Is there a method that stops string hopping?

Playing Technique
#1

I looked at the Pickslanting Primer and saw the diagonal path the pick should take. I tried working that into my playing but I ended up string hopping.

Is there a method for guitarists to stop the hopping and bouncy-ness?

#2

Have you tried rest strokes? In theory that should make the hop impossible because you only break the plane of strings in one direction. The other stroke gets ‘trapped’ (the rest stroke) and that should ensure whatever joint you’re moving goes in a fairly straight line. The video you posted in another thread looked like you were beginning to do this. It was a very deliberate “away from the body” on the down stroke, “toward the body” on the upstroke. Strict elbow motion I’d consider to be impossible to string hop, and I think you had an element of elbow in your motion that I’m referencing.

#3

In that video I chose to use two motions, the second motion was elbow and I was upward pickslanting with downwards escape.

But I think I would rather work on the opposite. A downwards pickslanter with upwards escape.

I believe when I was going very slowly I did let the pick come to rest on the adjacent string after I completed the downstroke, but you can do that when you pick slowly, but I don’t see how you can do that when you are picking fast.

Seems to me there really wouldn’t be time to let the pick rest on the adjacent string when picking fast.

#4

This is one of the main reasons it’s advised to start with speed. Fast picking on a single string. You won’t be able to do the string hopping motion at shred speed.

#5

I think the best approach is to go with what you’re naturally better at as opposed to what you’d like to do. There are enough great players on either “side of the fence” (USX vs DSX) that none of us should feel bad about leaning into what we’re good at. 99% of the players we look up to developed their technique organically - they tried stuff till something clicked and they rolled with it. You could even say they exploited it.

How is this beast able to do it?

Slow it down to 25% speed on the youtube player and you’ll see a rest stroke on nearly each down stroke. He’s not alone either, there are numerous examples of players who use rest strokes in their playing. It may not be conscious all the time, but it happens enough. “Small strokes are needed to go fast” is a myth. What we’ve seen in extreme cases like Rusty Cooley is that at the fastest speeds the pick strokes get a little smaller. But this happens as a consequence of the speed…it’s not the cause of the speed. For any “normal fast stuff”, like 16ths at 140 bpm all the way to 180 (and even “fast stuff” like 200bpm), rest strokes will not slow you down. What have you got to lose by giving them a try?

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#7

I’ve got to take a break from my Blackmore solo for a little while. I’ve made progress on it though. But I want to go back to working on my 3-note-per-string G Major scale.

I’ve been trying to play it using my elbow. Not sure if the elbow comes naturally to me. Seems like I always blend in some wrist anyway. But that probably is okay.

#8

Shortest possible answer:

— attempt to play at a speed that is too high for string hopping. You will either: (i) play the thing with a non-stringhoppy motion or (ii) not be able to play the thing at all.

Additional, personalised suggestion:

try to stop worrying about making the smallest possible motions. I know from previous posts that you have focused a lot on this, but we have metric tons of experimental evidence that actively trying to reduce your range of motion is — in short — a bad idea.

You should primarily focus on the following things: comfort, speed, smoothness, tone, timing and dynamics.

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#9

I’d add power to that list.

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#10

Genuine question from one mathematician to another, not trying to be pedantic :smiley:

What distinction do you make between “power” and “dynamics”? Or more precisely: my understanding of dynamics is the ability to play very softly to very loud, while maintaining the other desirable things from that list. So, in my understanding, “power” would be included in the “very loud” part of “dynamics”.

#11

I think that by using the term “dynamics,” students create connotations to musicality. They tend to think about developing “control” within the range of volume/loudness available to them.

Power determines our dynamic ceiling, but is purely physical; the ability to rapidly generate momentum in the picking hand and transfer energy efficiently into the string.

Personally, I don’t want my students worrying about “controlling their dynamics” before they can demonstrate that their ceiling is high enough to give them headroom.

The power required to drive a forced oscillator goes like square of frequency. Being able to demonstrate obnoxious, totally non-musical power with a picking movement at lower frequency has been a reliable indicator that a picking movement will be sufficiently powerful to remain functional at higher frequency. That is, the movement will have sufficient range of motion and carry enough momentum to break through the string, rather than scratching on top of the string or bouncing off on contact.

However, generating that power must feel almost effortless. The energy must transfer efficiently into the string, like hitting a ball with the “sweet spot” on a bat.

I regularly get my high E string caught under my neck pickup while demonstrating picking power in lessons, even while picking fast.

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#12

I’ve never seen a formal definition for what “string hopping” is. But notice that most (?) people do it, and the question is why, what problem is it solving? I suspect the PROBLEM is that people get their pick stuck between the wrong two strings and have to rescue the situation with a heroic movement of hopping the pick away from the guitar body, finding the correct string, jumping in, etc. So it could be that the underlying problem is a LACK OF PLANNING and then getting painted into a corner.

Well if string hopping is what happens when one is painted into a corner and has to jump out of a terrible situation (stuck between two bad strings), being able to play quickly in simple cases in no way means that one won’t fail to plan yet again and get into similar situations (?).

Basically there is good reason that many (most?) people do “string hopping.” Indeed USX, DSX, etc., are really ways to avoid getting trapped, hence there is no reason for an expensive escape attempt (if that’s what string hopping is).

Dynamics is relative, e.g., I could go between “weak” and “really weak” on an electric guitar and nobody would know (except perhaps they’d notice lots of extra noise). On an acoustic instrument one needs sufficient power to play with everybody else as there is no volume knob, and one might assume (?) that keeping that level of power makes sense for an electric guitar as well.

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#13

Pretty sure it is something like “wrist extension gets used in both upstrokes and downstrokes”. The use of the same exact muscles without recuperation, like we see when antagonistic muscles drive the motion, is fatigue inducing.

#14

So let’s accept that definition. This motion is the most natural way to resolve the “my pick is trapped somewhere” problem, I would think, and the DSX or USX solutions are not really so obvious, particularly as they are not general and need escape hatches to work for many pieces of music.

SH’s real problem is that it requires an enormous amount of motions to be crammed in a very short amount of time (say 75ms), so it’s just waiting to have something go wrong; but you’re right that even if one can do that, they’ll surely get tired.

I’m not sure what my point is… perhaps it is “string hopping is likely created by necessity because otherwise people have their pick trapped, and they couldn’t figure out faster alternatives.” Or perhaps my point is different, “an ounce of prevention (DSX, USX) is worth a pound of cure (string hopping).” Yah, I’ll take the last one, it seems like a more useful perspective. :rofl:

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#15

FWIW: Conceptually think of the cross picking motion like an exponential curve as opposed to a U or V (parabola, I guess) shape. It’s flat on one side and goes up in the air on the other.

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