I captured a snippet while practicing Tumeni notes today, to see what was going on.
It seems to be escaping at least, but is this 9-2 or like 10-2?
I have some work to do on technical side too, I see. This was recorded in 720p@240fps but youtube only shows it as 480p@60fps. Perhaps that’s automatically solved once I figure out how to get landscape mode 
Definitely record a longer video, and try to get some slow motion as well.
From what I saw it looks like you are escaping on both ends- how fast can you do this and does it feel smooth?
Also- where did you learn Tumeni Notes?- any tab or instructional you can provide?
You can slow down the video right in the YouTube player
I haven’t learned the whole song, but grabbed the tabs for the crosspicking part from here: Steve Morse Tab by Tumeni Notes | Songsterr Tabs with Rhythm
The crosspicking part is also one of the tab examples available with CTC’s Steve Morse interview.
Thanks for posting!
That’s the operative question! We can micromanage the video all we want, but for the time being I think only you can tell us. You know what the test is? Fast and sloppy!
Crank up the speed on this. If it’s super effortless up to and perhaps even beyond the tempo of Steve’s recording, but you’re hitting wrong notes or missing notes, that’s ok - you’re probably doing it right. If the hand feels jumpy and you reach a speed limit well below the recording, and/or you feel forearm tension, then you’re probably not making the movement correctly.
Keep in mind that you can be correct on some notes and not others. This can sometimes even fool you into thinking you’ve got the whole thing ironed out. Because you’ll be able to go faster, and it will take longer for the tension to set in. So you’re like, aha, I’ve got it. But when the movement is correct on all notes, you can go fast and feel nothing.
Ergo, film this again and go as fast as you can go, even if it’s a mess. If you experience any of the above, adjust your arm position and try again. Instead of trying to “fix” certain notes, what you’re looking for is the arm position that matches the wrist motion you are trying to make. This will remove the need for certain to use repetitive motion, and the whole thing will click. Albeit potentially sloppily - which again is fine for now.
I’ve been working on the roll on and off for a while, but have been making a push lately with daily practice. I take snippets like the ones below constantly, to get some diagnostic information while practicing.
Here’s the a ADG roll at 100 bpm slowed down:
At 120 bpm:
And at 150 bpm which is around my max on this right now:
I’m at my wits end now. I’ve spent around 40 minutes on this per day (probably around 8-10 minutes of actual playing), while reviewing constantly, for about a month now. I’ve been changing my degree of pronation, amount of ulnar deviation, moving the anchor point around (up down, left, right), I’ve been changing picks and even moving the guitar up and down and left and right. Alas, I’ve seem to have landed on a local maxima.
How do I progress from here? It seems to be at about 90%, but I can’t for the life of me get it to 100%. Even at the slow speed of 100 bpm it isn’t clean. The last pickstroke of the roll seems to be my achilles heel with a miss about 80-90% of the time!
Thanks for the update! And nice work on this. The motion looks smooth and flat. I’d rather see what you’re seeing, i.e. smooth motion with most of the notes correct, than jumpiness. You’ve surpassed the first and probably largest hurdle most people face with this.
The main thing I’m noticing is that your fingers are dragging a little. This can be an indication that the motion is not centered, and is too radial. In other words, the midpoint of the motion, let’s say, if you place your pick against the middle string of the three-string group, your thumb should almost be pointing straight in line with the radius. This means that the other fingers will not be pointing straight - they’ll be slightly ulnar. Or “rightward”, as I like to think of it.
This is your midpoint orientation. Your wrist will have a slight ulnar bend to it. If that gives you too much edge picking, then adjust your approach angle (i.e. arm position) until you get the edge picking you want. Don’t mess around with the thumb more than a slight bend either way. If you feel like you have to bend your thumb all the way around your index finger to get the edge picking you want, then you have no range of motion left if you ever need to adjust it.
When you play a downstroke on the highest string of the pattern, your wrist will now be even more ulnar. When you play an upstroke on the lowest string of the pattern, your fingers will approximately be straight in line with the ulna but not actually radial. In the supinated form of this motion that you’re using, it never goes radial. In fact, the actual range of motion of the wrist is not symmetrical - it is more ulnar than radial. So what you are doing here really is centering it, even though it may not look or feel like it.
