Is this DWPS correctly please?

Technique Critique
#21

Hi @troy I know you stated this already in this post but as I am having to re-learn all of my motions due to years of wrong (in plane), I thought it best to pick one and learn it.

My UWPS position does not escape the strings by very much as I tend to pick in plane. Therefore as none of my motions are correct I planned on starting with DWPS. This is because at slower speeds 80bpm 16th notes I get a better clearance of the adjacent escaped string using DWPS than I do with my attempts at UWPS.

As I have bought the Yngwie seminar and the MAB seminar I thought I would work through them in order. DWPS then UWPS to learn 2WPS. Most of the rock/metal songs I like require 2WPS so I will need to work up both pick slants eventually. Currently both suck and don’t feel natural so I decided to start with DWPS.

Thanks again for your input @Troy it is always appreciated. Also I greatly enjoyed the interview with Andy Wood, this is an amazing place you have set up. If only it was here 15years ago when I started out playing :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: I don’t even listen to mandolin music but now after seeing Andy Wood I want to learn! Haha one step at a time though as I suck at guitar!!! Thanks again

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#22

The motion for plane picking is already there just you combine it with flexion, without that the plane motion is what remains.
On the other hand getting rid of habits can be a pain in the ass.
Just to make sure we talk abiut the same thing. With plane i just mean a straight line, you do that perfectly on the upstroke, the down stroke ends with a slight curve. The curve is unneeded for DWPS. Technically it should not cause any problems, but if yo say you feel some tension there’s one ingredient that could be removed.

I totally agree with Troy when he says there’s no need to focus on this specfic motion, just from watching, it looks good enough to stick with it, so if the other options feel worse or same, I’d say you still have this one as promising fallback.

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#23

My only observation here is that you’re learning DWPSing but from the camera angle it looks like your right forearm is pressed up against the body of the guitar, as would be an UWPSing positioning. I can see that you have a somewhat supinated stance with the right arm but perhaps if you tried adding a little wrist flexion you might achieve a more natural picking angle.

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#24

When you have “the right forearm” pressed against the guitar, that’s supination, and that is the most common downward pickslanting orientation. So what we are seeing here is what we would expect.

Forearm orientation is a complex topic. It is possible to play uwps lines with both supinated and pronated setups, and I know that you use a supinated approach. However downward pickslanting is more lopsided. Most players I can think of who play this way do it with a supinated setup. The Gypsy players like Joscho Stephan are classic examples, as are Mike Stern, Albert Lee, and others.

#25

There is no ‘order’ to the way we learn things. It’s unpredictable. My best advice is to forget about trying to do things in a sequence because that puts up roadblocks when you can’t get past a certain point. Massive time is wasted on trying to get past those roadblocks.

Instead, a better method is a kind of ‘strategic’ variety. Try lots of things, see which works best, do more of it, see if it improves. If not, change something and try again. If still no improvement, try another approach entirely. Rinse, repeat. The most important thing you can do is to get one of these movements to click, and click well. It really doesn’t matter which movement it is right now, and definitely not whether it is ‘uwps’, ‘dwps’, ‘2wps’, and so on.

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#26

I thought supinated meant an upward turning of the forearm…as in “supplication”?
What I think I meant to say was that even though his forearm is pressed up against the guitar it still looks like a slight supination since you can see the inner wrist. I was under the impression that a DWPing stance typically had a small space between the guitar and wrist due to a wrist flexion, which I wasn’t seeing here.

Maybe I’m mixing the terms up? Probably wouldn’t hurt for me to review the primer again!!!

#27

That’s correct! He’s doing that, so he’s supinated.

This is a good observation!

I see what you’re getting at. I think it was just the phrasing of what you originally wrote made it sound like you were saying supinated was not a ‘dwps orientation’. But I see you were referring to the air gap with the guitar body.

So, yes, many dwps players use a wrist flex, and that creates either a little or a lot of that ‘arched forearm’ type look depending on how much of it they use. It also affects the way the movement works. Those methods are all great and definitely on the list of things someone should experiment with when trying to do the “survey them all, choose what works” approach.

In general, I don’t think wrist flexion is technically necessary for downward pickslanting to work. Mike Stern doesn’t have much of it, for example. It just makes the movement flatter and more deviational without it, since you’re pretty much right up on that guitar at that point.

Anyway, good catch and yes something @weealf can experiment with if he likes.

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#28

Hello
In your first post you say

It sounds to me like you think you shouldn’t use forearm rotation as you dwps and now you try to do it with only wrist deviation and it feels tense.
As far as I know some forearm rotation is totally normal while dwps’ing, I do it too, combined with some wrist deviation and it feels relaxed to me.
Maybe your natural way of dwps’ing is with the forearm rotation included but now you are suppressing the forearm rotation?

#29

A post was merged into an existing topic: Avoiding Downstrokes