Maybe you can't handle pickslanting at all...?

Technique Critique
#28

Thanks for those responses; gonna process all that…

I’ll post a one-string video soon, but meanwhile I wanted to add that it seems to me that my stringhopping is not only a problem for string changing of any kind - but also for accuracy.

Hopping creates fatigue, that’s number one. But maybe worse, hopping (at least in my case) means that my anchor is bouncing. Probably like a guy trying to shoot a cue ball with his shoulder, elbow, wrist and fingers all getting in on the act - it’s hopeless for him to shoot consistently straight like that. He must cut down on the multiplicity of motions or it’ll never go.

Likewise, I think the hopping is a sign of too many muscle groups vying for control of the pick. And so I end up with erratic play, accuracy-wise.

#29

Your scale playing looks perfectly accurate to me. The motion is quite consistent. In other words, you’ve learned this motion perfectly. So I wouldn’t worry too much about “losing your anchor”. Plenty of picking motions that I make catch way more air than this does and don’t even use much of an anchor at all. I mean, look at all that space under there!

The bigger concern here is the lack of efficiency, and the tension and fatigue this begets. Try not to worry too much about these smaller details and just shoot for smooth and fast.

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#30

after all these years of steel strings, I’ve forgotten how lovely a nylon string could sound.

My first guitar (and my first guitar instructor) was a nylon-er, and for obvious reasons it never stayed that way because I could never make it sound quite that good.

#31

Edited out, irrelevant commentary for this thread.

#32

Here I’m not so sure I agree, Troy. True, there’s lots of air there (i.e. no anchor). But there is also, as you’ve pointed out at other times, a constant ‘depth gauge’ in this clip. Meaning fingers 4 and maybe 3 are providing you with a physical reference point because they’re always grazing the guitar top. So while you’re not anchored, you’re still getting one of the main benefits of an anchor - reference.

That kind of referencing is not easy to pull off for ‘hoppers’ like me; maybe impossible, in fact. No anchor, no referencing - up the creek without a paddle, in terms of accuracy. (And as for my clip - I’m not gonna tell you how many times I shot that before I could show you a fairly clean run;)

Still, I take your point. Just keep my eye on the pick-motion ball. Will do:)

#33

Is this what we want to see?..

Basically same thing, in slo-mo:

…Still concerned though, because I’m ‘feeling the burn’ - can’t keep it up for more than 10-15 seconds without really feeling it in the top of my forearm (dunno what Grey’s Anatomy calls that… the ‘hairy side’).

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Attempted DBX - Trem, Arps, Scales
#34

I think someone else will give you better and more thorough advice, but try this. Keep doing what you’re doing and reach out with your left hand and immobilize your forearm arm so that only your wrist can move. I’m not saying you should adopt this as your new picking technique at all. I’m just saying doing this so that you know what only using your wrist feels like. I bet a few things will just automatically click for you if you get your wrist going while you grab your arm

Forearm is super crucial for more complex motions, but you should definitely get an idea of what it feels like to just bang away on one string with just a wrist motion. I bet your arm pain goes away too

#35

This video turned out much darker than it was on my phone which is a bummer, but I hope you can still get two useful tidbits out of it:

THE FIRST HALF OF THE VIDEO WHERE I’M JUST BANGING AWAY AT ONE NOTE

If you base your picking around simple movements, it’s way easier to think about and do. This is me just sitting down and playing without touching a guitar since around noon. Just record and go. But it sounds alright because I’m literally just moving my wrist. If there was more to it I would have to warm up. But it’s just the same motion I’ve been using all day to wave at dogs walking by my house or to wash my windows. Ya know?

THE SECOND HALF WHERE I START PLAYING ARPEGGIOS!

