I try to make bigger movements at all times since I have a tendency to make really small ones and it gives me issues.
I completely understand, I used to be a mini-picker as well, and it really made picking complex patterns nearly-impossible. I remember watching people picking across strings and basically thinking it was impossible for me.
To break out of it, I really had to experiment with all sorts of different mechanics & combinations of mechanics. It was not an easy fix.
dont throw the baby out with the bathwater. Small, efficient strokes have their place for sure
Do you use forearm rotation?
Yeah, quite a bit.
One neat thing that can be done with the forearm mechanic to get a lot more âtravelâ with the pick, is the âMABâ approach. Basically, your wrist is more elevated, so the rotation of the forearm has a longer âradiusâ, hence a longer/quicker motion for the same amount of rotation. Itâs not for everyone, and it makes muting tough, but itâs something to possibly try.
Here is a clip of my arm and grip setup. And attempting to maintain forearm rotation properly. Tracking is still not consistent.
I think I just need to apply myself and work in 10-15 minute chunks of time. Getting the motion to work with a rest stroke sized pick stroke while staying relaxed.
Well it has been about a year since I first posted on here and as you can see I have not improved much. Every time I think I have a breakthrough it is nothing and the few things I have figured out havenât really made a huge difference. I still canât reliably play anything for any amount of time. Iâm not sure why. I have watched just about everything and tried my best to apply it. Keeping my arm relaxed and using bigger motions is still so hard for me to do and I am at a loss how to proceed at this point. I clearly still donât have my motion learned. I feel like I have done what I was supposed to, but I just canât get it to work out for me. Iâve wasted many hours for no real gain in ability. I thought last year by this time I would be much better, but I am not. I honesty havenât really enjoyed playing the guitar at all in a long long time because I just canât play anything I want to and I just canât seem to get better. But I am determined to get this stuff down and I wonât stop until I do, so here is where Iâm at⌠still⌠Any insight would be appreciated. If there is anything left that I havenât been told already.
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Hi! Sorry for the frustration here. Regarding your motions, they look pretty good to me. I can see that there are little hiccupy moments here and there, but there are also moments of total smoothness that look and sound really good. I think a lot of players would like to have the core of what you have here. And you have tons of speed so thereâs totally no issue with that.
What is the music you enjoy playing, and how do you do that? Do you write tunes and play them? Write or record short riff ideas you stumble across? Work on covers and play-throughs? Do you play things that involve lots of techniques like rhythm playing, legato, or tapping, and not just continuous alternate picking for lead lines? Not only is this kind of variety good for developing motor skills, but it fosters a positive mental space where you like what you sound like and look forward to playing music. If it ever starts to feel like a chore or a competition, thatâs when I personally just want to put it down and go outside. I never want it to feel like work, even though in my case it actually is!
As far as the picking side of this, when it comes to real-world playing, I rarely alternate pick more than a couple bars of something. 32 sixteenth notes is a bunch of notes! Especially if itâs inside of a song or solo. Maybe you have enough smoothness to play lines that are long enough already. Again, incorporating your current technique into a song that involves a wide variety of other techniques, and is fun to play, can highlight what you do well and also take the burden off feeling like all you do is exercises and technique.
If you want to try something different technique-wise, you can also take a look at some different motions. We have some pretty good tutorials up now for wrist motion, for example. Again, I like what youâre doing with your forearm motion here. But if you feel youâre stuck in a rut, it can help to experience what a different motion feels like. Maybe it will feel different âenoughâ that your issues here wonât arise. Or if they do, maybe you will be able to address them better, if only by accident. Donât worry about losing your current technique. Thatâs not going to happen. You can just keep adding to the toolbox of things you know over time.
Just some thoughts, Iâm sure others will have more.
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I guess the core of what I am doing is ok. That much is better than a year ago. Tracking is the main issue bothering me. I have trouble getting it to work all the time especially with rapid string changes. Itâs due to my wrist not wanting to work sometimes and my super small motion size I am trying to get rid of.
