It was the mother f*****g shirt the entire time

Playing Technique
#1

So… There I am… Running YingYang sixes on one string with DSX then with USX. The DSX is fine, and the USX is making some nice progress. I decide to do some traveling and I open up the Metronomic Rock seminar and click on the “Gilbert Sixes Loop.” I run it a bunch of times, I’m starting to get a feel for it. Then decide I try “YingYang Sixes” traveling but I want to be able to switch back and forth between the two with a hotkey instead of my mouse so I don’t have to stop picking. Then I see this:

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It doesn’t occur to me right away, but it damn sure does when I watch Tommaso do it. His forearm slides across the body just a bit. And I think “Wait? That’s allowed?” And I watch it again just to make sure. Yep. Then I watch Troy’s USX version. Son of a… He kinda does it too. But why didn’t I know that? Why couldn’t I see that before?"

BECAUSE TROY WEARS A FREAKING DARK LONG SLEEVE AND PLAYS A DARK GUITAR!!!

But not Tommaso. No! He was nice enough to wear a short sleeve shirt so you can see the arm slide across the body a bit. Change the name of this site to TommasoWearsShortSleevesWhenPicking.com! This is what it took to finally have a breakthrough? What kinda sh–

In all seriousness, I think this was the breakthrough I’ve been needing. It know it’s stupid for it to have been something so damn simple, but if that’s what it took, than that’s what it took. I was using too much wrist to move across the strings. I used a bit of slide, but not in a way that was actually helpful. More like the wrist adjustments made me slide. I’m also stubborn as hell and thought it had to be something much bigger.

The kicker was that I can travel the strings in DSX with mostly wrist. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. But I can’t do that with USX. I need to incorporate the slide. I was over-correcting, so to speak, my wrist when I’d switch strings in USX. The angle would change just enough to make far more difficult than it needed to be.

When I stared down at my picking hand doing those runs, I noticed that when using the slide, my hand actually looks like it’s supposed to look. It’s that bit early on in the PSP where the motion in the air is clean but when you do the same motion on the guitar, it’s not the same. The DSX runs also helped point that out. That motion is so natural to me that seeing what my hand looked like from string to string, it’s almost like the guitar is moving, but the hand stays the same. Figuring that out, I ran USX lines and noticed that they weren’t at all. I don’t think that kind of thing can be picked up on without a Magnet or staring straight down at it.

My USX is feeling far better than it ever has. Still a long way to go, but I at least I know what I’ve been doing wrong. Or rather, what I should have been thinking about this entire time…

That it’s all about the mother f******g shirt!!

4 Likes
#2

I am in favour of this change :rofl:

If I understand your concern correctly — are you asking if it is necessary to move the arm a little to do “string tracking” (i.e. basically making sure the pick is in a good position to play the string of interest?).

I think that depends on the setup, anatomy of the player etc. There are some setups that allow “wrist-only” (or “wrist-mostly”) tracking for most people, like this “ergonomic mouse form” demonstrated by Troy: Chapter 4 – Testing Range Of Motion – Cracking the Code

In other setups (like the one I use in Metronomic Rock), tracking is facilitated by repositioning the forearm ever so slightly, as you correctly pointed out.

In practice however, you want this to happen fairly automatically, without the need to consciously control all variables. Your main concern will be to stay comfortable and produce a good sound.

I’m sure we’ll sort out these aspects as well in your upcoming TCs!

2 Likes
#3

Ha, welcome to the club pal! For some reason I had the idea that the hand should stay in one place, just moving slightly toward the neck for muting. Out of all the great ideas to be found at this site I think the key one is “question your preconcieved ideas.”

For me it wasn’t actually sseing someone use arm-tracking, it was seeing Troy’s very wide range-of-motion with the pick, I always thought that was a deal-breaker and it led me to question everything.

As for renaming the site, may I suggest “Are You F******g Kidding Me?!”

