Off the forum now back need a bunch of feed back

Technique Critique
#1

Hi, ive been here since July life kinda happened and I didn’t use the forms much and had to focus on music university with me starting term 2 now.
ive been trying to get my playing faster after years of thinking I never could be good , sometimes when I play I focus so much and sometimes I don’t. that causes things to work or completely crash and its like a wheel of fortune but for picking.

ive been trying to smooth my picking with people here advising me im a downstroke escape player. however im trying some upstroke escape. and also thinking logically of my escape trajectory depending on the context rather then mindlessly alternate pick

and im still working on my tremolo which feels less fuzzy and out of control then when I first started but when I record myself and use a BPM finder online I get 143 which must be wrong or im not fast enough and to be honest I do struggle w guitar stamina from having a 2 year hiatus until last march . ps I do feel this depends on the guitar im playing, I usually play V shaped guitar but ive been playing my Strat type lately

first video is that of a tremolo test plus a little EJ string skipping 5’s lick ive been working on, I can do it slowly and medium accurately with the correct escape but I cant go faster and clean then the video in this post , do u think its just matter of getting it under my fingers first then trying really fast?

#2

Your tremolo is somewhere around 180-185bpm for 16ths, and that’s a good start! It’s elbow, so you might want to see how you do with more DSX-friendly patterns for a bit.

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#3

thank u for letting me know how much, everything I ve used to measure the time has been so unreliable id like to know how u did it.

Ive been trying DSX stuff and its going great minus the ocasional weird pick angle some repetitions but I also am planning to do usx only in the context of when its necessary like licks going from the highest string to the lowest one, I picked this lick on purpose to make my usx a bit stronger, don’t get me wrong! I still use dsx for mostly everything but it feels weird not doing it when it comes to phrases that need usx

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#4

No problem! Honestly, I’ve been using metronomes for decades, so I can just tell approximately what speed something is as soon as I can find a pulse to lock onto. In your case it felt 180ish to me, so to double-check I set my metronome and played it while playing your vid.

If you really want to get nuts, record a tremolo and put it in a DAW, then play it at half speed and count how many notes occur in one second. It should be around 12 with where you are now.

And I totally understand the desire to get some USX, or mixed escape, stuff happening! I used elbow for a very long time, but ultimately went with wrist as it seemed to have a better balance of speed potential and freedom of escape.

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#5

Hey there! I think like @Riffdiculous pointed out, your tremolo is good and looks like a wrist-elbow DSX.

I see you are mentioning you are also trying USX stuff — is that what you are trying in the last 5-ish seconds of the vid?

If so, couple things you should know to avoid spinning your wheels:

  1. the pentatonic lick you are doing, played with pure alternate, does not look like a USX lick to me, because you have a mixture of upstroke and downstroke string changes. So it’s more of a “mixed escape” lick. Is this the “Eric Johnson Fives” lick? If so, the way to play this with USX would be via a mixture of alternate picking and downstroke sweeps.

  2. I don’t think you are doing a USX motion for the pentatonic lick. I think you are doing your usual “primary DSX” motion when possible, and then use a different direction of wrist motion — a sort of “secondary” wrist motion, for the upstroke string changes. This could in principle work, but you have to check whether you can do this at higher speeds to make sure your strategy is mechanically efficient.

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#6

hi tommo! yes it is the Eric johnson five after I posted it I realized it isn’t pure USX especially on strings that have more then one note hat needs to be played, I think I will post a more in depth video of the lick again today, your note on it being a dsx motion even thought im trying to do usx is getting me to think. do u advice recording it as fast as I can even if its sloppy just to see if the motion is correct? again thank you for the feed back

#7

Do you feel any tension or pressure on the string when you are tremolo’ing your DSX motion? If so, you should try using less pick and see how it feels. You could record yourself tremolo’ing in slow-motion in a Magnet angle and see how much of the pick touches the strings and if the pick gets stuck on the way up or down which could introduce unnecessary tension. Cheers and good luck!

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