When you do this, this should get the fingers out of the way. If it doesn’t, try using more grip exposure (visible pick) and using more of a fixed amount of wrist extension to set the attack depth. Just as an example of how these two variables work together, this is what more exposure and more extension, with the slightly more centered motion looks like:
You don’t have to use as much exposure and as much extension as I’m using here - this is just an example of how this works. This is locked in and doesn’t change. Motion takes place from that baseline. Now you can do a full extension movement and go as ulnar as you like and nothing hits the body. The pivot point is the watch band area of the wrist, or the center of the two eminences - depending on where you are anchoring.
While you are doing this, I would try a couple different grips - either more extended index finger (thumb more toward index pad), or less extended (thumb closer to inde middle knuckle), just to see if that does anything. For me, using a middle knuckle grip tends to shut off the finger motion, allowing me to focus more on getting the wrist motion correct.
Again, nice work here, this is really just a simple change to center the motion. In general, try not to put too much time into any of this. If after a few tries with tiny little tweaks you don’t see any demonstrable improvement when you film yourself, that usually means there is something bigger, simpler, and more fundamental that is not working and needs to be adjusted or moved differently. Feel free to post more frequently if that’s the case - the more time we can save you, the better.
FYI I dropped these in Final Cut and sped them back up 600%. It’s always helpful to check out the normal speed because that’s where the motion shape and the sound of the actual playing are most apparent. If you do any more, just link the normal speed version in addition to the slow.
Again, nice work here - keep it up.
It looks good, keep it up. For whatever reason, the 3 string roll was incredibly tough for me. I’m not sure why, but watching and emulating Troys form helped a lot. Centering everything, and using almost entirely wrist deviation for tracking, and basically resting my flat wrist on the strings.
Thank you so much for this incredible post; what a treasure trove of information! 
I’ll give this all a try and report back!
Will do!
Not a problem. One more thing I meant to mention - try not to hammer away on the same phrase / pattern all the time. Try the backwards roll, try the back and forth roll (upstroke and downstroke), and try some phrases that aren’t rolls at all. Like descending fours on two strings, or ascending fours, etc. Ideally you want a basket of stuff to work on, because it increases the odds that one of them will “work” for some random reason. That and the grip changes are the simplest “significant” things you can change to mix it up.
I’ve been working on this, as well as getting my wrist a bit more ulnar. I had to move my guitar up (and moving it to the left also helps) to be able to get the anchor in the right spot as well as change my approach angle a little. I’m sticking to one guitar while practicing these rolls and this one has a strat type bridge. It was impossible to play on the low E and A string with that anchor point and an ulnar bend previously without moving off the bridge completely.
I’ve taken a look at some concert photo of Andy Wood, where he’s standing, and he has the guitar lower, further to the right (If I sit down the guitar would land between my legs, whereas it would land on his right leg AFAICT). I’m not sure how that works out to be playable. I’m 6’2’ so maybe our proportions are quite different.
In any event, the shots below look better to me, it still feels relaxed, even if this new setup is a bit unfamiliar and therefore feels slightly awkward.
I can’t reproduce this reliably yet, it still takes some fumbling to find it. Should I just burn this in, and then maybe that gets me some flexibility so I can move the guitar left/right/up/down later on? If not, then I suppose I can live with the ‘jazz guy’ look
I would’ve recorded a little longer snippets, but I introduced a bug in the magnet app causing changes to the duration setting to not get sent to the phone 
Normal speed:
Slowed down:
Copied Andy’s setup with the guitar lower and to the left.
Think I get it now:
And slow:
Had a hard time replicating this with other pick grips (e.g. Andy’s grip), but I suppose that might come later.
Hi! I’m not really following the concern about on the guitar height and the anchoring — not that it’s not a legitimate concern, just that I’m a little dense sometimes! Generally speaking, wrist motion is unaffected by the direction you point your arm. Obviously things like edge picking are affected by approach angle so you may not like what you end up with at certain strap lengths, but it shouldn’t stop the motion from working correctly.
You can also have any anchoring you want, whether it’s on the strings or the body, and the motion still works. It’s good to learn to do it both ways because playing on the low strings often means you move to the body. It’s also useful to learn to leave a little gap between the arm and the body, which I see that you’re doing. This way there’s not as much difference between these different anchor points.
