I forgot about this, we did an extra video trying out 240 fps video on the Google pixel phone. It probably doesn’t add anything to the discussion put I thought I’d put it here in case anyone’s interested in seeing what picking looks like in REALLY slow mo. 8x slower part starts 30 seconds in.
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Awesome. The 240 mode looks pretty good here - there’s a lot more detail visible in the movement. Specifically, and I’d like others to take a look and confirm this, but it looks like your motion mechanic itself is at least partly finger-driven, similar to Martin Miller’s technique, or what Batio does when he uses his finger technique. For example, check out measure 100 in the Rainforest Outro clip, when he uses that technique for a tremolo line:
https://troygrady.com/interviews/michael-angelo-batio-2017/clips/rainforest-outro/
What Mike is doing is perhaps more strictly fingers than what you’re using, but note that the pushing with the index and thumb is what causes the escaped downstroke. So this movement, by itself, is basically an upward pickslanting technique. Which would explain why you find those lines easier.
Next time you set up a camera, try a take that’s more typical audience perspective / face-on. That will make it clearer how much actual side to side wrist movement is happening. And also try it with your sleeve rolled up so you can get a look at how much forearm is involved.
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lol, This video rules man.
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I think I’m seeing the same thing you are. Fingers not as a primary driver, but there definitely seems to be movement at the MCP joint of the thumb (I think I sometimes do something similar, but more from the thumb CMC joint). This kind of joint movement could be a bit of a “speed booster” in addition to providing a slant change mechanism. There also seems to be some thumb movement that’s just accomodating the leading edge angle as he tracks across the strings.
I also think we see something interesting about how the thumb movement relates to his anchoring. In particular, while there aren’t any fingers anchored, the anchoring of the ulnar edge of the hand with pinkie extended will create a certain dynamic for how the metacarpals will move relative to each other when the “palm” itself flexes slightly as part of the thumb movement. I think there’s something interesting to be investigated re: this type of anchoring versus ring finger anchoring (which we see from Darius Wave), or even “pinkie on the guitar face” anchoring, which we sometimes see. I think Paul Gilbert does a kind of “ulnar palm edge” anchoring similar to this, though he generally has the phalanges of the pinkie curled, but sill has the MCP joint of the pinkie arched back/up similar to the extended pinkie we see here. I really think there’s something interesting going on about what’s happening within the palm in this sort of “wrist” technique, and what role anchoring (and finger MCP joint action) plays in enabling it.
Another thing that pinkie MCP joint extension could be achieving is affecting the position of the pinkie metacarpal relative to the rest of the hand, for the purpose of how the ulnar edge is positioned for use as a rest or anchor along the bridge (or strings). I think that could be an ingredient for enabling movements like this one to work. I.e. having pinkie metacarpal thrust forward could be a factor in enabling an efficient wrist flexion/extension component without losing tacticle reference against the bridge.
Glad I’m posting that screed here, and not on You-“you’re overanalyzing it dude, just play with feel”-tube.
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Ok, I’ll try and get another video up with a front view eventually. It might have to be with my crappy stone age phone.
I’ve been messing around while paying extra attention to my finger movement and I’ve found that I can play this particular ‘2WPS’ chunk with relative ease, starting with a flexed thumb:
G --------------------------------------5–7--8-(flex thumb)—
D ----5–7--8-(extend thumb)--------------------------------- (repeat)
A -------------------------------------------------------------------
it seems that the thumb movement is not only helping with the string changes but also helping to move my pick up to the higher string.
But if I try to play it moving to a lower string:
G ---------------------------------
D ----5–7--8-------------------- (repeat)
A ----------------5–7--8--------
I can’t do it at all, and my thumb is trying to stay extended all the time. Also note that this phrase is equivalent to the first one but starting on an upstroke.
So, what I think the solution is is to reverse the thumb movement like this:
G ------------------------------------------------------------------
D ----5–7--8-(extend thumb)--------------------------------- (repeat)
A --------------------------------------5–7--8-(flex thumb)----
So like in the first pattern, string changes on a downstroke are done with a thumb extension and string changes on an upstroke are done with a thumb flex. This is what I’m working on right now, but it feels really weird. I think its going to be the key to ‘2WPS’ scale runs across more than 2 strings - a full 3nps ascending scale run is going to need both of these movements to work.
EDIT: just realised the first pattern is outside picking and the second is inside picking. So I guess this is why I’ve always found outside picking easier?
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Bloody hell, let me grab a dictionary and I’ll get back to you eventually
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A lot (most?) of what I’m talking about isn’t specific advice for you, but general questions about picking technique that arise when we look at your technique and compare it to others. 
There are difficult things you’re doing “naturally” that work, and I’m interested in the details of how.
Sorry if you’re getting caught in the nerd crossfire here!
Short story it looks like you’re using some kind of finger motion. Yes, part of that is to control edge picking, similar to what Teemu does. But are you actually moving your index and thumb with every picked note, as part of the picking motion itself? That’s a fundamental question here. Can you feel if you’re actually doing that?
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Buahahahahahahahahaha 
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To paraphrase back to you, it sounds like you’re asking if it’s possible to keep the pinky side of the palm anchored on the strings for muting purposes, while still having a “wrist”-driven picking motion. And if so, does that mean the palm or thumb bones actually move in addition to the wrist, expanding and contracting, to permit the picking motion to happen even though one side of the hand is effectively fixed? Let me know if that’s what you’re getting at.
I have a copy of the Mr. Big 1992 San Francisco live solo on my desktop as I type this, and cursory glance, I really don’t see that kind of motion in his technique. It looks more like “whole hand” wrist picking, where no part of the hand beyond the wrist is fixed. That’s what Andy Wood’s technique looks like, and he’s the most Gilbert-esque player we’ve interviewed. In fact, when we edited Andy’s interview, I pulled out clips of this motion specifically to illustrate the contact points he uses to get muting with a uwps wrist technique:
https://troygrady.com/interviews/andy-wood/clips-guitar/rhythm-metal-mutes/
The Bach Bop clip also has some good uwps scalar muting, in m.14:
https://troygrady.com/interviews/andy-wood/clips-guitar/bop-bach-and-roll/
Again, I don’t see any finger involvement in Andy’s fast scale technique. The Darius Wave guy in the other thread, where this subject also came up, for sure. His technique looks much more finger-oriented and not particularly Andy- or Gilbert-like to me at all. In fact the operative question in that clip is how much wrist is even happening there, as opposed to thumb / index or thumb CMC / palm type movement.
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This is mostly what I was getting at, though I’m thinking about the pinky side of the palm not so much for muting, but for maintaining a tactile reference against the guitar for managing pickstroke consistency with a wrist mechanic.
In the Paul Gilbert case, I’m wondering even if he doesn’t have movement happening within the palm, whether there’s a kind of slight isometric contortion of the hand that could be helping to get the pick orientation to work with the kind of palm edge tactile reference I mention above.
Good point about Darius, and thanks for the detailed response. I’ll do my homework on the Andy Wood clips you provided and get back with any other questions/thoughts. I suppose you or @Brendan might want to move my ramblings on this to another thread if I’m derailing @mcm 's feedback.
The closest I can get to something Andy-like feels like I’m using more elbow or shoulder than I suspect Andy does. His point about “squeezing” the front of the guitar with his forearm really resonated with me though. Among other things, I should probably sit down at some point and just watch the entire Andy Wood interview all over again…
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I think I am, but not intentionally. I feel like I’m just trying to move from the wrist only, but at speed I feel the finger and thumb start moving a bit. I’m just letting it happen naturally, If I try to keep the finger and thumb locked in place they tend to tense up and I can’t get as fast.
