interviews we’ve done. Grip is important and can affect the way different motions feel and operate. I don’t think anyone has mentioned specifically trying to use the smallest amount of exposed pick. Maybe I’m not asking them directly enough to ferret out this information.

Superficially, I wouldn’t look at the grip of players like Andy Wood or Molly Tuttle and think they are specifically making a “minimal pick” type attempt. But again not something I really think about so who knows, I may have overlooked this.

#4

I know that it’s something I consciously do, and it’s the primary reason I use really small picks. If I have too much tip exposed it seems to make the pick want to flap back and forth too much between my fingers and it just feels…awkward. Same thing if I use bigger picks. All that material just wants to pivot back and forth too much and I feel like I’m going to lose hold of my pick, or it wants to turn and rotate. The alternative is to hold the pick tighter which feels even more awkward because of the extra tension this produces. Maybe I’m just weird like that and it’s not an issue for most players.

#5

In my experience the size of the pick doesn’t really affect this as much as you’d think. I have pretty much the same “amount of pick” exposed on every pick I use, large or small, angle pad or side grip. I just situate it so the same amount of pick is exposed no matter what. It’s not something I think about, but I’ve noticed from all the filming we’ve done that this is generally the case.

I think this “amount of pick” focus is possibly a kind of misplaced oversimplification, like building an airplane with the tiniest wings because the bigger ones flap around too much. Instead, maybe asking what function a wing is supposed to perform, and whether small is even appropriate, and whether flapping is even bad in the first place. That’s probably not a perfect analogy but you get the idea!

Instead, better questions to ask are what grip you are even shooting for, and whether or not you are doing it properly. Then ask about your arm setup and anchoring. Then ask about your movement. In other words… ask about everything! It’s a system. All the parts work together.

#6

I know it is for me. If I try to play with a big pick or too much tip, so that the flapping thing starts happening, it feels awkward and a bit uncomfortable. If I keep doing it anyway (and ignore that feeling) the pick inevitably flies out of my fingers. Is this something wrong with my picking technique? Possibly. But playing the way I do now has allowed me to get fairly fast, and I’m still improving, so maybe it’s just one of those quirks unique to me.

#7

Just from the players we’ve interviewed, it’s clear that this is sometimes intentional, especially when you have a player with a heavy gauge pick who wants to play lightly. Loosening the grip causes the flapping and makes the pick flop over the top of the string. You can see this in Mike Stern’s interview, all the time, and also Joscho Stephan when he wants to play delicately.

So I don’t think this is so much a black and white thing, but yet another of the thousand variables we’re supposed to be able to control. As if we didn’t already have enough, right??

I think we still need to get to the bottom of really fundamental questions like this, such as: how do you play a “louder” note? Is it more pick? Faster movement? Firmer grip? All three? Sometimes some and not the others? It’s amazing again how many variables there are.

Of note, when I do extended finger grips, even when lots of pick appears exposed on one side, you might see on the other side that my finger is extending much further down the pick than you might guess. So that may have something to do with it as well. When I do pad-side type grips, I can almost totally eliminate the “flap” even with relatively light holds. Those are very stable.

If you get a moment, take some photos of your grip from a couple different viewpoints and post them. I think it would be interesting to see what you think “choked” up looks like, and what part of the hand is actually doing the choking, and how much pick is actually exposed on both sides of the pick. In fact if you can measure that, that would be cool too.