Just isn't "clicking" for me yet

Technique Critique
#12

My first smooth motion was about 10-11 months ago…and it has changed over that time without thinking too much about it. It started with a pronated DSX (wrist only) then moved to a slight supinated (almost central) DSX with more elbow and some wrist (this was a conscious effort)…then USX became a usable motion when I didn’t use elbow and just wrist (didn’t think too much about this)…recently forearm rotation is just starting to ‘bud’ on the bass strings…now I don’t know what my primary is except I’ve embraced just trying to make things smooth without thinking about it.

My point - you are not necessarily tied to any one motion (in my experience)…just knowing the concepts in the primer can make you conscious of them…which can open the door for you experimenting with them when the music calls for it.

Capitalize on anything that is working at the moment and build your go-to phrases. You may collect more motions as you continue to develop.

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#13

Was your first smooth motion “discovered” following the Pickslanting Primer or was this something you’d developed yourself (or did it just one day “click”…as I hear a lot of lucky people describe)?

A broader question to everyone: is finding a smooth motion, regardless of mechanic, like finding a needle in a haystack? I’m trying to understand if finding a smooth motion is elusive (but replicating it is easy once you do) OR if finding a smooth motion is easy but replicating it consistently is the hard part.

#14

Completely agree! One thing that’s been surprising to me is how self-conscious I now am when I’m picking guitar strings. I’m thinking a lot more about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. My wife says I’m probably over-thinking these things, as I tend to do.

And I can also say that since starting my study of the Pickslanting Primer, my guitar playing has gotten worse. A lot worse.

But I see this as a good sign. A (hopefully) step backwards before a giant leap forwards? I’ve no doubt that string hopping is prevalent in my technique. Now that I know what it is and am trying to stop it, my playing is worse. Does that make any sense?

Keep in mind that I’m not playing any tempos where it should matter if I’m string hopping or not!

#15

It was discovered following the pickslanting primer - I was a dedicated string hopper prior. Did it ‘just click’? Yes and no - it took me weeks (maybe a month) to get the motion in a continuous tremolo stream…mainly because I didn’t know what it felt like and a new pick grip/arm set up felt awkward.

Once I did get the motion…it kind of came and went. Like I got it for a few minutes then lost it for a few days. Then it came back…lost it…came back and stuck…basically.

Once it stuck, I was overjoyed however…my pick strokes were very light on the strings…it didn’t match the volume of my melodic playing enough to even use as a tremolo…this took months make more confident and to dig in more.

Make no mistake - for me at least - eventhough you can sum up this alternate picking thing as ‘start at speed and experiment until it clicks’ is a really summed up order of operations. At the end of the day I’ve fought like hell to get a usable, fast picking motion…it just didn’t involved slowly inching up the metronome while no considering form - which what I had done for 30 years.

If was to advise myself 1 year ago I’d say use this forum’s technique critique without any shame or shyness. The expertise here is second to nothing else out there. It will fast track you. I posted one critique and it set me up to change my arm ever so slightly…which set me up to get both USX and DSX into some form of usable.

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#16

Absolutely true

I think step 1 for @Rivethead is to find a fast motion. He’s already gotten started with the technique critique, we just need a better camera angle and some faster picking examples.

For the angle, I resorted to enlisting the help of a beloved and patient family member to hold the phone at a good angle. Troy told me to bypass this I could buy a $10 phone holder and use that with a regular camera tripod and while I can’t get as closeup, it’s enough for a good critique angle. Yeah it costs a little $ up front, but so do guitar lessons and this is a much better investment.

For the speed…I feel your pain like you’re in a catch 22 with the chicken/egg analogy. But, there’s got to be some fast movement that your hands can already do (scrambling eggs, knocking on a door, beating your chest to break a cough up, shaking a bottle of something that says “shake well before using” etc.) that you can transform into a picking mechanic. It’s not going to feel normal (yet), but I bet you’ve got something in you that you can use to tremolo at 150 already :slight_smile:

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#17

Same here re. the expertise and fast tracking. @Rivethead I don’t know if my thread in technique critique might help - I was in a similar position to you. In particular see the part about winging it and also the table tapping part.

Getting a good video showing a down the neck view will be helpful as well - I did this without a magnet or any other hardware - i just tremolo picked the open string whilst holding my iPhone with the other hand.