It sounds like you’re starting to imagine “anchoring” and “referencing” as something it’s really not once you get the hang of your guitar. The strings don’t really move where they are! Once you get the truly know where they are, they’re always there. The thing I’m playing is a variation on this really cool piece Tommo wrote but using my own picking style and it has really big skips. There’s one part where I do a different fingering than Tommo and so I’m jumping from the low e string to the high string in sixteenth notes at 150 bpm! But I don’t need to reference the body because the strings never move! If I tried to tense up and dominate the guitar, this would never work. Instead, I’m just letting the strings and pick do their dance! The only reason my pinkie is there is to VERY slightly brace a little bit of the recoil from the big string skips. Anchoring is something you should do if it helps your mechanics, but you shouldn’t do it so you know where the strings are

When I’m playing 3nps stuff fast, unless I’m palm muting, my hand is just floating and it feels like each string change is literally weaving my hand back towards the body as though guided by a thread. It’s a crazy feeling motion that is really fast and efficient. If I would have had pre-conceived notions about how to anchor I would never have found this mechanic

There are a lot of much much better pickers than me to reference on here, I am just at the beginning of my picking journey. But I hope that this quick little response gives you a bit of insight though by showing two ideas in focus

(Just so you don’t get confused. I am using my forearm a little bit in the second half to turn my arm when I hit the low note of each tremolo pattern. Also, it looks like I’m really digging my arm into the guitar but I’m not; so don’t do that either! Just very gently touch the body and stay loose!)

PS Tommo’s piece is so dang cool and I am totally going to drop a well recorded cover on here once I get it more in my bones. Like seriously five stars

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#36

Looks like a solid USX to me, fast and fluent. What happens, if you do this and just focus on relaxing a little bit more?
It looks like you are gripping the pick really tight for example. Try to be as loose as possible, this might help with the “burn”. No need to change the picking motion in my opinion.
So, good work!
That should Yngwie and EJ quite well

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#37

You did it! You left stringhopping behind :slight_smile:

This is obviously an upstroke-escape motion, so you can start working on some escaped-upstroke phrases straight away!

\begin{Shameless-Self-Promotion}

Couple of examples that I tabbed - but you can choose anything else that you like and fits the mechanics:

An Yngwie-style shreddy exercises that covers all strings with 6 notes per string (start with downstroke to have upstroke-only changes):

A bluesy etude that altenrates between slower and faster USX phrases:

\end{Shameless-Self-Promotion}

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#38

Wow! That was quick. What did you do to get this happening? Is this a motion you were always able to do but didn’t consider using, or is this brand new?

The speed aspect of this is great. Don’t worry about not being able to do this very long. That will improve over time as you learn not to try too hard. And also, I think people often have super unrealistic expectations about endurance. Who really picks more than a couple bars of uninterrupted sixteenth notes anyway? Most real-world playing has natural breaks in it that allow recovery. It’s normal to think 32 straight notes with no legato or sweeping feels a little effortful.

The only constructive comment here is that the pick attack is uneven. Some notes are chopped or cut off sounding. You can hear in slow motion how the upstrokes pluck harder and sound more grabby than the downstrokes. This is an attack problem. What you want to do is try slightly different tweaks to hand placement, grip and edge picking until this goes away and upstrokes and downstrokes feel and sound more similarly smooth.

The grip section of the Primer is your friend here. I would also check out the forearm section chapter on grip, because that’s the motion you’re doing:

In this chapter we walk step by step through how to get a smooth-sounding attack with a very similar motion and setup to what you’re doing here. You can try straightening the thumb a little for less edge picking, so you don’t have that built in bend in it. The thumb can also overlap the pick if necessary. You can also try a more extended index finger grip like angle pad. You got this far in one day so now you have a great reference point for what the motion should feel like. Just keep that in mind while you experiment with these pick attack tweaks until the notes sound smoother.

Nice work here.

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#39

7th11th, been trying that, consciously releasing muscle tension while performing this exercise. I’ll try it some more; thanks for that tip. And Imno, I tried some of your stuff, too (but I still can’t do those faces.)

[I haven’t figured out how to respond to individual posts… is there a way?..]

Thanks, Tommo, for those etudes (and the encouragement!) I really like specific instruction like that. Rather than, ‘okay, now take those new chops into the wide world of music’… instead, ‘now go and do this specific thing to nail it down and improve it.’ I want to get to work on them both, but…

Here comes Johannes earlier point about single vs. double escape. I can kinda guess what you’ll say, but… isn’t DBX foundational in the sense that you should make progress with that first, and only then advance to single escape? After all, single’s harder. (Maybe single’s no more difficult than double as a motion, but the licks you play with single seem to be more challenging.)

Troy, honestly, in four years of playing I don’t recall ever having done this! Tommo’s etudes scare me, but I know that’s because I’ve been avoiding those kind of runs, since until now I couldn’t hope to pull them off.

And yeah, I thought it was uneven; thanks for confirming that. So I’ll start tweaking now, like you suggested.

But back to my question, I would be interested in what people think about DBX vs. USX or DSX as a starting point for building core technique…

#40

Not at all! :slight_smile:

We find that most people have their first “speed breakthroughs” with single escape motions. So I would recommend to at least try to see what happens when you use this new motion to play actual USX lines. You don’t have to spend hours a day doing this, just try here and there when you sit down with the guitar and feel like noodlin’ a bit :smiley:

Of course, at the same time you can continue to explore other motions including DBX.

PS: to attract someone’s attention you can use the “@username” command, just type “@” and you’ll see a list of users that are participating in the thread, like so:

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For quoting text just highlight the bit of text you want to reply to and you’ll see this - press quote and it’ll insert the proper commands in your text editor, you can then move the quoted text wherever you prefer:

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#41

I want to reinforce what tommo says here @Yaakov!
DBX is definitely more rare than single escape, and it also seems to be more elusive, as you can see in enough technique critique posts here.
@tommo is a really good player who knows what he is talking about, so he knows that the stuff he recommended to you will work with your newly found picking motion, given time. I would also try @Troy s proven method of yngwie sixes, on one string first, up to speed, and then include string switches.
And definitely watch the start with speed video, and get your head around chunking.

#42

Not sure where you’re coming from on this but your own experiment right here shows that single escape is the very first fast motion you could do. So what does that tell you?

In general I don’t like the terms “hard” and “easy” because they’re super vague. What’s hard? Too much effort? Too much time to learn? Because I’ll tell you, once you figure them out, all these techniques feel “easy” to do, as in low physical effort needed to do it.

So the time it takes to figure it out is the main variable. And if you asked 100 new guitarists who never used a pick before to play a single note as fast as they could, my guess is nearly 100% of them would figure out single escape, either USX or DSX. I think that’s just the way “fast” picking works.

DBX I’m not sure is really a high speed thing. It might be more like a mid-fast tempo thing, 120-180 that kind of range. At least from what we’ve seen.

Use what’s working and get good at something, you can always add more techniques later. In total, how many years, on and off, have you been doing this? I know you said 3000 hours but I can’t remember if you said how long overall.

Anyway, again, great work here.

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#43

I meant that since no one really single-escapes on a lilting ballad melody - single escape is usually for ‘fast’ runs, from what I’ve seen here - it takes more time to develop (more notes played faster = greater demand for coordination & solid technique). So my thinking was that you should learn to crawl (~DBX) before you walk/run (~USX/DSX).

But I sense that folks here don’t see it that way. That’s cool. Crawl-before-walking works in a lot of things in life, but I’ll grant that it’s not a hard fast rule, either.

I’ve got a unique situation. A company shut-down put me into stay-at-home dad status a few years ago. The kids were young and Mommy was getting along well in her field, so it worked out well having one parent with a flexible schedule. But as they aged I found I had more time on my hands. So I pulled out the old acoustic from the corner… and fell in love. I’ve racked up those 3000 hours over four years (my ‘anniversary’ was actually last week).

(BTW, thanks @tommo for those posting tips:)

#44

Slower isn’t really “easier” in the case of picking motions, if by easier you mean length of time needed to learn something. Lots of first-timers here can do Yngwie licks north of 180bpm in a short amount of time. Far fewer can play any of Molly Tuttle’s stuff at 140bpm even after a while trying. The double escape stuff just seems trickier for people to figure out. But I would take that with a grain of salt because most people here are rock players who grew up trying to do Eruption, not Whiskey Before Breakfast.

People definitely use single escape for slow stuff. Even now, if you don’t tell me I specifically have to use a particular motion, I will almost always choose USX because it’s what I know and have done the longest. For example this stuff in the Primer isn’t particularly fast and a great example of what motion I would use if I really wasn’t thinking about it at all:

Very slow lyrical stuff is very often just all downstrokes for Gypsy players, or sometimes all upstrokes for blues players trying to get a particular tone. At that point I’m not even sure these picking motions are even used.

#45

@Troy I’d never watched this one… do we have to worry? :joy: :joy: :joy:

#46

There’s just something that happens when you crank up that Steve Winwood type beat really loud…

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#47

@Troy I think the fastest single note picking anyone can do (that hasn’t “cracked the code”) is trapped picking. You have a double rest stroke to help you! I know that’s what I would have done.

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