I’ve run into an issue that I’m not sure anyone I’ve ever talked to has heard of. Anytime I try to go beyond 100bpm my right hand starts to lift away from the strings and I start missing strings like crazy. I’ve tried to force myself to keep my hand down but then I get really clunky. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
Way easier to diagnose if you can post a video. We’re all just guessing otherwise.
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I did over in the TC thing.
That’s the #1 thing Troy says in response to requests like this. #2 is, “have you gone through the Pickslanting Primer?” @Mook6363 ? It has examples of at least 4 different ways of moving your pick back and forth that should go far beyond 100 bpm. Troy’s now playing some fast tremolo at 270 and synced playing at 250bpm
Can you link that? Also, as much as we’d all love to help, if you’ve already been through a TC on the “main site”, you’ve gotten advice from the best. We may not tell you anything you haven’t already heard.
I just posted it so I’ve not received anything yet
Ah gotcha. I think we need a “share” button on these user TC and video pages because copying the link from the browser is only going to work for you. The public one is here:
I can tell the TC instructors are going to ask for you to play something faster, showing exactly what is not working. Please don’t feel on the verge of quitting though. The good news is when you can’t play fast, it’s not because you can’t, it’s that you’re not moving your hands in an efficient manner. Just about anyone can learn a good efficient motion capable of good speed.
What you describe and looking at your slow playing, I’m going to bet the issue is the dreaded “stringhopping” problem. And again, good news because when you know what doesn’t work, you can just stop doing that and learn a new motion that does work. I hope that’s encouraging, yet also vague. I know Troy worked so hard to get the “platform” TC feature in place so that users with a paid membership get priority feedback from the experts and also to prevent “analysis paralysis”. We all mean well on the forum, but often people get a flood of at best “different” (at worst, conflicting) advice on what they should do to fix the problem. Troy or Tommo will respond to your TC shortly, I know they’ve been a little swamped lately. You’ll get exactly what you need to pick up some speed, so please hang in there!
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Not everyone here is a Masters in Mechanics member (I’m currently not)…so not everyone will be able to view it.
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The vague thing really got me. Made me laugh. Thanks for that
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Right, sorry I’d forgotten about that wrinkle. I know when I helped Troy out with building the TC area of the platform there was originally a concept of public/private/unlisted where videos could get shared but there was a point where he decided that even viewing someone’s videos should be for subscribers only. Thanks for the reminder!
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Also when you say I should play faster do you mean like balls to the wall and let the ugliness reign or faster until it breaks down?
They’d want to see both I think. All TC’s ask for a fast tremolo on one string. This does not mean your arm should be tensed up and it’s uncontrollable though. You should at least be able to play regular accents in an intentional manner. Most people don’t get the very important truth that while we’re used to “tremolo” being used almost as an “effect”, the picking in coordinated fast playing should really be the same as tremolo picking - the pick traveling back and forth in a straight line (more or less, as some motions can be slightly curved). The important thing is the smoothness of the motion. Depending how you move your pick, we’d expect escapes in one direction. That will help define what types of phrases you should be playing (switching strings after upstrokes or downstrokes etc).
I’d also film an example of you doing the very thing you’re trying to do but is not working. Playing faster than 100 bpm and let’s see the “bad” technique. If you include those in your TC, the instructors will take it from there.
Right off the bat @Mook6363 in the faster part of Blackberry Blossom you aren’t strictly alternate picking - you have a few spots where you end up using a pseudo, inefficient sort of economy motion, sometimes going up up to cross strings, sometimes down down, and it occasionally makes you airball (basically miss) the string you’re going for. But that’s not as important right now as just trying to develop some motion that goes faster than what you’ve got. This tune sounds cool, but I think it’s a little tricky for that purpose - try a tremolo first, and then some simple melodic sequence on a single string. Everything will branch out from there.
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Why not ask your teacher what he or she thinks? If you don’t have a teacher, why not find one? In the worst case you can take lessons online with some incredible artists. Is there something that I am missing? 
