Maximal's technique critique - Picking medium speed riffs

[Maximal]

Hi everyone,

So although I am always fascinated by super fast lead playing, I got kind of stuck and super frustrated some months back and nearly quit playing for a few weeks. When I started again, I tried to get away from all the alternate picking lead playing and learn some more rhythm stuff and some songs in their entirety and I have to say I am having so much fun with it. But obviously, on guitar, you can never completely ignore alternate picking so I started to incorporate some of the easier 2nps pentatonic dwps runs into my practice and I think for the first time ever I got this whole escaping the strings thing. However, this also made me realize how much of my playing is based around string hopping and how inconsistent it is compared to proper technique. Now, for the largest part, I am not trying to melt faces with sextuplets at 130bpm but I am more interested in 16th notes rhythm parts at medium tempos (<= 130bpm) as they appear all over the place in modern metal.
For example:

INTERVALS - AARON MARSHALL // MATA HARI // GUITAR PLAYTHROUGH

Periphery - Marigold (Guitar Playthrough)

(sorry, I had to merge the tabs into 1 image)

I can sort of play this stuff at the original tempo but it’s just not very consistent so I’d like to switch to a more reliable technique. Now I didn’t find too much information anywhere about riff playing, but as this is quite a lot of 1nps stuff I probably need some sort of cross picking, but from what I can tell there seem to be a lot of variations to this and I don’t really know which of all those amazing cross pickers I should try to mimic. it would be great to get some first-hand experiences from other players who changed their ‘bread and butter’ picking technique and how long it took them. Did this require you to relearn most of your old material with the new technique or does this happen sort of automatically? And did this replace string hopping completely or do you still do it up to a certain tempo (like Eric Johnson)?

Thanks for your help

[hamsterman]

it would be great to get some first-hand experiences from other players who changed their ‘bread and butter’ picking technique and how long it took them. Did this require you to relearn most of your old material with the new technique or does this happen sort of automatically? And did this replace string hopping completely or do you still do it up to a certain tempo (like Eric Johnson)?

That is me. I am one of the few here that completely changed my form, and abandon all forms of pick-slanting. I am now a an ultra-orthodox double-escaper.

As far as time needed… give yourself some time… I’d say at least a few months. I started about 2 years ago… and I’m still not finished… but I feel like I’m getting close. Before starting I was fast but unreliable, and frustrated with picking in general. I’m much happier now with my guitar playing.

As far as techniques… there are lots of them. Troy goes over pure wrist, and forearm-rotation-wrist.
I use finger/thumb/wrist/forearm. Whatever you choose, just make sure that you are double-escaping… and that it feels smooth and flowing.

As far as ‘relearning’ playing old songs. Not necessarily… but the key is to get to a point where everything becomes automatic… and where pick-direction becomes irrelevant… and you can play Cliffs of Dover starting on an upstroke or a downstroke… and it won’t make a difference. But that’s a bit of a long-term goal of course.

One thing I would say is that you may find that like many others… you still need to use pick-slanting along with X-picking, and that’s fine. Andy Wood does that, Martin Miller as well. But if you make the decision to abandon slanting all-together like I did… it may benefit you to do it during a time when you don’t have to perform… where you can kinda retrain yourself, without putting yourself in a position that might cause you to go back to your old habits. But once you get past that hump… your good to go.

As far as string-hopping, do you mean inefficient ‘bouncing’? if so… once you learn a nice-smooth X-picking form, bouncing goes away by itself.

[Maximal]

Thank’s a lot for your reply, it is really helpful to hear that some other people were frustrated and got things sorted out. I am not really trying to abandon pick slanting, but I think that I have never done a lot of pick slanting in the first place, as far as I can tell it never developed naturally and I am just picking up dwps and noticing how easy string changes can be. But dwps feels like a pretty simple thing that you can explain in 5 minutes, whereas cross picking seems so intimitading. I just rewatched the martin miller episode on youtube and those additional finger movements are kind of complex.

I just recorded myself playing the second picking pattern from my first post (had to play it with open strings as the left hand was holding my phone but the movement should be the same). As you can see it super inconsistent, I hit strings I don’t want to hit and it seems to be all over the place. I am not even sure what my motion mechanic is here, I think I mostly play with a rotational mechanic but there seem to be some kind of wrist movement, especially for the string skipps. And sorry for no audio, my phone can not record slow-mo with audio.

Riff thingy

Is there any obvious solution to this that is kind of close to my hand position?

Edit:
Normal speed from a different angle with sound, be warned it’s rough to say the least

Marigold

And the first thing:

Mata Hari

[hamsterman]

Troy could help you a bit more than I could at identifying specific issues… but it appears like you have some bouncing going on… which is pretty normal for players that are starting on X-picking.

