Maximum effort, minimal gains. General help needed

[wellokaythen]

Hey everyone, I’ve been trying to improve my alternate picking for years now. I practice around 30-45 minutes per day and am getting a bit frustrated with my progress, my gains seem to come and go and was wondering what you thought of my techniques.

Here is single string:

Tremolo

Here is a descending 6’s run with some slow-mo (I find descending to feel the most awkward)

Descending

Here are my thoughts:

• I feel my tremolo starts out well but after a few bars new motions sneak their way in. You can see my escape motion start to wander and flatten out as the clip goes on. The past few weeks I have been just setting the metronome at 190 and just going for it regardless of how it feels and it hasn’t seemed to correct or increase the length I can hold this tempo.
• The descending run is okay, I feel like I get a “perfect” run every other try. I attribute the mess ups not to the escape motion, but rather the feel of the first pick strike on the new string. Sometimes I feels like a garage spike and will throw me into a string hopper type motion. I am curious what you guys think, look at the first notes I play on the B and G strings notice as I pass through the string the motion becomes nearly flat. Is this an issue? It seems almost like a remnant of string hopping.

How do you think I should proceed and more importantly, how do I practice correcting this stuff? Appreciate the help as always.

[Pepepicks66]

First reaction when hearing your clips is that you have too much attack (could be not enough pick point) and are likely using too much force in the pick (either holding it too hard / too close to the tip).

[steve506]

Your motion has a lot of potential imho. I wish I was able to pick like that when I joined the community .

In an effort to add consistency, have you tried playing with clearer/ louder accents? The tremolo motion establishes a brilliant baseline but incorporating accents makes everything a lot easier (at least for me) because every accent kind of “resets” your motion and prevents the unwanted motions from affecting your playing. In my experience, it is a lot easier to play four cycles of four notes (by adding an accent to the first note of every group of 4) than playing 16 consecutive notes as a single stream.