You’re right. I shouldn’t take my shot with the guy who’s rewritten the book on picking techniques. I am taking lessons with someone online but it’s more for how to do music and how to learn it and less to do with picking motions. Just want to see if I’m salvageable before I spend more money going in pointless circles
The problem with even “good teachers” is most don’t really understand picking technique. There are some around the forum who offer private lessons that I’m sure would be extremely helpful.
There’s definitely value in that. There is more to music than technique (though there is lots of music we won’t be able to play without a certain level, or “type” of technique). You have to learn to filter out bad advice from good players. Beware of suggestions to play things gradually faster and not move on until the slow playing is 100% clean. Different industry but I just read a quote from Ryan Reynolds that said “You can’t be good at something unless you’re willing to be bad”. Meaning, don’t be afraid to get it wrong. The important thing is to consider that feedback and never do that again…try something else instead lol! Once you find the correct motion, sure. You’ll be able to slow it down (some) and you can work on things in a clean manner. Otherwise, gradually playing faster always leads to an early plateau on speeds because “bad” motions won’t go fast.
I know I sound like a Kool Aid drinker but I’m positive you’ve come to the right place. I’m convinced anyone who’s open to trying different things until they find something that moves fast is headed in the right direction. Doing more and more of what hasn’t worked after even a few months time is going to lead to a dead end. That’s why most of the world’s amazing-est (if I can type it, it’s a word) players usually get their “chops” within the first few years of learning their instrument. They are highly intuitive and find the right technique on their own, right from the start. Hang in there!
I played golf professionally for 12 years and I always started slow and built speed up when learning something new. There is a caveat there however. I would practice slow and build up but I would always take time to go all out with a new position or move at the end of practice. When people say you need to go fast and then clean it up I get really angry about it. Not one guitar player or golfer has ever started off fast and then cleaned it up. You have to start slow.
You’re absolutely right by saying get the technique right and go fast but I never hear people say that on videos on the interwebs. Sloppy fast movements in any discipline without a slow progression in getting any motion correct only leads to sheer disaster.
It’s misunderstood. You aren’t supposed to keep going fast and sloppy perpetually and only play fast and sloppy. Because you’re right, I think that would produce horrible results. You’re supposed to use that approach to identify the motion. This does not have to be 100% of the maximum speed you can move your pick, but it needs to be capable of doing 16ths well above 150 bpm. You can probably do several of these movements in a controlled fashion without getting overly tense, and they all go at/above these speeds:
- Scratch-off
- Scribble with a pen
- smash a button on an arcade game rapidly to kick the hell out of the other player
- knock on a door urgently
- shake out a stubborn match (or cool your hand off if you touch something hot)
- scramble eggs
Any of those can be tweaked into a picking motion on the guitar. The key is finding one that feels comfortable, getting used to what that feels like, figuring out if escapes on upstrokes/downstrokes and find phrases that pair with that.
By comparison, prior to you becoming a pro golfer, there’s no way you were swinging slow when you’d tee off to the extent that people are indicating we should be playing our instrument slow to “somehow get faster”. That’s like “putting” to start your drive out, hoping if you just tap a little harder, gradually, you’ll slowly add a couple yards to your drive until you’re in the triple digits. Or someone who just hopes they can become a sprinter by never going faster than a power walk. There are various thresholds where these motions turn into other motions entirely, and you can’t find them until you try them, because the “slow” version of them is just not the same motion.
And actually, one of the fastest (the fastest???) guitarists ever advocated to play fast and then clean it up. Shawn Lane.
Try to keep an open mind. If what you’ve been doing hasn’t given you the results you want, doing more of it isn’t going to one day magically work out. I’m confident you can get a fast picking motion but you’ve got to trust the process 
EDIT: I’ll stop with the advice lol! I see you are in the capable hands of @tommo now, but I’d bet the middle part of the venn diagram of what I’ve said and what he’ll tell you is close to a circle 
Mainly because I’ve read thousands of posts that he and Troy have written, and I just try to be a good little parrot spreading their excellent advice.
Best of luck, you’ve got this!!! We’re all pulling for you!
I will respectfully disagree. You have to get the basic mechanics under your fingers…but once that rudimentary stuff is done…you go.
