Not sure if I even can get any faster with what I’m doing right now.
Your techniqe looks fine to me, how long have you practiced this? As you get used to it, you can take a lot of the pickslant out.
Ever since I’ve learned about it, but hearing about people overblowing how it could cause arthritis, make you lose your hand and obliterate your playing in its entirety, I got insecure and stopped training it, haha.
What you think of me using the finger joints so much?
When was that?
Any finger joint motion is fine, there are so many different ways to pick a string, it really comes down to your own efforts in what is most effective for your hands, we all have majorly different types of hands and different best ways to pick.
In my opinion if you just keep practicing you will feel what works. You have a great alternate picking motion from what I can see. I would say just keep hammering away at it. But really try to do it with a musical line, not an excersise. I make that work out excersise mistake regularly.
I felt like I was doing it all the time. I don’t know of any crosspickers that do that so I don’t really know if it hinders your speed or not. I feel my finger joint movements are very exaggerated.
Thanks for answering, appreciate that. I’ll keep on working on it.
Checkout Martin Miller. He uses finger/grip motion as his mechanic and can play Tumeni Notes and Glass Prison. He’s actually cleaner than most wrist players who do the same thing (in terms of not hitting muted strings and only playing the intended notes). I do think this technique lacks power and also speed in crosspicking, but it’s still fast enough for what most people are interested in playing.
The important thing to remember when doing crosspicking or any motion taught around here is that it should be capable of going at the target speed very quickly. It may be sloppy but the speed should be there. If it’s not, you’re either doing it wrong and/or it’s not the best one for you. Try one of the the 3 or 4 ways to crosspick! :
Edit:
I should add one really interesting thing about Martin Miller’s crosspicking is that he constantly moves from his shoulder/elbow to “track” (move over top of the string he wants to play). So his fingers do the motion that escapes the strings in both direction and the shoulder/elbow takes care of putting the pick where it needs to be. This could be why he’s so accurate as compared to most of the wrist based crosspickers who play at these speeds. They have to cover more ground and little accidents are bound to happen at those tempos. Hence the swiping you’ll see in players like Steve Morse and Andy Wood. That’s not a knock on them either, they sound great. It’s just collateral damage of those types of wrist techniques.
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the easiest way to tell if you are doing something right is if you are able to get at least SOME correct repetitions at the target tempo (and of course you don’t want to feel any pain, discomfort etc. etc.).
So this is a test you can do on your own, pretty early on in the process of experimenting with a new technique. You try the technique at the intended target speed, and maybe most repetitions will be a mess. But if you do get some repetitions that are correct (or close to correct), then you know you are probably on the right track and it may be worth investing more time in it.
Conversely, if you never get any correct reps or if you feel like the technique is fully incapable of speeding up, no amount of “practice” will fix that.
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