Paul Gilbert, Pick Point, and the "Cello-y Swish"

Playing Technique
#1

As some of you might’ve noticed, I will frequently recommend a positive pick point as feedback when I hear the pick attack has too much transient / “feels like it’s getting stuck on upstrokes.”

I haven’t really played guitar in a few months. Played for a bit (unplugged) and it felt / sounded bad, and the technique was obviously off. I tinkered with variables to see what I might’ve been forgetting with no success, until I started messing with the pick point.

After making it pretty positive, I noticed that it felt great, sounded great, and I could play pretty much all the stuff I did before. Since I was unplugged, I could hear the change in the attack easily, and the obvious “swish” that was taming the transients (this is a brand new .73mm Dunlop Flow btw).

This reminded me of that old Paul Gilbert video, so I watched it again and took a screenshot of his pick point:

Gilbert Pick Point
Gilbert Pick Point1107×972 22 KB

Hopefully you can tell (16 year old low res video lol), but the leading edge of the pick is almost perpendicular to his thumb… very positive pick point. Here’s the timestamp:

He mentions that he likes that “brushy kind of cello-y swish swish.” What he doesn’t say, and what I’m basing this whole theory on, is that he requires some degree of that “swish” in order for his tone / feel / technique to work.

You can achieve this with pick point, OR making the plane of the pick more perpendicular to the string (forgot what that is in CTC terms), and a combination of both. When he plays standing up with the guitar low (similar to Nuno), I would guess that he doesn’t use as much pick point.

My theory is that the “swish” automatically cuts your pick depth, increasing speed and reducing the “trapped” depth.

I would guess that if you find yourself frustrated with your technique, taking a step back and trying to find the “swish” and adjusting from there would be a good start.

Hope y’all jump in with some thoughts!

#2

Funny, I was talking to someone about this very thing a month or so ago. I think in Paul’s case the positive pick point (calling this PPP here on out) compensates for how supinated he is - his thumb’s approach angle, I guess you could say. Since I believe his natural escape is a very shallow DSX, if he didn’t use PPP with his amount of supination, he’d get garage spikes.

EDIT: this video’s great if you haven’t seen it, and that PPP is obvious.

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#3

My thought on this is that it is not so much that the angled 45 degree “swish” cuts the pick depth, so much as it makes the potential depth you might otherwise use not as critical as it might otherwise had been. This becomes more and more evident with higher degrees of angling, almost to the point that swiping can also become
more and more subtle as well. It does come with some trade offs though, and maybe more ideal use cases (more of my thoughts on that below). As an aside Paul Gilbert has also mentioned he focuses on using a more shallow pick depth in Intense Rock 1.

One trade off is the sound. There is such thing as too much swish, which will start to obscure the actual note and initial pick transient in favor of the swish noise. There is definitely a balance with this, and this becomes more apparent with pick type as well as how extreme the angle is. Another trade off is the tactile based feedback loop. With extreme angles, both the sound and the lack of feedback from the pick hitting the string might be off-putting to some, and the intensity of this depends on where you are picking. Picking where string tension starts to become more lax like picking above where poles of the middle pickup is to about the 1/2” or so area closer to the neck - where ever you may do it within this area, tends to add a bit more of that tactile feedback back into the equation versus inching closer to the bridge where the tension is higher and the pick may may be tempted to just graze over the strings with a weaker initial transient/attack. This might be even more exacerbated with heavier picks. 45 degrees seems to be probably the best starting point, and honestly very little, sometimes none at all thumb bending is required to achieve the 45 degrees depending on your preferred picking hand position.

I think it was a thread both I, and I I believe Pepe were in talking exactly about PPP. I think in Paul’s case some of his anatomy may cause some assumptions about exactly how supinated he really is. Most people who would expose that degree of their inner wrist outward would look way more supinated than Paul looks when observing where his hand is actually resting in conjunction. You would start to see the inner palm more clearly in most people, if you were only considering the wrist view as an indicator. I think that dissonance is pretty unique to him. I think he could lay his hand flat on the strings, and you would still see what looked like the underside of his wrist.

He may be very mild DSX, but in other footage I have seen, he appears more neutral. Paul may be a slippery one.

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#4

'twas a DM, but this has definitely come up on the forum, too.

