I’m having trouble trying to get smooth up-pick escape and down-ward escape picking motions. The motion doesn’t feel smooth to me and when i try to “floor it”, I just end up locking my wrist and moving my forearm minutely. Any help would be appreciated!
Regular speed video:
Slo-mo video:
First off, welcome to ctc!
In my experience, stiffness occurs because the player is uncomfortable with the speed they’re trying to play at.
As boring/lazy as this answer sounds, your best bet would be to slow things down to a metronome and play up from there as the stiffness decreases. As you become more comfortable playing at higher speeds, forearm stiffness may almost entirely become wrist action (that’s how it happened with me at least).
Anyway, best of luck man \m/ keep shredding
thanks bro! I’ll give that a try. I’m just stumped because from my understanding my technique LOOKS pretty alright. I just can’t figure out why it feels awkward. It’s not the pick slant, it’s the motion itself that just feels alien to me
Yes, the motion does look a bit jerky. Looking at the slow motion video, one thing stands out to me. It seems your pick snags the string on the upstroke, on both the USX and DSX “forms”. There is much more string displacement on the upstrokes because of this. In other words, the pick is not perpendicular to the trajectory and gets stuck on the string on its way up.
If I were you I would try different pick grips, even a different pick, to see if this makes it a bit smoother. You could try a lighter grip as well. Keep mixing it up and try different things!
I don’t know. Doesn’t stiffness mean that the player has not found the right motion? Maybe that’s just another way of saying that the player is uncomfortable with the speed they’re trying to play at, though! 
But I don’t agree with slowing things down to solve the issue. How will you learn the right motion for speed when playing slowly? It’s like trying to learn how to run by walking.
Im convinced that both is true.
You surely cannnot judge a motion without trying it at the desired speed. But I also think that the correct coordination of the necessary muscles at the desired speed is not somethnig you just do out of the box.
So I would recommend tinkering with the motion at short bursts. always with “stay relaxed” in mind to find something that seems to have the potential needed and then going slower, but not too much. There you make sure to replicate the movement you found at higher speeds as close as you can and let your mind become accustomed to the movement and the muscle activation frequencies.
In my case I seem to have to ramp up new found motions, because if I just floor it I seem to be unable to avoid to fall back to the motion that is very hardwired in my CNS through years or even decades of execution.
Thomas
I’m going to fiddle with some positions a bit more and then get back to you guys. I used to play thumb pad to finger pad pick grip with a largely supinated arm and my pinky anchored on the e string/pickup. However, it found it was very limiting and I can’t do two way pick slanting with it, so i switched techniques. Now I’m having trouble with the coordination of the movements
I think these are great starting points! I’ll add only a couple of comments to the nice suggestions of others: