Hi,
I’ve been working on wrist picking for the last couple of days but I’ve noticed when I start to build speed I have a lot of tension on the right side of my neck (I’m picking with my right hand). I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong to cause this though. Does anyone have any tips?
Hmm,
it might make me “captain obvious” but I’d say your problem is, you’re tensing up your neck 
My approach would be to look for the speed where you start tensing up, practice bursts at that speed and concentrate on relaxation. then prolong the duration o that bursts without tensing up.
Thomas
Thanks Thomas. It usually is the obvious things that are the most helpful to hear! I’ll work on that today and maybe in a few days post an update. I’m working toward 115 bpm 16th note triplets, and I’m currently at around 110 bpm triplets. Quite a long way to go! If anyone has any tips on how to most efficiently practise this, please let me know! I’m very new to alternate picking.
I think you need at least a photo If not a video.
Hi! Do you experience neck pain when you play guitar ordinarily? What kind of picking motion(s) have you used previously, if they weren’t wrist? If you have other picking motions you can do in a strain-free way, why not use those? Whatever you’re experiencing probably has more to do with the rest of your body more so than your wrist, and I’m not totally sure we’ll be able to figure out what that is without a photo or a video. So start there for sure. And even then, these things are sometimes hard to “see” unless it’s something super duper obvious.
If strain is something you experience regularly, one thing that might be worth doing is a session or two with an Alexander Technique practitioner. If you’re not familiar with it, Alexander Technique is basically a system of thinking about posture where they teach you how to sit, stand, and move in a biomechanically relaxed way. You do these sessions with a — I forget how they refer to themselves — therapist? Teacher? And they suss out all the little things about your body that could be causing discomfort like that.
I’ll be honest, AT as a practice makes grander claims about its benefits to overall health for which there is not a whole lot of good supporting evidence. It can be a little new-agey. But from a practical perspective, one thing I can tell you is that an experienced AT instructor is going to have lots of experience looking at a wide range of bodies and finding sources of postural strangeness that you may not be aware you’re doing. And that is likely more specific experience than even an experienced guitar instructor would have, unless they only do posture all day.
We interviewed Lori Schiff who does this at Julliard, but it was like a million degrees that day in NYC, and the footage was basically unusuable with all the AC noise running and everybody sweating bullets. It’s been on our list to catch up with her again and do something in our studio now that we have a nice climate-controlled place.
Short story, if there’s someone you can find locally, that could be one thing to try. If we can’t figure it out here.
Hi Troy, thanks for the in-depth response.
I was in a car accident a few years ago and have had neck/shoulder pain on and off since then, as well as fairly intensive physio sessions, but it was my left shoulder that was injured and the pain now is coming from the right side. I used to mostly fingerpick, or use more of a forearm technique - I was initially afraid to start wrist picking because I had tendonitis in my right wrist and didn’t want to aggravate it. Thankfully, wrist picking doesn’t seem to affect it at all (and may actually actively be making it less uncomfortable, in the wrist at least) but I’ve never had pain in this part of my neck before. The main reason I wanted to start practising wrist picking is because it seems to be a much faster and more efficient technique for the shred runs, but if it’s going to cause me pain then I may have to drop it unfortunately.
I did contact an AT practitioner in my area, but I don’t know when she’ll respond or be available, and I also don’t know if I’ll be able to afford the sessions as they seem quite expensive, but I’m going to see what her reply is to my questions at least.
If I extend my right arm and then twist my forearm so my palm is facing toward the ceiling, the part of my neck that is painful sort of sticks out. If I very lightly tense my bicep, I also notice a kind of grinding or moving sensation in my bicep, and a pinching/release sensation that extends all the way up to my index fingertip when extending my arm in this way. When I do my wrist stretches, I did also notice a pulling feeling in the same part of my bicep but my physiotherapist didn’t know what to suggest.
I’ve attached a link below to a video of the stretch that seems to make the muscle/tendon/nerve area stick out more prominently, and I’ll post a video of my playing technique tomorrow morning if that’s also needed.