Removing the bouncing involves a bit of analysis… finding out what mechanic is causing the bounce. It might be that you are using the same wrist motion in two different directions on one stroke.

Think of it like a golf swing… where multiple mechanics come-together or blend-in to create a curved path. So try different mechanical combinations until you feel like you have something sorta like this.

[Maximal]

So I looked at my slow mo again and yes, it seems to be way too jumpy.
But I think it makes sense to start from the very beginning to get a feel for what correct, efficient picking even feels like so I went pack to chapter 1: DWPS and motion mechanics.

I recorded 2 short clips of 2s and 6s. I really don’t like 2s, they made me realize how bad I was since I saw that pentatonic exercise in Troy Stetinas Lead Mechanics for the first time. To be honest, I feel like I am more in control now, but my whole picking system is still so rigid. I tried to increase the size of my picking movements but I can’t get it to Troy’s unstoppable force level. And then we also have 6s, basically with the same problem: it just doesn’t feel very good and I don’t think I could speed it up to 200bpm. And also, which motion mechanic am I using? For the 2s I definitely think I am using a rotation to move the pick up and down and then wrist movement after escaping to change the center of rotation for string changes. But for the 6s? It still feels like rotation but I couldn’t tell for sure and there’s arm movement at the very end, probably as the wrist can not/doesn’t want to strech that far up.

I just resubscribed to mim and I’ll check out the motion mechanics primer but if somebody has a clue what’s going on here, feel free to tell me.

Thanks,
Max

[element0s]

It’ll be easier to go over your technique if your camera shot is “down the strings” similar to what Troy does in his videos.

For what it’s worth, I’m an UWPS guy currently working on a forearm-based DWPS form similar to Troy and Teemu for classic Heavy Metal rhythm guitar (and also adjusting my UWPS form to a more subtle position). I’ve been working on it off and on for about a year but my band tours and plays a lot so I’ve had to put it on hold to focus on other stuff. However we’ve got a 4-month break from gigs after tonight so I’m going to be putting in more work during that time and hopefully I’ll have more progress.

I would say that I’m currently at the “flip-flopping” stage, meaning that I can sorta do the motion here and there but my old playing habits get in the way about 75% of the time and it can be pretty demoralizing when you look at your short-term growth. The hardest part has been switching to larger forearm motions when I’m used to much smaller finger/wrist stuff. It’s a confidence thing I suspect. My brain is convinced that smaller, tense motions will be more accurate and always wants to revert to that style of playing.

Best of luck!

[Maximal]

I bet it’s super hard to develop new motions while maintaining the ability to play all the songs you learned with your old mechanic over years without ending in a weird in-between state. But I’m sure with the right form of practice you’ll be able to get to a stable state within those 4 months, so have fun .

And yes this whole larger motion thing is really, really weird, especially when entire youtube has been telling you for years that you should use small motions. I noticed that I was literally starting my downstroke on the string in a rest-stroke position which I suspect that causes 2 of my big problems, one being that sometimes I simply get stuck doing alternate picking and second escaping the strings in dwps as this requires me to extend my picking motion beyond this neutral position. Combining this with a too tight resting position on the bridge and therefore insufficient arm/shoulder tracking makes clear why I never got around descending licks that go over more than 3 strings as this would require some serious wrist over-ulnar-deviation with wrist only-tracking.

And I have to say I absolutely love the picking motion livestream, in my opinion this is probably the most important video regarding alternate picking. I enjoyed every second of it and recognized quite a few similar mechanics in my playing.

So I tried to play some 4s with dwps and mostly wrist deviation from a more magnet-like camera angle. I tried to keep the neutral wrist position in the air above the string instead of on the string and light resting on the bridge. This feels a a lot less stable than what I am used to but I can directly feel that it makes tracking easier. Probably takes some time to get used to it.

Chromatic 4s

Thank’s a lot to everyone,
Max

[Maximal]

So 2nps dwps licks are getting better slowly and this is sooo much easier than what I used to do before. Instead of practicing 2 hours a day at once I try to pick up the guitar for 20 minutes multiple times a day and I notice that slowly I don’t have to enforce pickslanting anymore and it just happens. Here is a slow-mo shot:

And I finally tried some cross-picking, after all this is the reason why I started this thread. As I am trying to stay in a dwps world most of the time I started with Andy Woods cross-picking motion, so curved down and straight upstrokes. As far as I understand, the only differences between this and a more linear dwps approach should be the down stroke, basically the little wrist extension in the 12 o’clock direction to not crash into the body versus the bigger extension to get over the string. The upstroke should basically be the same in both systems, just a straight movement that does escape the string as we are still in a dwps world.

Looking at the video however, I noticed that I do add this weird finger movement unconsciously, which in theory should not be necessary but I know that some guys like Martin Miller also have finger movement in there so I am not sure if I should worry too much about this…