My metal picking technique

Haha yup it was that bad.

Sometimes playing around with different pick sizes helps, because it forces you to alter your grip a bit. For me, I found it a bit tough to do ‘chugging’ with smaller picks, but I know other people can do it fine.

Also, as others have said here… mixing in the elbow can do wonders, but its a skill that you probably won’t develop right away. It took me a few months to get it right, and to really relax my forearm, and properly rest my upper forearm on the body of the guitar. I know it seems impossible at first, but it isn’t, it just takes a bit of time.

It seems that there were a lot of great comments in this thread, but I want to attempt a summary.

Going through strings can be made so easy that they’re almost invisible, so let’s think about that for a second. Let us look at the strings coming out of the computer, as if they look like this:

oooooo

So if you’re going to strum, you slant the pick, e.g., →/oooooo or oooooo\←. You would never do →\oooooo or oooooo/← because the pick would get stuck.

If you try →|oooooo or oooooo|← this will work if the pick is nice and thin, and many great players use thin picks (like EVH and Paul Gilbert), so that might work for you as well.

Another factor is to be sure that you don’t expose too much pick: Just a few mm is plenty.

But there is another thing that helps in addition to slanting, and that is picking with the edges of a pick, and not the face. I’ll draw that like this,

→Voooooo or ooooooV←. In this case the edge of the pick makes a ramp that feeds the string down. Depending on the shape of the edge, the pick can go through very easily. For me, I use 2.0mm Dunlop Flow picks, and you can see that the shape of the edge makes it very easy to go through strings, so also look at the types of picks that you are using.

Therefore, in summary: You should somehow have a “ramp” for the string to go under the pick, and this should be very obvious in the mechanical sense. Either slant, or use edge picking, and be careful not to move the string more than you have to. Good luck!

https://www.jimdunlop.com/product/549p088-7-10137-10858-5.do

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I’m using edge picking. I’m a bit confused about the slanting though, I thought the point of slanting was to make your pick escape from under the strings when moving to a new one.

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Not only that. It’s natural when you want to strum a chord, or push through more than one string. Actually I believe that many guitarists developed DWPS as a strumming position in the beginning and only then developed suitable mechanic to play fast lines.

So I’m having a really good day and am cutting through the strings like butter when I’m playing single note lines, regardless of whether I’m edge picking or not. No idea why, but the strings seemed very stiff yesterday, so there’s clearly a large inconsistency that exists in my technique that has existed for some time. Regardless, even on a good day like today, I can’t quite break through all the strings at once. It’s not so much a stiff feeling as it’s just failing to connect… I wish I could explain it better.

First video features no edge picking (or a tiny amount), second video features heavy edge picking.


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It’s a nice sign. Usually once you get the feeling it becomes easier to reproduce it. For me sometimes helps mindless playing while watching youtube, sometimes not playing guitar for a couple of days (which sounds strange, I know…)

Glad that you got it!

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Hold up, haven’t got it yet! I’ll come back in a week, as I’m going on a mini tour. I’m also seeing a guitar teacher tomorrow, so hopefully he can help. I have had this feeling on and off for quite a few months now, and I still don’t quite understand it. I usually just start by sweeping a bit, because for some odd reason the sweep motion is usually not a problem, and then try to apply the feeling to regular picking. I’ll post pics of my pick tomorrow just to get an opinion on its shape (no idea what the model is) - I’m going to bed now.

Most people slant to easily traverse strings (strum or sweep). A tiny fraction also use it to escape, and therefore give it two purposes.

Wouldn’t downward slanting also make it harder to upstroke though? I felt like you were advocating downward slanting for downstrokes and upward slanting for upstrokes but wouldn’t making those transitions considerably slow down your strum in itself?

You are absolutely right so they will change slant if strumming.

Also note the benefit of a thin pick!