Thanks everyone for the replies and the help. This seems like a great community.
Hi! Thanks for posting. The supraspinatus is a tiny muscle in your upper back, on top of the scapula, one of the many that operates the shoulder joint. It’s like the starter motor on your car — its job is to kickstart your ability to lift your arm to the side the way you’re doing it here. It’s tiny, so it only gets the ball rolling. Once the arm lifts up a little bit, then your deltoids, i.e. bigger shoulder muscles, take over, because they have better leverage at that point.
Because it’s tiny, the SS can be easily injured by getting essentially squished between your upper arm bone and the scapula. When this happens, it’s called suprapinatus impingement syndrome and it can cause all sorts of referred pain running down the arm similar to what you’re experiencing. Worse, the condition is self-perpetuating. Because the supraspinatus is inflamed, it can’t do its job, causing more squishing when you try to lift your arm, and more inflammation. So even though your bigger shoulder muscles might be fine, it’s the little one beneath them that needs the fixing. If any nerves get squished in between the bones as well, so much the worse. The ulnar nerve is the one that runs down to the little finger. If that’s where you feel pain, then that could be impinged as well.
Short story, it’s doctor time! I would skip the AT specialist and go right to your primary care, a possibly an orthopedist or whatever is similar in your neck (pun intended) of the woods. Just to find out what’s going on.
If you continue with guitar playing in the short term, only do motions where you feel none of this. If that means finger picking, so be it. You can try different picking motions to see if any of them feel pain free, and I’d only use those. Don’t worry about wrist being more “efficient” or somehow better than others. We have no evidence to suggest that. The elbow seems to be capable of the most raw speed, but only at ridiculous shred level tempos that most people never use anyway. So I really wouldn’t worry about which picking motion you use — only that you can find one that is pain-free.
Thanks again, Troy. I’m not going to be able to see a doctor until after Christmas now I don’t think, but I’ll work on my legato or something until then I suppose, haha. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the supraspinatus and it does sound likely that it may be the problem, or potentially supraspinatal tendinopathy… the diagrams look very complicated and this is pretty far outside of my area of study, though. It does feel like a tendon issue and I can feel a sort of inflammation in the painful area, but I’ll stop trying to diagnose myself and wait and see what a doctor can tell me.
I think I was probably going too hard on the practice. For the last 4 days I was practising for maybe 3-5 hours a day doing very repetitive motions, so there’s a lesson learned among this. If the pain starts to subside I’ll limit myself to 15-20 minute sets and only do a few a day… plenty of other stuff to work on in the mean time though. Let me know if you have any advice going forward!
All the best
Mike
That’s a lot of guitar time! I wouldn’t go that high on the regular, and especially not in big blocks or all at once. What were you working on?
I’m working toward being able to play this currently:
The 16th note triplets around 8-9 seconds in is what inspired the venture into wrist picking, because that’s what it looks like Mateus is doing in the video. I don’t have any kind of technique developed to be able to play anywhere near that fast yet, and shredding had never really been my thing, so I figured it made sense to essentially copy what looked like it was working for him.
I started working from home as an English teacher recently, and my office is also my music room, so in between my classes I get to practice… for the sake of efficiency I’ve gotten into a routine where I’ll pick something to work on for the week and then set timers for however long I have in between classes where I just focus on that, and this week was alternate picking to nail that post-intro section. I got a new job recently where I don’t start until around 10am and I’ve been waking up at 6 because my girlfriend is working breakfast shifts as a chef, so I have 3 or so hours before I even start work with nothing else to do… so, guitar! Haha.
Do you have any insight into how long to spend practising one particular technique, and for what kind of duration? I set myself a goal of 3 hours minimum a day which I’ve been managing for the past month or so, but I was literally doing 4 sets of 45 minutes alternate picking in the mornings for the last few days (presumably leading to this injury), so I don’t think that’s a smart idea long-term. Just curious to hear what works for you and any others, since this forum seems like a treasure trove of knowledge.