As far as the music I like, itâs fairly broad I guess. My friend and I do some of everything you mentioned. We have a bunch of covers, original songs, and some ideas we kick around going right now. I have a hard time finishing anything because I canât get my playing going the way I want. Previously it was due to the fact we were learning about recording and that sort of stuff so it took us a while to get where we are now. Itâs pretty much down to me finishing my lead parts now. Hence my frustration.
With regards to the techniques, I used to practice sweep picking arpeggios, tapping, and legato to a certain extent. As well as chord shapes and more theory stuff. The past year Iâve done literally nothing, but alternate picking practice since I thought I could just get it worked out then move onto the other stuff I had been doing. Maybe a bad idea, but I thought I would be âdoneâ by now. Whatever I thought that meant. Sounds pretty silly now I guess.
I have tried using more elbow and only wrist deviation, but I could never get it going right. And when it works, my deviation/forearm combo feels pretty good. Especially since I realized due to my more trigger like grip I need to use less supination. I spent a while trying to mimic your position, but stupidly ignored that your grip is completely different. So now that I use almost no supination, or at least thatâs sort of what it feels like, I have had better results. The thing that still hinders me is the tracking, especially on two note per string stuff. Also the TWPS stuff like the PG lick and sixes, which I tool around with swiping or using some amount of TWPS with, but have largely abandoned due to your recommendation. Iâll get back to that eventually. Once I have DWPS better.
So to conclude this essay I typed out, if I could get my tracking better I think I would be good to go. The âglitchesâ I have sometimes mixed with this tension and inability to relax sometimes (which is usually due to overdoing it I think to be fair) is holding me back. So I will keep going with this and try to take some of your advice with the variety and maybe just do what I can right now on the songs my friend and I have and try to enjoy guitar again.
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Here are some more random picking clips. Mostly showing rapid string change issues with two note per string and six note per string along with some tracking all the way across the neck. I apologize for their length, I need to make them shorter in the future.
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I only scanned a couple of these clips but again the motion looks great. I think a lot of people would be happy to have your speed here, even if you havenât quite worked out how to get it to happen all the time on every kind of phrase across all strings super duper fast⌠and Iâm kidding a little because thatâs a tall order!
The way that I see this itâs a progression where playing really fast tells you when the motion is correct. Itâs not perfectly smooth all the time and there are moments where it fails. Thatâs normal. But getting to that point is the first step, and youâve got that part. You know youâre doing it efficiently, because thereâs no way you could go these speeds otherwise.
Then the next step is slowing it down just a little bit and working on smoothness, while continually checking at the higher speeds to see if itâs improving. When youâre really cranking, these speeds youâre hitting are really fast. Can you go just a little bit slower than that? How about a little bit slower than that? Is it still smooth?
This is where musical variety can help. Music occurs at different speeds, even crazy fast prog and metal isnât all shred all the time. Learning a tune with variety is kind of the ânaturalâ version of playing exercises at various speeds because the song actually requires it.
With that in mind, the clips youâve posted all appear to be stock patterns played very fast. Do you every play stuff thatâs not an exercise, not a scale pattern, and just slightly slower? If youâve got tunes with different kinds of phrases in the them, Iâd work on those. And by âwork onâ I really mean learn/write, play and enjoy them, with an eye toward noticing if the motions become smoother over time as a result of that.
Also, songs have things you have to play. You canât just blaze on a couple of notes for a few seconds, stop, try it again, play another lick, and so on. You have to⌠play the tune. A lot of the super fast random variation youâre doing in these clips, where youâre blazing on a phrase, then you stop, then you blaze again, hit some wrong notes, blaze again â playing a tune will calm some of that down because you have to play for the song. Iâm not a fan of relentless repetition, but medium repetition, the kind of involved in playing through a whole section of a song a handful of times because itâs fun, that can definitely help things come together more organically. Especially if youâre doing this at a variety of speeds just below the very fast ones where things fail out often.