Possibly, but I brought it up because his thumb is coming in at a diagonal to the strings (as opposed to someone like Anton Oparin who is pretty flat against the strings). Paul’s motion might be neutral/trapped (I argued such here in a thread I started where there’s an ancient video of him easily economy picking scales in both directions with almost no change to his setup), but he seems to swipe upstrokes occasionally and not downstrokes, so I still lean towards DSX being easier for him. And this is also why he has that positive pick point… if his motion were USX, neutral pick point would be more suitable, I think.

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#5

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wxhO82Zemhc?feature=share

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#6

So this is interesting because so much of this can be both situational and fluid throughout one’s playing career. These are things that may not be static. To maybe a big degree certain aspect are, but one can ask “what iteration of Paul are we analyzing?” How he has adapted his playing through his career and the things he has chosen to play in various stages throughout certainly reflect that and how have those things Influenced how he plays.

I also tend to be hesitant to make too many aha correlations with such things. I have a slightly positive pick point if I were to just look at my pick in my hand as I grab it, but that’s just where it happens to land in my fingers. It isn’t premeditated, it just is. however if I were to look at how the pick is actually hitting the string from the angle of my hand to them lookin down, I would say it is actually neutral. This is a point I believe you brought up in that other discussion I’m thinking about. Now, that said, I do not go out of my way to purposely hold the pick in that manner, its more just happenstance, and more than likely my playing was adjusted subconsciously around this than the other way around. I chalk it up to an idiosyncrasy.

Regarding swiping, my opinion is that to some degree swiping may be inevitable to some extent at really fast speeds no matter what your mechanics are. It’s really more how noticeable it is. Some could swipe, or skate as I call it in such a way that it may not be easily detected.

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#7

Totally agreed here. Excellent hand sync and muting (and pick depth control) save the day after a certain point.

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#8

@Fossegrim skate, that’s cool never thought of it like that

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#9

Never seen this one, I’ll check it out!

Definitely, and to clarify, I never intended to say “more swish = more speed”.

I’m thinking of it almost exactly like using a compressor to control transients relative to sustain elements. Once you understand compression in music production, the usage isn’t “I’m going to compress everything until it loses all transients.”

Similarly, once you understand the “swish” and what it does to your pick attack (transient), the usage isn’t “I’m going to make my picking as swishy as possible.” Rather, having enough of it so that the feel is more “even” (I think @Riffdiculous called it “garage spikes”).

I could subscribe to this. At my fastest / most difficult playing, I wouldn’t be surprised if most string changes were swiped to some degree, just suppressed as much as possible.

I remember practicing some single note string skipping stuff on acoustic and more or less swiping on purpose, but making it as unnoticeable as possible (@joebegly you were asking before about how I developed my picking). As I increased the speed near my max, the swiping was pretty subtle, but the cool thing is that the lower speeds actually had very little swiping.

Maybe swiping is something that should be practiced as a way to desensitize yourself to the feel, while making it sound as subtle as possible.

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#10

Well that’s at the heart of discussion now isn’t it? It may not be occurring at all at moderate to somewhat fast speeds, but once you are speeding up to the point where you have fractions of a second to make perhaps a more difficult string transition, you don’t really have the same freedom of movement that you do at moderate to moderate fast speeds. The technique may be largely the same, the shortened transition time may be the driver. It may not even happen on every iteration either. I think that’s kind of what you see with Paul too.

Personally speaking I think it’s more important to understand that it might happen, than it is to actually practice doing it. You still might want the good habit of trying to avoid it if possible, while being okay with the fact that it happens, unless of course you are doing for a textural effect.

Most people can detect it in the more extreme of cases.

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#11

Hi @Pepepicks66 I was really referring to your specific “wrist” motion. You have this ultra relaxed “forearm is totally still” thing going on even at your highest speeds. Typically even generally wrist-y players (i.e. Di Meola; (vintage) Petrucci; Andy Wood et al) will have some tension creep in at the highest speeds where the forearm appear to start moving indicating elbow is driving. You seem to avoid this and there aren’t many players I’ve seen who accomplish this. Paul Gilbert, Anton Oparin and João Matheus are a short list that comes to mind. So I’m curious if this just happened organically or if you noticed tension and tried to dial it out, etc.

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#12

Joe, I think some of these players do have additional tension creep in, it just manifests in different ways, and may look different to the eye, or maybe not be too apparent such as seeing additional elbow movement. I stopped at Paul on your list because you can see in some examples he indeed does appear to flex his forearm more when he is at his faster speeds. It doesn’t move, but you do see it bulge out a bit more which indicates there is more tension creeping in.

