I’m not sure if that is true.
My guess is that you reach a point here where you are free of ‘unconscious’ ingredients.
I think if you worked on a motion for a while and know how to play overall (which both seems to be true in your case), you won’t get big improvements without replacing, removing or adding ingredients.
If this feels smooth (and ‘just’ weird due to inacurracy), you might be on the right track.
If you can hit 150, that’s a solid speed. The string tracking accuracy will come with time. I’ve been working on it about 18 months or so… and its a HUGE learning curve. Honestly… its probably the most difficult thing I’ve had to learn on the guitar… but its paying off bigtime. My playing sounds so much better now.
Second thought … it might be a tracking issue actually. The hand has to move a little bit to get the strings tracked, even on a 3-strings roll - at least for me. If the hand (palm) is too much anchored (or kind of “de-sync” wrt tracking) I can’t reach the higher string correctly.
Here’s another clip focusing on inside change. It’s a 4332 pattern starting on an upstroke.
I’m trying to figure out how that inside string skip should feel. I’m thinking it should be something like in the clip, that is an almost straight trajectory actually (instead of concave/convex), from outer the B string to inside the D string. I think it’s not only about how you escape the B string, but also how you hit the D string. I tend to crash and bury the pick too much here I think.
Nice work! I would resist the urge overthink these things. This looks exactly the same as the previous clip which tells me it’s essentially learned, or starting to be. As such you’re unlikely to change small elements of it like what individual pickstrokes “look” like. And I don’t know what the point would be anyway since there is nothing really wrong about what we’re seeing here.
If this feels pretty good then just pick up the tempo until it’s no longer accurate or clean. Does it degrade gracefully? Meaning does the movement feel smooth at all speeds and just get a little sloppy? If so that’s good, you have found a movement that is efficient. If you film that test I think could be instructive to look at.
If instead you hit a speed limit before sloppy sets in, or if this is the speed limit were seeing here, then it is possible this is not a completely efficient movement. Generally, movements which are efficient will go faster than they can be controlled, with no feeling of mechanical awkwardness, just a gradually increasing error rate. If you can’t push this into a zone where it is really fast but like half the notes are missing, then that might be a hint that it’s not the right movement.
First of all the last clip looks great to me!
Stringtracking, at least imo, is probably the main challenge in crosspicking.
Furtheron to me that is the main difference to 2WPS in scaleplaying.
I’m not sure if that’s the case, but I guess a pattern like the forward roll can be played faster than you could play repetitions between the D and B string (regardless of escaping).
The reason is that in that pattern the tracking is not repeating, or doesn’t have to.
After the stringskip there’s enough time to play the inside change without adjusting the hand position and that avoids repetition for tracking.
That’s probably very simplified (and to be clear just guessing), but the main point is, stringtracking can get pretty complicated for crosspicking.
Yeah, absolutely. string-tracking has been a much larger problem than I thought it would ever be. I just started trying those 3 string roles, and man are they tricky. It’s not that I’m not clearing the strings or not completing the stroke… it’s just that I continue to have problems getting to the right spot at the right time.
A lot of my issues stem from years of phrasing things that neglect outside picking transfers. I am really making up for that now.
That’s right, with the risk of developing a mental block… anyway I went back to it without too much thinking about it. Actually focusing more on the second part of the pattern, but …well … not thinking about it too much in fact. I feel I’m making progress on it.
Here’s some take I did tonight.
Not very clean and couple misses here and there but I’m confident the motion is smooth. And I get the motion and can work it at slower speed to polish the playing.
This is still pretty clean! I can see the airballs and the “pushes”, when you press against a string without actually plucking it. These are common picking errors in these kinds of lines. But overall this is still fairly polite. Can you take this movement into a tempo region that is even faster, but where there is dramatic accuracy fall-off? What does the movement look like then? If you film that, I’d like to see it.
It’s a test worth doing to determine what the potential for this or any movement is. For example, you might hit a point where you simply can’t go faster and the accuracy stays more or less the same. That could indicate that this movement is speed limited lower than we’d like.
Or, you might be able to go faster but parts of the movement change. You might see the forearm component get smaller or perhaps even go away at higher speeds. Maybe that’s a hint about how efficient that component of this movement is.
Or maybe the opposite might happen - the whole movement might become forearm if that movement actually holds up better than the other ingredients at higher speeds.
So anyway, just a kind of a stress test to see what happens.
Nice… smooth playing!! I just started practicing the rolls… and they are still choppy, and the outside skip sounds different than the inside one. I wish I practiced them earlier, since they are a great exercise. I’ve tried practicing 5 string rolls, and doing rolls on a classical guitar… just so I can better learn the sudden string skip.
@Troy : I wonder what speed would be a valid ‘stress test’ for these 3-strings roll. I don’t really work with a metronome, though I sometimes check kind of loosely. I know I can get the 43232 roll at around 140bpm, not clean and inconsistent timewise but I can feel I could get it clean if I put the work. After that it starts to feel almost like slow strumming (or raking) in a sense that I lose the feel of a doing roll (though interestingly enough at those speed it really sounds like a banjo). I’ll post a clip next week (I have a busy week-end)
More generally I wonder at which speed these rolls can be played clearly, in a musical sense, by the best players out there. What about Andy Wood and Molly Tuttle playing actual tune ? something like 140 I think, is that right ?
The tempo doesn’t matter so much - it just matters that you’re going fast enough to cause the movement to degrade.
Yes, Molly can do this quite easily around 150 as she does below. But again, doesn’t really matter, and you don’t need a metronome. What matters is that you’re pushing it to the point that the movement degrades. Movements which are efficeint will degrade. Those that are not will simply hit a wall and stop.
It makes sense. Though sometimes it’s not thta obvious the difference between ‘degrade’ and ‘hit a wall’. In my case with this motion, it’s more that ‘winging it’ makes the pickstrokes fall apart, in a sense that they miss the target.
In retrospect I think that the best way to sort it out is NOT to think about that string skip, but to consider the following pattern and play it like it should be. The string skip will put itself in place naturally. I realize that it contradicts the title of that thread and I should plead guilty for that 
Definitely right on that. The same goes for any 3 note repeating pattern on multiple strings. Like picking twice, then picking once on the adjacent string. The change from outside to inside happens too fast to be able to consciously think about. So basically, it all has to become ingrained in your muscle memory and then slowly smoothed over time. And there’s no real shortcut to learning it; you just gotta practice it for several weeks until it feels natural. Same with the roll.
Here’s a basic roll, trying to keep semi-decent pickstrokes with decent timing (lots of misses for sure)