Over time youâre looking for the motions to become more smooth. And if theyâre not progressing exactly as you want at first, donât worry about it. Change that part of the song to use some other technique. Try not to beat yourself over the head constantly with the same challenge â exclusively fast picking pentatonic patterns, or exclusively fast picking scale patterns â and youâll be giving your motor system more room to get better at what it can get better at now, which may not be in the order you expect.
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I can slow it down a bit and it still feels ok. I will take your advice and work on stuff with variety and played in a real setting of some piece of music. I have a bunch of those sitting around waiting to be finished. Maybe I am at the point where I just need to give it time rather than sitting for hours trying to get a motion going. Music isnât just stock shred patterns played super fast over and over again anyway. Iâve definitely lost sight of why I even started playing guitar in the first place. I donât ever really compare myself to other people or feel that music is a competition, itâs really just that I have an idea of the stuff I like to hear and I would like to be able to play it well. Having said that, I will buckle down and finish some of the music my friend and I have going, regardless of if I can play all of the silly shred patterns across every string all the time. Thanks for always taking the time to reply Troy.
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It sounds of clicking and scratching with the notes not ringing out. Slow it down 50%. It might mentally help you to try to pick the string just a nanosecond before you Fret the note. Focus on getting a good sound with your hands
So a quick update and question. I have pretty much found how to comfortably play very fast. How to rest my arm on the guitar body, how my hand should be oriented, where my hand contacts just in front of the bridge, what part of my hand is contacting the strings, how I need to hold the pick, and what the fingers I am not using should be doing. So this allows me to play very fast pretty consistently. The problem is the tracking which, especially on two note per string things like the EJ atom, feels really stiff and jumpy. Like my wrist doesnât want to move the way I need it to. Itâs hard to explain, but with regards to practicing this stuff, since I have my motion going pretty good how much should I slow down? Should it be very slow since it is one way pickslanting only or do I still need to be going at a moderate tempo? Doing the EJ atom exercise feels very hard when trying to reach the third string in the group and I always hit the b string when going back to the high e unless I am going pretty slow.
Hi! I recommend not beating your head against the wall with things that arenât working. As a guitar community I think we have often this technique myopia where we only do âexercisesâ, in order, trying to master each one sequentially. But thatâs not super realistic to the way we learn other things in life. Thereâs good evidence that doing a variety of things at once offers more improvement because youâre giving your motor system more ways to learn what âcorrectâ feels like.
You clearly have a great base of skill. You know youâre doing some really important things correctly. Why not write some tunes that focus the techniques youâre best at? The idea is to get comfortable playing through longer pieces smoothly and musically, without as many stops and starts. You may find that after six months of working on playing longer stuff, and not worrying so much about a few basic motions, that you go back to the tiny things that werenât working, and they might work better.
At the very least youâll end up with a great repertoire of things you can play and not just a bunch of execises that are only half working.
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Understood. Itâs a bit of a relief actually to read that haha. Thanks.
Hello again everyone. I havenât posted anything in a couple years now. Time has really flown by for me. I think I have made some good progress on my picking in this time. My picking motion is pretty consistent now I would say. Anyway I thought I would share these super fast picking attempts. I think I am hitting 16ths some of the time, though I can clearly hear triplets at times too. I just wanted to see how fast I could go so the stuff I am playing is just a bunch of nonsense and not played really in time or cleanly I would say, but maybe if I turned the bpm down it would improve. 260 is probably faster than I will ever be able to comfortably go anyway. Unfortunately the slow motion videos I took would not upload correctly to YouTube this time and I am not sure why, but I found that turning the playback down to 0.25x speed allowed me to hear how many notes I was playing per beat so I think that is good enough for this. The motion I am using is the normal wrist/forearm combination that I do, but to go super fast like this I have to sort of add in a bit of elbow. At least that is what I believe is happening since I feel a tightening in my elbow area.
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