I hope this clears up five years’ worth of confusing posts I’ve made on the blog.
When I first came to this site I had a hit and miss elbow technique with a wrist and forearm regular chord strumming technique which I would use for single notes. There were a lot of random mistakes in my picking.
So I watched some of the free video stuff put out from this site around five years ago. In it there were then three options, wrist, elbow, or forearm rotation. This was the time of pick slanting rather than trapped and escaped.
I’d never heard of forearm rotation at speed so I tried it and found I could do a tremolo. What I did not realise is I’d hit on forearm and elbow blend. I thought this was the only type of forearm a person could use.
So I then looked at the Joscho tremolo strumming and thought, hey, forearm strumming. I do forearm so I can do this. It took me two weeks to get a forearm strumming started and two months for it to settle and longer to get a settled pick grip very near to my other forearm grip. However, this was not forearm and reverse dart thrower blend like Joscho but forearm on its own. This I did not realise. I thought I had a single forearm thing rather than two, neither of which were his.
So I’ve now got two types of forearm and both are confused. To add to this I learnt I have a pronounced arm wiggle with the forearm motion strumming which is absent from the forearm and elbow blend. Nice to know.
So I then tried the Martin Miller stuff thinking he has forearm, I have forearm. In actuality, I’m pretty sure he is forearm with reverse dart thrower blend plus fingers. So we have different primary forearm motions and hisis like Joscho’s primary motion.
So I move onto wrist, used the free material and then paid for a month’s subscription and having previously started playing about with dart thrower and reverse dart thrower concepts I taught myself how to do regular strumming with both of these concepts and this helped me get a wrist technique with a similar grip to my two forearm techniques, both still misnamed. I also found out the colouring pencil test on the site works well with stopping you confusing the rules of strumming with the rules of wrist sinlge note picking.
And from the paid material on the site I looked at the two forearm motions performed by Troy in the air. Oh, I thought, I’m strumming with forearm motion. So I tried to get the forearm and reverse dart thrower wrist blend from his demonstration, and after two weeks it came through in the air and became controllable after two months.
So I put the two forearm strums on the guitar and if I use the grip of the forearm tremolo strum for the forearm and wrist blend tremolo strum I get a drumming pattern rather than a strumming pattern unless I open the wrist as Joscho does for his second tremolo strumming pattern and by then I’m strumming using the exact side of the pick not any of its points. I think this means it needs a pick point change.
So after all of this befuddlement I have built up by accident a picking system based on forearm and elbow blend onto which I’ve got forearm rotation for fast strumming and a wrist technique which I don’t think is my best wrist poisition. For this I think I would have to follow the change is pick position suggested by the forearm and wrist strumming. I can change it but they are a long way from each other, and it feels like I currently play through the thumb with my grip which is only very slightly bent, maybe better to say relaxed, whereas I’d need a flat thumb for other other wrist and forearm and wrist techniques and this feels like playing through the index finger.
It’s been an interesting five years.
Mark
