Picking technique videos

Technique Critique
#1

[6 new photos added to shared album] Guitar Videos

Above is a link to a Google Photos album with 6 videos (3 regular speed, 3 slow motion): DSX, USX, and part of the Cliffs of Dover intro.

It was surprisingly finicky to set up a decent angle, and ultimately I had to stand up in just the right spot to make it work (my wife saw this and thinks I’m crazy). I used a Swiss Pick for better contrast rather than my usual black tortex pick.

I can definitely appreciate the ease of using a magnet mount, and would gladly pay someone to make one for me honestly (or maybe someone can send me the DIY instructions?)

Anyway, I’ve been practicing now for a few weeks after not really playing at all for 20 years. Appreciate any observations/feedback.

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#2

I’m getting a “can’t find link” message, not sure if anyone else can see them.

#3

Fixed! Try the link now

#4

Hey @Brandon8o, great filming!

Long story short, both tremolos look great! Those are the motions you want to use in your fast lead playing.

The motions in Cliffs of Dover, however, look a bit different - and for lack of a better word - more laboured. Maybe this is just because you are playing the lick at slow/medium speeds, where you can afford more inefficiencies.

I’d aim to play the same passage with a motion that’s closer to your “USX” tremolo video. As usual the advice in this case would be to just go for it and play the lick fast and see what happens!

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#5

Sounds good, I think maybe I’ll try doing more pentatonic exercises and see if I can just get a smooth consistent attack. I feel like I was never really able to play smooth and fast pentatonics. So the more scattered approach with the Cliffs lick is probably a product of getting ahead of myself before making sure I can play these scales consistently at fast speeds to begin with.

#6

My wife actually filmed all my technique critique videos :stuck_out_tongue: But she does think I’m crazy for the whole speed obsession thing. She may not be entirely wrong.

I thought your clips looked great too. While I am not positive, I suspect the USX tremolo motion you are doing isn’t the same motion you’re doing when playing the EJ licks. Hard to say for sure since the speed is lower. But a quick little test you can do to sanity check it is play a measure or 2 of tremolo that goes right into an EJ lick and watch that right hand closely to see if anything changes. I know this was a problem for me early on. Any left hand involvement made my right hand change, just because the motion wasn’t totally baked in yet. Another thing that helped me was playing tremolo melodies.

Anyway, great playing! Good luck and it will be exciting to see where this goes when the USX becomes totally rote.

#7

Nice dude! Cliffs of Dover is coming along great!

It looks like in that little Cliffs of Dover snippet you’re changing to a DSX on the last lick which might be intentional - but you started in a slightly pronated hand position and end up pronating even more as you continue through the phrase; as @tommo mentioned it looks a bit different than your tremolo technique.

I think you mentioned in another thread you were kind of a DSX/UWPS guy, correct me if I’m wrong - I’m the same way and I found the gamechanger for me to figure out the USX motion was to almost over exaggerate a supination hand position so that the upstrokes were really coming away from the guitar body quite considerably. I always subscribed to “as small as possible” pickstroke mantra for fast playing pre CtC, so I was pretty surprised when these types of lines started feeling really smooth when my upstrokes were coming like a mile high off the guitar :joy:

#8

Yes, that’s totally right and was intentional (though maybe not advisable). I changed the fingering on the last segment which I can do pretty fast in chunks but is still halting when I try to put the whole thing together start to finish. Anyway, having the extra lower string allowed me to try an alternative way to play that last passage that made the final transition feel faster. That’s a work in progress and perhaps not what I should be doing when there’s still a lot of work to do as far as nailing down a consistent technique.

#9

This is something I absolutely will try more, and I appreciate that tip. I do feel like I make these tiny motions sometimes under the heading of it seeming efficient, but bigger motions seems to be the way to go from what I’m reading in the forums.

And yes, you’re right that my default natural tremolo is elbow with DSX.

#10

Although I keep trying to work on an USX method, I’ve decided to really stick with my more automatic natural wrist/elbow DXS approach for now. Descending 3nps passages can just use swiping (although I still need to practice that a lot as it continues to feel odd). Ascending 3nps stuff oddly actually feels pretty good with economy/sweep picking, so for some reason with that and I tend to use sort of a wrist/finger approach when I do it. Descending pentatonic passages feel smooth. Ascending pentatonics feel weird though (my brain naturally wants to start with a downstroke only when ascending, even though mechanically it shouldn’t matter whether going up or down to keep the same U-D sequence on each string) and that’s probably just a mental thing.

I’ll see if I can get another video up soon to get some feedback on a few of the licks I’ve been working on.

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