When you were doing this, what specifically were you doing during the 4 sets of 45 minutes? Were you attempting a certain phrase or phrases? Were you getting it right, or were there wrong notes, or something else that you wanted to improve that wasn’t improving, hence the repeition? Just trying to understand better what people are doing out there.
In general, I wouldn’t choose an arbitrary amount of time as a practice “goal”. The time isn’t really the goal anyway, it’s the end result. There are lots of unanswered questions about “practice”, in quotes, including what most people even mean when then they use the term. But in the very general sense, it sounds like you’re asking about acquiring a new skill. And really the number one obstacle there is trying to figure out how to perform the target activity correctly, recognizing the feel of doing so, and going, aha, that was it, I felt that!
If you could magically pare down your playing time to just those aha moments, then that would be the theoretically shortest amount of time you could practice. Of course, that’s not possible, so a certain amount of “practice” time, again in quotes, is spent trying to have those moments in the first place. This is where the time question arises. But again, in a very general sense, if I’m not having aha moments, there is no reason to keep playing. I’ll put it down and come back. And some days, that’s just the way it is. I’m fine with that. This is what I mean by time versus results. I want to have the aha moments, and some days you do, right away, and others you don’t. This introduces natural variability.
Keep in mind also, we’re often trying to help players who have played in some cases for decades without ever experiencing what accurate, fluid picking technique feels like. So whether they get there in five intense months or a relaxed year or year and a half is of much less consequence to me. I’m sure there is some optimal amount of aha time that will produce the most results in the shortest time, and beyond which it doesn’t make sense to keep going. But the bigger issue is that simply piling on repetition without having that feeling of “hey I almost got this” isn’t doing as much good.
So in short, you have to actually feel like you did something, it has to be recognizable as such, and generally that feeling is also easy and fast, if a little sloppy. The “long tail” of practice is cleaning things up, with gradually better accuracy over that six months to two-year window. But you should have a high bar for doing it “sort of right” immediately, with comfort and smoothness. If the hands aren’t giving it to you that day, it’s ok. They will eventually, and your job is to keep an eye out for when they do.
Re: this clip specifically, the pentatonic stuff looks like wrist with a little forearm, upstroke escape / downward pickslanting. We’re about to upload a new section to the Pickslanting Primer on precisely this subject. It is the most comfortable way I know of to play these kinds of lines, and it’s the method I’ve used in all our seminars like Cascade. The new material should be up over the next week or so.
However in the mean time I think it’s a good idea to stop playing for a while until discomfort goes away. And I’d also check in with a doctor since pain in your neck, and referred pain down your arm, sounds like nerve impingement of some kind and that’s not a good thing. It could be nothing, just temporary inflammation. But given your history with the accident it’s wise to play it safe.
I had a classical guitar teacher give me an exercise to play one week for a certain weakness in my technique - I spent 2 hours a night on it, came back…and the results were impressive - I was proud. He smiled, gave me another exercise for a different issue and asked that I spend no more than 5 minutes per night on it, instead spend the other 1hour and 55 minutes on reading and repertoire. I still improved significantly at 5minutes per night for this one issue - we both agreed the progress was about 80% of what the ‘two hour method’ provided…this was a big lesson for me in terms of ‘rate of return’ and since, I have been more selective in my time investment for practicing.
Going through the CtC stuff now and using alot more random play and looking for ‘ah ha’ moments, I realize this is really many, many little ‘5 min’ exercises, so the potential of practicing this way is huge. It’s also counter intuitive to the way I used to practice, which was basically ‘time=progress’ which true, but to a much smaller degree than I had assumed.
Thanks again for all of the information Troy! I have had a couple of weeks break from practising and the pain has been on and off, so I don’t know if it was caused specifically by this or it’s just another ongoing symptom. I have an appointment with a doctor tomorrow for a referral to a physiotherapist, though. Has the new section been uploaded to the Pickslanting Primer yet? Cheers!