Regarding the wrist thing, I think some people may just have looser wrists or more range of translational motion with them so it appears they can move them more independently before they have to engage other parts of their arm.

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#13

That is a great point. And actually I just now recall a YT vid where he was demonstrating a fast Yngwie-ish lick and if I slowed things down I could see his forearm start to move just a little, in the same direction as his hand.

Still, I think this style of wrist-only picking and general great balance of tension is a skill that not many players exhibit. Not to the degree the players in my short list show. I’m sure there are others too but they came to my mind first. So, since we’ve got @Pepepicks66 here, I figured it would be fun to ask him how he arrived at his motion :slight_smile:

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#14

So obviously there’s an undesirable sound with noticeable swiping, but there’s also a jarring feel to it. One thing is being ok with it happening from a sound perspective (and at high speeds it’s harder to notice), but the feel of hitting two strings can be enough to throw off your entire technique.

When I would “practice” swiping, it’s not only about making it sound good, but also desensitizing myself to the feel of hitting two strings. I think being comfortable with the sensation helps you “be ok when it happens” accidentally.

This is also why I think the idea of starting with speed and “cleaning up” with practice works. I think it shifts your mindset to being ok with things sounding / feeling sloppy, which can almost entirely be attributed to swiping (assuming you have the raw tremolo speed, can play on beat, and have the notes memorized).

I think I had a few techniques going when I started playing fast (2003ish), the problem was that I didn’t know what they were, or how to tap into them at any given time, leading to tons of frustration when I would have an “off day” when nothing worked. Looking back on it, I think the first thing that clicked was elbow-ish DSX, and some kind of weird combination of fingers / wrist USX for harder string-skipping stuff.

Eventually, I minimized the amount of off days I had, but I didn’t know what exactly was going on.

I developed some pretty bad “golfer’s elbow” around 2015? A combination of the common flexor tendon, and looking back on it, likely lots of triceps. When I would play, elbow movements would cause considerable discomfort, which made it easy for me to tell when I would do them.

I figured out that I would be an elbow player whenever someone would say “yo play something real quick”
and I was anxious without any warm up, or when I would practice and would try to just play my max speed right out the gate. I think the motion is just easier for me (and I would guess, most people), since it’s similar to strumming for beginners.

I think it wasn’t until 2019 when I really started to dedicate time to warming up, and just stop primary elbow playing altogether.

What I do now I would guess is a combination of wrist (flexion or diagonal, not deviation), forearm rotation maybe? and fingers? I’ll have to record some more videos to tell.

Are you talking laxity, or less forearm muscles, or less muscular control? I’m not sure what would classify as “looser” wrists. For reference, I do tons of grip exercises (can do one arm pull ups) as well as push stuff (started doing tuck planche on my knuckles).

#15

Thanks for the story! Very interesting.

Tell me about this part. You just went “elbow…NO!!!”? Did you monitor for tension build up? Did you try moving a different part of your hand/wrist than when you did more elbow?

I’m really trying to tease out how you learned the wrist dance so well lol! I can do it, but I had to work at it pretty intentionally. I feel like you stumbled upon it intuitively though, maybe?. Basically in all but your absolute fastest playing, when you do a downstroke, your forearm moves in the opposite direction. Vice-versa on your upstrokes. This indicates your forearm is really relaxed. For my purposes, this is agnostic of the whole Anton discussion of it’s required/not required etc. I’m just curious how you developed yours.

Agreed.

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#16

Correct. This is on the en of the jarring type that is painfully obvious and falls into what Troy named garage spikes. This type has the potential to knock the pick out of your fingers depending on how you play and the degre you are doing it, and probably a good indicator of a very strict single escape player. I consider this type outside of this scope of discussion because this is the type where most are painfully aware of it, and would try to avoid in favor of a different method to facilitate an escape.