1 Like
#4

I can’t remember which video it’s in, but somewhere Troy mocks himself for his choice to use long sleeves in those lessons lol! Seeing what the arm is doing provides a lot of insight.

Which is one of my most favorite things about Troy’s work in general - he never considers it “done”. He’s always searching for more examples, more explanations, and even circling back to his own understandings that have evolved over time. Namely, wrist playing.

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#5

Haha I remember this also! I can’t remember which video or lesson it was in but it gave me a good laugh at the time :sweat_smile:

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#6

Perhaps putting stickers on the forarm should be a requirement of ctc lol

Honestly you can get those suits videos game developers use to track motion with the ping pong balls, Can we see troy in lycra? Might get more views lol

2 Likes
#7

My concern, and eventually my 'DING" moment was, first, actually doing the pure DSX motion that YOU use when traveling. The second was realizing that I didn’t use DSX at all when I traveled. Seeing what your hand was doing, then “copying” it steered me in that direction. My hand never did that when I would go up and down the strings. I think the thread that had some of the Death Metal clips also helped form my conclusion.

The reason for that is that my absolute fastest balls out motion isn’t usable for anything I’d ever want to do, and was really only usable for what I did with my last band. When we’d play live, the tempos would get pushed so far that I adapted a DSX to keep up with the riffs I wrote at much slower tempos. We weren’t Death Metal but we’d hit those speeds. We were in the high 100s, low 200s when writing songs and then all hell would break loose live and we’d hit these ridiculous speeds. We recorded a glorified demo (which I’m hunting down now to post here) and a lot of that was recorded at those speeds. I think that the clip of someone’s wife picking for the first time and eventually figuring it out is sort of how I developed that motion. I didn’t have a choice at the time. My drummer was self-taught, just as I was, and our music was just pure rage. He had a lot of early Dave Lombardo influence and since he wasn’t “metronome schooled” he’d push it as much as he could and I had to figure out how to keep up. That’s where that motion came from.

But that wasn’t how I played in real life. The fastest I would ever play was whatever speed the fastest Petrucci lick from the 90s was. At that point, I just wanted to learn how to actually play music, so my speed took a back seat aside from a few burst-licks here and there. I don’t know exactly what my motion was during that time, but wasn’t DSX or USX. Which means it was probably DBX? I really have no idea. There was no method to that stuff before y’all came around. The only things I knew about my picking at that time was that my rhythm/riffage was faster than anything I ever did in a solo. By far.

I think we’d have caught on if I filmed the right stuff to begin with. I posted that I was concerned about that in my TC, but what was suggested steered me in the right direction anyway, so it probably wouldn’t have mattered. At least for the first step. Once we got to the traveling part, I think it would’ve been seen by y’all and we probably would have gotten to where I got to last night. The thing I didn’t film was playing mutli-string lines at a reasonable speed with my most relaxed motion. The main ones I posted were my crappy attempt at USX and my fastest DSX tremolo, and without taking into consideration why I used that DSX motion to begin with. I was trying to recreate that motion in USX and it just wasn’t working. The few times it seemed like it might, my muting was gone and I’d really rather not lose that.

It’s an awesome breakthrough that I would have never had if I didn’t drive on all of these side streets to get there.

1 Like
#8

Troy in Lycra, with 80s Richard Simmons video production aesthetic.
:rofl:

2 Likes
#9

That might make the subscription price double…. Might be worth it though, lol

3 Likes
#10

Maybe he wears long sleevs so his for arm doesnt stick to guitar body? Just a guess but I’ve gigged in summer time out doors and I obtained a tennis players wrist sweat band for just this reason, I’ve also played with a bandanna tied around my wrist. At the least youll sweat all ove ryour guitar body at the most it will slow you down because your pick hand wrist for arm area sticks to the guitar body. I dunno just thoughts…also Ive seen pro players on stage with wrist bands etc. so theres something to this I think.