I would love to get some thoughts on Jimmy’s picking technique.
Originally I had thought he used trailing edge picking, but I’m not 100% certain about this. It does look to me like he’s holding the pick with his thumb, index and middle fingers.
Anyone on here have insight into his picking? His wrist seems to have a very distinctive movement, that I can’t explain.
Here is an OK video of his picking:
and here:
At a glance, his picking a lot of the time seems to be sort of similar to Ardeshir Farah, with a combination of forearm rotation and either one or two axis wrist movement. This can result in a kind of “pendulum swing” of the pick over the strings which might even be allowing Jimmy to full-time crosspick a lot of the time (would need a closer look to be sure).
There are places where he shifts into a faster gear, where there seems to be a bit more of a Vinnie Moore elbow thing happening, but it’s not a textbook Vinnie Moore thing, and he doesn’t seem to exhibit the kind of brachioradialis tension we associate with the “hyperspeed” elbow picking of guys like Rusty Cooley, or our forum-mate and CTC interview subject John Taylor. I don’t know if that means part of the “elbow” drive at the “speed burst” parts from Jimmy is partly coming from the shoulder (something I’ve experimented a bit with in the past), or if maybe the need for brachioradialis tension is reduced somewhat by squeezing the forearm against the front of the guitar (something that I think we’ve seen from Andy Wood).
But now I’m mostly curious whether he’s doing full-time crosspicking at moderate speeds.
Thanks for the reply and analysis.
Do you think he’s using two way pickslanting at all? If he was using crosspicking that would suggest he probably isn’t changing his picking angle, right?
This is a type of crosspicking technique, and it’s awesome. Jimmy is on our list to reach out to. We may already have - I don’t remember off the top of my head - and not everyone responds. But if he’ll sit down with us, we’ll sit down with him!
Edit: @Frylock , sorry, didn’t read. You nailed this description. And the comparison with Ardeshir’s technique is right on too. This was something I was looking forward to in meeting those guys, i.e. seeing how much crosspicking was actually happening in Ardeshir’s technique. Now that we’ve seen it up close, he doesn’t really use his movement that way. But it probably could be used that way if he wanted to.
Wow Troy!! I really hope Jimmy does get back to you, I have been trying to find videos so I can study his technique for a long time now. I remember this was one of the first concerts I ever saw of Jimmy, some nice picking close ups too now that I’m rewatching. I’d never heard anyone playing with a Strat tone like this before.
Woohoo! I didn’t feel sleighted by your pre-edit version, but thanks for the shoutout anyway. 
Super quick close up of Jimmy’s picking technique from this Premier Guitar video:
Resurrecting this thread; I had heard of Jimmy, but never really HEARD him if you know what I mean. Dang it, he’s really, really good!