So this is where the divergence in perspective lies If I were to say I would ever have a view on this. And this is really my perspective only, because I’m someone who never has the available practice time to deep dive into single techniques subjects like this. There seems to be notion that swiping is always something one is cognizant of and is a shortcoming in one’s technique. If you are doing the subtle or “more gooder” kind, it likely doesn’t register to you or anyone else in many cases that you have even done it, and from your perspective in that moment you just as well have made a clean escape. This is why I say don’t practice it at all (unless you are on the opposite spectrum and can only make clean escapes and want the extra gnarl) and practice to the best of your ability to make clean escapes/transitions. If you notice them creep in now and then, big whoop. By spending time purposely and intently practicing various degrees of swiping, you may essentially be over complicating the matter than you would just practicing making as clean as possible alternate picking string transitions. Again that’s just me. That’s how I would think about it and approach it, which is to say I wouldn’t. :laughing:

Of course this all depends on the goal at hand. If you wanted to hone in your skills to be hyper sensitive to it, by all means, do it up. The one time I would consider practicing this purposely to that degree, is if I wanted to really be “the swiping guy”, or to showcase the differences between the varying degrees of it, when it is barely on the cusp of being audible, and a clean transition. Even then, almost everyone that does try to showcase swiping usually uses a more audible, exaggerated version of swiping to demonstrate it.

Yes, or rather the appearance of it. More like non pathological hyper mobility. Just like Chuck Berry or James Brown could dance around looking like their foot was broken and hanging limply off their ankles, though neither were obviously suffering from muscular dystrophy. Could someone learn that to an extent? Sure. Is some of that maybe just genetic hyper mobility, probably. I dunno.

I have said this here before, but I have a hard time believing many people actually use pure deviation as their only picking motion even if it may look like they do from a distance. I can’t even move my wrist like that if I were to just try to wave it back and forth in the air with out it turning into some form of what I believe they call “dart thrower” in these parts. I can only do that by holding it flat on my knee and even then it’s sus deviation at best.

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#17

When I had the elbow pain from playing, it was easy to monitor: feel pain = my elbow is taking over. I don’t think it was ever tension as much as the movement. Even now, there’s tension in the sense that I can tell I’m holding isometric contractions to keep my elbow more or less fixed (as well as an isometric contraction pushing my hand into the guitar).

At this point, I’m a firm believer that you need some degree of tension to hold things in place. I think that people echoing the mantra of “you should feel no tension” is actually counterproductive. I’m also experimenting with some degree of isometric holds before playing.

So is this what “wrist dance” is all along? I tried to get an answer in the other thread, but it started to feel like it was going nowhere.

Took a quick video; this is my “natural” motion, I wasn’t trying to do the “wrist dance.”

I definitely see / feel what @joebegly described. If that’s the case, I feel like that’s easy? I anchor my hand with the hypothenar eminence of my hand, and my elbow is fixed in space, so if I move my wrist, my forearm will move up on downstrokes and vice versa.

If you anchor your hand anywhere else, then the “wrist dance” doesn’t happen.

I also notice my thumb moving in the video, which probably looks more noticeable because it’s not actually hitting a string?

I actually agree. When I would “practice” it, it’s no more than a dozen or so reps of a given line, not like hours of dedication.

A doctor did tell me I have some degree of hyper mobility, so maybe there’s something there. Maybe we should convince the players that can do this (apparently @joebegly already has a list, lol) to do a quick hyper mobility test, lol.

Same, I tried doing it in the air and it’s just not a thing for me. I can do flexion / extension, and maybe diagonal?

I think if you were to force wrist deviation as a movement, you would likely get some kind of injury in the long run. Pure speculation here, but maybe that happened to players that develop issues into their career (Steve Morse)?

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#18

Yeah, I also believe that whole no tension thing is a bit of a misnomer that has carried over through the ages because it traditionally is used as a sweeping statement to mean without excessive tension sans any real guidance or examples of what excessive or “no tension” really is or the subtlety of it. You obviously have to have some tension, even a fair degree in some circumstances or else you are not playin’ nuthin’.

I’ve seen that term here recently too, and I’m not sure if that’s what it means or not either, but that description to me seems oddly see-saw-ish. Maybe I’m just not visualizing it correctly though. I kind of always get a kick out of the terminology here. It’s so colorful.

I tend to be a little wary of trying to replicate non-guitar in hands picking. You can maybe try to approximate it in air, but there are definitely variables missing when you do so. For the hell of it I tried to look at what my elbow/forearm does so I could keep up with the discussion in the thread, and my elbow and upper arm tends to stay fixed and doesn’t move.

That would be a sight.

I think flexion and extension are easy in general for a lot of people to do than deviation ever would be. The easiest general hand movement for me is kind of a spastic gyrating rotation, probably a lot of people fall into that category.

Unfortunately age almost always takes its toll.

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