Just something I’ve been thinking about lately.
tl;dr - I was never a good alternate picker prior to CtC, I’ve cleaned my technqiue up a lot since I’ve been here, and I still have occasional breakthroughs. I’ve been working on recording an album lately and, while I still lean hard on my legato technique, I’m starting to incorporate more fast picked runs into my writing, and in a studio environment you really don’t have much tolerance for error - you’re listening back to your playng, and if it isn’t tight, you’re doing another take or practicing until it is. This has really lit a fire under my ass.
One of the things I’ve realized is, I was never really unconsciously aware of it at the time, but I played a lot of bluesier stuff before I got into more technical playing, and always had a tendency to kind of, for lack of a better word, work my pick angle a little and sort of micro-adjust it with my fingers while playing. And, that carried over to my my faster playing.
And, I’m realizing that on fast picked runs, I’m starting to stop doing this, and when I do, things almost immediately get more percussive and rhythmically tighter. That sort of machine-gun like regularity in a fast picked run has always been really challenging for me, and I still don’t think I’m quite there yet, but when the pick feels like it’s being kept static and just moving back and forth through its pickstroke, rather than sort of moving around a little bit as I play, suddenlu thinks feel MUCH tighter.
Didn’t even realize it was happening until I started to, well, stop doing it. Makes sense, though, any excess motions and adjustments not necessary to move the pick are a potential source of slop, and the whole point of a directional pick escape is you just lock in and let the stroke move the pick for you, and after a couple decades of picking poorly, it feels like I’m finally starting to internalize that.