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#18

Thanks for the detailed reply!

Your experience on finding and ultimately retaining a useable motion was super helpful. Because I have had moments where the speed suddenly increases and resistance seems to disappear. But they go away pretty quickly and I cannot reproduce them - nor figure out what I was doing to cause them!

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#19

Yes, this thread has definitely helped me understand that I need to just search for a fast motion first, video tape it, and get it validated that that motion is producing the smoothness or “feel” that I should be trying to get with all the motions.

And I need to improve the quality of my videos if I hope to get any feedback from them!

Regarding fast motion…the only motion that’s ever got me into the shred motion is elbow motion. But it just feels so rigid and uncontrollable I can’t see how that could be a regular, useable motion. Yes, it gets me to the speed zone and maybe that’s enough to get the feel…

#20

Thanks! I will take a closer look at your thread. I do recall that Troy commented on how you produced such good down-the-neck video without a homemade magnet. I’ll have to give that a try too.

#21

I feel you here…I felt the same way when Troy advised me to just go all out with an elbow motion. It felt too fast for me and I couldn’t fathom it being usable. Check this out (first clip labeled tremolo only):

I still haven’t tamed it (getting closer though!), but it’s something I’m refining and what’s really important is that it’s fast and smooth. The last day or so, prompted from your very thread, I felt compelled to try some rotational USX stuff out. That really is the end game for me. I probably should post a video to make sure I’m not wrong again lol! But the ‘feeling’ I get when I’m gunning that fast elbow tremolo is what I think I can get going in my attempts at this rotational USX thing now. If I never would have gone through procedure of just going with the elbow, I wouldn’t really know what smoothness felt like at the fast speeds. In other words, knowing what fast/smooth feels is worth its weight in gold if you’ve never felt it before. It will transfer.

One thing last thing I’d mention about an elbow mechanic is that if you feel tensed up/fatigued and you’re only at the 150 bpm range, just try lightening up on your pick grip, and BTW experiment with some different pick grips too. This mechanic can have some tension when it’s all out. This doesn’t look tension free to me:

It is still controlled though. And even still, this is much faster than you or I will be playing most likely :slight_smile: So we mortals can manage this motion at ‘our’ speeds tension free, no problem.

Sorry for the TLDR quality of…everything I write. Try out elbow if you’ve seen some speed with it! Just some short bursts, tweaking the variables until it feels like you can play an even tremolo with it. I’d target 150 - 170 bmp. Anything less than this runs you the risk of a motion that isn’t efficient.

#22

Thanks for the response! Your tremolo video is the motion that I’ve had the most success with too. Only difference is that I seem to go faster/smoother when I use a trigger grip. I will try to get some of video of that.

With the Rusty Cooley video…it looks to me like he’s actually blending wrist and elbow motions. I could be wrong. But that’s interesting - I hadn’t seen that video before.

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#23

This is great to hear!!! In my critique video I just happened to be doing the side pad grip, since that’s what I’ve always used… I’ve since experimented with a trigger grip – Rusty is using a trigger grip I think. Sometimes it feels ok to me, sometimes I feel like I relinquish control. At the end of the day, it’s probably personal. The fact that you’re doing a new motion and already playing with variables and ‘feeling’ different results should be very encouraging to you. Keep up the great work my friend!

Hmmm interesting. I watched the fast parts in the ‘onlooker’ (i.e. non-magnet) view in super slow-mo and it does look like his wrist has a little wiggle at times. Neat. Either way, definitely elbow is what’s driving this speed

#24

Hey Rivethead, I thought I’d share my homemade magnet with you:

DIY_magnet
DIY_magnet1456×2101 642 KB

You can find the clamp and the 3M velcro strips at any decent hardware store. The piece of wood is a section of a paint stirring stick and everything is held together with Gorilla Glue(I added a little to the adhesive backs of the velcro strips too just to be a little extra careful). The trickiest thing about it as it’s currently designed is finding the sweet spot in terms of tightening the clamp to the neck. This is due to the small amount of surface contact on the red circular part of the clamp along with the fact that tightening it involves rotation and that means that when it starts to contact the neck but isn’t yet tight you have to keep rotating and that can cause it to move. Ya gotta wannit! If you can find a clamp that doesn’t rely on a rotational mechanic to tighten you might be better off. Hope that helps!

