We made another series of stealth updates to the Pickslanting Primer this week in the picking motion section. This includes an overhaul in the way picking motion is presented, along with some new tutorials on wrist motion. You can find the new stuff here:
Until now, last year’s two-hour behemoth survey of various picking motions has been serving as the Primer’s introductory picking motion talk. It’s comprehensive but it’s also long, hard to navigate, and outdated in some technical respects. The intention was always to replace this with individual sections on each of the most common approaches that offer clearer hands-on teaching.
So we took the first steps in that direction this week. You’ll now find top-level sections for wrist motion, forearm motion, and elbow motion, with a short Wikipedia-style introduction for each. For forearm and elbow, we excerpted the relevant sections from the longer talk. They’re not bad and certainly better than nothing for now. They are currently much easier to find now that they are parted out into their own sections with relevant text introductions.
For wrist motion, we actually filmed two new lesson chapters introducing upstroke escape aka “downward pickslanting” wrist motion. These chapters lean on our most up-to-date knowledge of wrist and grip mechanics and walk you through the process of getting this motion going with all the most popular pick grips.
In fact, rather than focus only on the grip you currently use, I recommend that everyone actually try all the grips and motions we survey in these new lessons, as a way of speeding up the learning process. Each grip pairs with a slightly different wrist motion, but when you run through them this way it’s super natural and you may not even notice you’re making three different motions. This helps you recognize by feel what’s common to all these approaches and increases the likelihood that one will ‘click’ for you. This is, essentially, the clock face lecture but delivered in hands-on form without the numbers.
We’ve all seen the many “what motion am I using” threads here on the forum, and this is our answer to that. Every player of every level of playing experience can watch these new introductions and it should be stone cold clear exactly what’s going on. For players having trouble getting the downward pickslanting motion happening, or having trouble “looking for the pickslant” because they can’t figure out what they’re doing, we hope this gets everyone a step closer to getting the awareness and getting the skill.
In addition to the new wrist stuff, we included one chapter excerpted from the longer talk comparing Mike Stern’s movement to Albert Lee’s. It fits well with the new material and we’ll probably keep it for now.
We’re still lacking the downstroke escape aka “upward pickslanting” counterpart to this lesson but will film it over the next week or two and get it up there. Together these will be, we hope, the clearest introduction you can find anywhere to this deceptively complex topic.
Finally, we created a new “Getting Started” guide for the first page of the Primer that outlines how to use the Primer and what path you should follow as you try to get your mind around your technique. You can find that here:
If you check these out let us know what you think.