So we’re thinking it’s the finger movement within the motion mechanic itself that’s causing me to be primarily UWPS?
I deliberately worked on my technique with the side of my palm anchored on the bridge to mute every string below the one I’m playing so they don’t ring out. I think I assumed most people do this. It also helps that I really like the sound of fast muted playing.
I’m totally happy for this thread to evolve into whatever, I’m all for it being helpful and interesting to everyone and not just me.
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Possibly, yes, that’s what I’m suggesting. If you rest enough of the pinky side of your hand on the strings/bridge, then there really isn’t any other way to get those downstrokes to pop up like that using wrist motion alone, and you would have no choice but to have the fingers take over. From the 240ps clip, it looks like almost the entire length of your pinky is resting on the strings.
By contrast, take a look at the Andy Wood “Metal Mutes” clip. There is no such pinky coverage. So Andy does not have muting down the entire length of the pinky side of his hand, but instead only up closer to the wrist where the movement originates. If you look between his hand and the guitar, you can see the air gap at the point where it lifts off the strings. Anything from that string and higher will not be muted. So Andy needs to track the whole hand across the strings if he wants muting, i.e. to keep the palm heel on top of the string he’s playing.
In your case, with that much pinky coverage, there would really be no other way to get the pick out of the strings other than lifting with the fingers. As usual, others please check my math on this.
What are the implications of this as far as what you’re trying to achieve? Well you’ve got a couple choices: if you want to play “pickslanting” lines the way we have traditionally understood them, then a pure wrist technique would allow you to do that. You’d use a setup similar to Andy, where there is only palm heel contact, and the entire hand moves side to side. Everything beyond the wrist is dead, and doesn’t move. I’m not saying you should reinvent yourself this way, but it might be an interesting experiment for you because simply setting up on the guitar this way may help “shut off” the finger movement, and help you learn what it feels like to turn it on and off.
Otherwise, I think you’re current technique is really cool and worth exploring, to see if you can get it to work for arbitrary numbers of notes per string, like Martin Miller’s technique does. This will require some experimentation to learn to feel what is happening with your fingers, so you can control those movements at will. Specifically, separating out the thumb bend type movements, which you use for edge picking control, and the index/thumb motion which looks (if we’re right) to be a part of your core picking motion itself. In other words learning to do just that motion, by itself, at will, without the thumb bending. This type of experimenation takes time, but I think you’re onto something potentially really cool here.
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Alright. This all makes perfect sense. I totally see what you mean about Andy’s hand position vs. mine and how thats probably constraining my wrist motion so the fingers end up taking over. Thanks so much for all the time you’ve put into this so far, I really appreciate it, my own technique is clearer to me now than its ever been by far. Can I get a t-shirt with ‘Troy Grady Cracked My Code’ on it?
In regards to where I go from here, in an ideal world I would want to try both your suggestions of trying pure wrist, and also experimenting with the finger and thumb. whatever I do I definitely want to hold on to my current technique, I’ve found it so solid for UWPS. Recently I hit 205-210 bpm 16ths on UWPS licks, and I don’t care about ever playing faster than that. I have all the speed I’m ever going to need for UWPS. But i still really want to hit that speed on other licks too.
So, there’s a few BIG questions (open to anyone) that stand out, and they probably each deserve their own thread, so feel free to move them around wherever, or I can just start new threads:
-
If you try to learn a different motion mechanic, is there a risk of ‘unlearning’ your old one, even if it’s been ingrained over many years? This is a big worry for me.
-
If you try to practice 2 different mechanics at the same time, will they ‘fight’ each other and itll end up being counterproductive?
-
How transferable are different mechanics between each other? Like if I try to switch to pure wrist, will I already be 80% there because I’ve spent so long doing speed and stamina exercises to train my muscles?
I’m aware these might be pretty complicated questions and might not even have a known answer. In any case I’m gonna do a lot of experimenting. Cheers.