Shawn Lane said it very clearly here:
There are a bunch of places to reference in this Martin Miller video, but he’s essentially saying the same thing to his student here:
Basically - find your current limit. Then go beyond it and live there for a while. Once that cleans up - move up so that it isn’t anymore. Rinse and repeat.
This isn’t conjecture or ‘maybe’ - it’s been proven over and over and over.
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Folks. We’re working through the process on this. Tommo has already requested the next step that you probably guessed we’d request, and if you have platform access, you can already see it is 1000 percent heading in the right direction:
Not only have we talked about it, but we’ve talked about it endlessly. Your slow playing is stringhopping. We have a great case study on this featuring another awesome member of our forum. If you’ve been on our YT channel, you’ve probably seen this one already:
You will notice that when playing slowly he does some of the same things you do. He makes a bouncy motion, and he also does “two ups” or “two downs” in a row at various points. So he’s not even doing alternate picking. These problems are extremely common in stringhopping.
The solution to the age-old stringhopping problem is to experiment at more “real world” playing speeds, since that’s where smooth motion naturally occurs. This is what we’re going to help you do!
Your first clip of the faster tremolo motion is an awesome first step in that direction. Yes, you miss the string a few times. Just understand, we expect that to happen. We also have another case study on exactly this process which you can check out. It’s Tommo’s wife Kim! As Kim learns to tremolo, you will notice many of the same inconsistencies in her picking motion that you yourself experience when trying to go fast:
When learning a new skill, the pattern you look for is “on” and “off” like a light bulb that’s on the fritz. You will see flashes of smooth, easy-feeling motion interspersed with periods of randomness. The periods of randomness are there because your body is trying out different ways of moving, to see which ones work the best. The periods of smooth motion are the little “successes”, tucked in between the randomness.
This randmoness is your body’s way of learning what “correct” feels like. Over repeated attempts at a wide variety of different speeds, you will learn to reproduce those flashes of correctness with a greater and greater hit rate. Toward the end of the process, you will be able to fire up the motion almost every time, without thinking about it. This is how you eliminate the inconsistencies over time. For this to work, there must be these little “success” bits. And since they only occur at natural playing speeds, that why we start there.
So to answer your question about whether it has to be going ham, all-out speed. No. It just has to be fast enough that the natural motions are starting to occur. And we can see in the tremolo clip that this speed is fast enough, because we can see the good motions happening. So you’re on the right track!
This is a really good point, and I want to make it as clear as I can what we mean by “sloppy”, because it is a loaded term.
Take a look at the picking motion you make when you play Blackberry Blossom slowly. Notice that the motion you’re making doesn’t look anything like the smooth motion you make when playing fast. They are completely different techniques. Repeating Blackberry Blossom slowly is not helping you learn the correct way of playing, because you’re not actually doing the technique you want to learn.
What this means is that even though you can get more notes correct when going slowly, your hit rate as far as the technique in the slow clip is actually ZERO. Let that sink in for a second. Imagine taking golf swing after golf swing, missing the ball entirely on every single attempt, day after day, and calling it “slow, correct practice”. If we keep repeating the stringhopping attempts, that’s what we would be doing.
Here is the amazing and yet counterintuitive conclusion: Correct notes are not the same thing as doing the technique correctly. Getting the notes right does not by itself make it any more likely you are doing the actual technique the right way. It’s crazy, but it’s true. Your own videos are very good examples of this.
If that’s the case, then we need to find another way of letting you learn the better technique, and the next step Tommo requested is that way. Your tremolo clip is a great first step. You’re doing nice smooth motion a certain percentage of the time. We just want to increase that hit rate.
I don’t want to twist your arm to be here, and if you don’t like our approach, obviously, you’re free to go elsewhere. But we can already see improvement in your very first response. So personally I’d suggest sticking with it to see if we can smooth that motion out even further.
I’d also request that if you’re working with us as instructors, and you have questions or concerns, bring them directly to us. If you head over to the forum to vent, it makes our jobs so much harder. I now have to type out this small essay just to explain our methodology and try to allay your fears that we might be steering you in the wrong direction. I promise, we always have your best interests at heart and we’ll do everything we can to get you to the next level.
Thank you!
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Which flavor? The Jonestown Sharkleberry blast, or the Rajneeshee Purplesaurus Rex?
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