My main concern is that the motion looks super flat - perhaps too flat. I think you can hear some buzzing as the pick is hitting unwanted strings in the more recent clip you’ve posted. It’s ok to clear the strings by some margin, and in fact you will need to be able to do this to get some pick on the string and play louder. Here’s a visual reference for how much pick you can get on the strings for a solid-sounding contact, and how much you can clear them so there is less buzzing / swiping, and still be relatively speedy and smooth:
In fact, smooth, fast, and loud is a good litmus test of whether you are really hitting each note individually. The strings will vibrate more and you will be more likely to hit them if you are not getting enough clearance. If you can do those three things together, there is a better chance the motion is correct. If one of them is missing, something may be wrong.
Moving forward, I would try to broaden the variety of things you tool around with rather than just hammering these roll patterns all the time. There comes a point where something is wrong, you don’t know what it is, and you can’t think of anything to do differently on the phrases you are working on. Ergo you can’t learn anything more from those phrases right now. Try incorporating other phrases that are not specifically roll patterns, and include a mix of intervals that move around across the strings in a single position. Anything arpeggiated, or that mixes arpeggios and stepwise motion, can work. Seventh arpeggios are cool since they usually map out to 1 or 2 notes on a string. I like the add2 sound, which you can hear in the example above. Lots of jazz and bluegrass lines fit this description as well. Molly has lots of cool examples you can use:
This wasn’t obvious to me and was why I was moving the guitar around the other day. I was trying to get the ulnar bend in the wrist with the anchor point on the bridge / strings but couldn’t understand how I could manage to play on the low strings doing that! I obviously had a hard time centering the motion… The video I posted today is the only one with the right anchor point, I think. It must be. It felt great
Do I aim for louder to achieve this?
Thanks for the examples. I have been noodling with some other stuff. Some wide arpeggios, Tumeni notes and the glass prison arpeggios. The reason I keep posting the roll is that it’s easy on the left hand and there’s no tracking needed. I’ll try to get some of the other stuff up to speed!
Thanks again for your help on this. I didn’t grow up as the kid that always got picked last, but when it comes to guitar my every instinct is wrong and I have to fight for every inch.
Hopefully this conversation will benefit someone equally challenged and stubborn 
Sure, you can try that. You don’t need to kill it with force, that can feel unnatural. But just as an occasional test, you should be able to get things clearly audible on an unplugged electric from across the room, and loud enough on acoustic that you’d have to sing pretty loudly to be heard over it.
Figured I’d post on update. Still working on this daily. I’ve found something that I think is correct. I’m at the stage where it’s a bit of trial and error to get it. My old form wasn’t ‘flextending’ enough, so I’ve basically started from scratch since the last post. At least that’s what it felt like, trying to get the reverse-dartthrower motion going 
Fast:
Slow:
When I got it, I turned on the metronome to see how far I could get this and I could do this at 140 bpm. At 150 bpm it still felt effortless but fell apart pretty badly otherwise.
I was noodling around at about 120 bpm probably, but going from there to 140 was trivial. Is that how it goes all the way up to 180 or whatever? You just get better at maintaining the right form at speed, and centering the motion, and more speed just unlocks?
Hi! This looks good. Good idea to branch out beyond just the roll pattern. Re: “unlocking speed”, you should be able to move at whatever tempo already. It’s more about how do you become accurate at those speeds. I think that’s what you’re asking, just clarifying!
The short answer is phrase variety I think is the way. Finding some phrase you can already do at the goal tempo, right now, where at least some of the notes / motions are already correct. Doesn’t have to be all the notes, just some of them. Then do more of those motions.
So start thinking of musical ideas. What lines do you really want to play? Are there lines that aren’t strictly arpeggiated or scalar, but a mix of intervals? Lots of jazz lines that move around in a position are good for this, since you’ll find a mix of one-, two-, three-, and four-note-per-string lines. Or country. Or metal. Whatever your preferred style is.
You can’t really predict when and why a previously inaccurate line becomes accurate, but time and variety, and constantly searching for stuff that’s working already, and doing more of it, is what works for me.