Not if you keep using the original one, and even then it would take a concerted effort to wipe it out completely. How many picking techniques does Eddie Van Halen have? Forearm tremolo (Eruption), elbow tremolo (Hot For Teacher outro), wrist crosspicking (Hang 'Em High), and so on. It’s ok to have multiple techniques, so I wouldn’t worry about this.
There is such a thing as ‘interference’, which we talk about in the Pietro Mazzoni interview. But it’s not clear which activities will interfere with each other until you test them, and even then some might end up reinforcing each other. So excessive worry about inteference is probably misplaced. Instead, a good general rule is that learning more things at once simply takes more time. If you can keep things focused on fewer items, you’ll learn faster.
Same answer. It’s unclear which things will interfere vs. reinforce, and to what degree. In general, once you come out the other side, the ability to do multiple techniques makes you more knowledgeable and capable, so I see everything as reinforcing in the long run. In the short term, keeping learning focused on a few things is probably a good plan.
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Edit: For context, below is referring to when Andy plays “Gilberty” things.
After briefly looking over Andy’s technique again, what’s standing out to me is the frequent contact he has between the heel of his hand (mostly to the “radius” side) and guitar face, bridge, or strings (and the fact that this “anchor” (or at least the fleshy part of the base of the thumb) tracks up onto the bridge pickup and strings as he moves to higher strings). That and the fact that when he shifts into “faster” UWPS mode, he has that little bit more elbow involvement. My attempts at something similar had been using a slightly more supinated forearm, and more contact with the “ulna” side of the heel of the hand against the guitar face or bridge. Will have to dabble with this more to see what feels better and produces more interesting results for me, but I definitely concur that at least in Andy’s case, there’s none of the “ulnar palm edge” anchoring I was talking about.
I also found it interesting how Andy talked about that when he wants to play with a more aggressive attack, he has the fingers curled in more, and when he wants a lighter attack, he has them looser.
Another thing that’s interesting is how when he does Gilbert-ish picked phrases, his “default” wrist position seems to have a noticeable amount of extension, which is perhaps related to the semi-anchoring thing he does with the heel of his hand. That heel of the hand anchoring seems to also be a feature in a lot of John McLaughlin’s playing, as I think Troy points out in the Antigravity seminar.
Thanks for the great and reassuring answers. I think I need to take a little break from picking anyway because my wrist, arm and fingers are all feeling pretty wrecked after over-practicing recently and i don’t want to injure myself (too much motivation from this thread), but when I get back to it I’ll try out a hand position for pure wrist picking (even before making this thread I’d been trying to make DWPS work with my finger technique and wasn’t really getting anywhere).
I already tried it out a bit and I can see why wrist is more suited to UWPS than DWPS, as opposed to forearm rotation, as its quite hard to get into a good position for DWPS, for me at least. Maybe a viable option is primary UWPS with a single-note rotation for DWPS string changes, like an upside-down version of Teemu. Anyway, that’s probably thinking way too far ahead.
I’m probably the most extreme example of that ‘ulna palm edge’ anchoring, and I guess I’m kind of proof that it doesnt really work with a wrist deviation technique. The more you move to a ‘heel’ anchor like Andy, where wrist deviation actually works, the more you rotate to an upward pickslant, it looks like. I guess that’s why wrist tends to be more suitable for UWPS unlike forearm rotation which is more suitable for DWPS. Obviously wrist guys like Paul Gilbert do DWPS string changes all the time, but its always a really subtle downward slant, not an extreme slant like Troy’s or in Teemu’s pentatonic examples (where its ludicrous, almost flat against the strings).
That is precisely the classic “primary up” scenario, and it’s what Andy himself does for the fast scale stuff.
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Wow. If I get any short film scoring projects in the future, I might have to use some of those sounds from mcm’s last 240fps video. I wouldn’t even need to run them thru filters or anything. Super atonal and creepy!! 
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