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#25

This is a misunderstanding. You can certainly use only elbow, or wrist. Forearm gets a little tricky but there are examples of strictly forearm players as well. Of course, you sometimes need to use some other joint to get string tracking.

#26

Lots of great responses in the thread. I’d just like to add that the motions in your two videos look more or less identical. In other words, the change in grip does not seem to change the motion. And since you’re looking for a faster, smoother motion, you need to change something else! Try different anchor points, different angles, different picks and so on until you find something that works.

Also, and this may have been mentioned already, I know you said that your goal is to develop a fluid wrist motion. But don’t close the door on the other motions just yet! Chances are you already have a fast, smooth motion that you can use to get some fast phrases going. This will at least give you a feel for fast playing. You can always go back and work on wrist only if you want to.

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#27

That’s really clever! Thanks for sharing. I’ve got some ideas I’m going to try as well.

#28

I came to similar conclusion last night. I realized that yes - I’ve been trying this stuff for weeks but really just keep doing the SAME thing every night and hoping for a different conclusion. That’s madness.

So this weekend I’m going to try a different pick and I’m also going to stand up and use various strap lengths (so the guitar will hang at different levels).

The thing that made me realize this is: tension. Tension is our body’s way of saying: “this isn’t working”. I’ve spent too much time trying to just brute force my way through tension. :grimacing:

Thanks for your reply!

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#29

Hey @Rivethead, I’m a bit late to the party and I see you have got many good replies already!

At the risk of repeating what has already been said, from the two videos you posted it’s hard to tell whether you are doing USX correctly. This is because the speed is low enough that you coulg get away with inefficient motions, and also because the filming angle doesn’t let us see very well the interaction between pick & strings.

I see @joebegly already gave you a link to the filming instructions, so that bit is sorted :slight_smile:

The most logical next step is to record a tremolo on a single string with a “down the strings” perspective, possibly both at real speed and in slow motion (if your phone does it). Just pick a single note fast for a few seconds, and we’ll take a look!

#30

Thanks for the reply! I plan to do this - hopefully this weekend. I’ve been messing around with home-made magnet ideas and I think I’ve come up with something that will work. It involves a Go-Pro, a large rubber band (originally zip ties) and a brass nut…

For everyone following this thread, I continue to test and explore wrist motions. Still haven’t found “it” yet, but I’m not discouraged. I feel like I’m making progress. A few things I’ve learned:

  1. Picks wear down. :grin: I tried some wrist motions with various picks I had on hand, just to see if different picks would help me unlock a motion. When I went back to my trusty Jazz III, I picked up a NEW one rather than the one I had been using for…well so long I can’t remember. And that (a new pick) made a big difference in the “feel” of my picking/motions.

  2. Wrist motions that were originally awkward aren’t so awkward anymore. I still haven’t found a wrist motion that gets me into the shred zone but I feel like I’m getting closer. But…

  3. Any amount of supination instantly slows me down. I think this is because I have a natural tendency to want to use elbow motion and a DSX path. The moment I rotate my forearm for downward pickslant…it feels like slamming on the brakes. Don’t know if that’s physical, mental, or both.

  4. The only motions that have allowed me into the shred zone are an elbow motion with DSX path (using trigger grip…I can’t quit get there with my usual side-pad grip) and, one time, a forearm rotation/gypsy thing with the wrist flexed to the max and tons of edge picking)

  5. I still don’t understand how finding a fast motion, any motion, is the first step in developing a usable USX wrist motion…the whole “filling in a crossword puzzle” analogy.

I know the above isn’t so helpful without video. I hope capture down-the-strings views of the motions I can do as well as my current USX wrist motion (which I feel like is better and faster than what I’m doing in the videos I previously posted).

Regardless, I want to thank everyone again for all of your advice and support within this thread and others…

#31

Here is a down-the-strings view of my most comfortable picking position (side-pad):

I know this isn’t shred speed. My goal is to make it to shred speed with this grip. I’m not sure if this video helps at all, but it was a good trial to see if my homemade magnet would work. If you see anything worthy of a comment from this, please share.

And here’s the same video, trigger grip with me getting to what I think might be shred zone. This is elbow motion, but people have asked if I can do any fast motion…well here’s what I can do:

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can offer. I feel like my next steps are to continue searching for a fast motion and trying to video tape it if/when I find something.

Slightly Ulnarized picking