Hi Drew! Yes, re: hand pressure on the bridge, I would say there shouldn’t feel like pressure, just resting. I don’t notice any particular difference between these motions. I mean, from a few feet away, and especially to the untrained eye, they all look exactly the same. That’s how minor the differences are.
RE: frustration, of course I hear you on that. We’ve all been down this road. But I think you have to take a few steps back here. If you didn’t tell me you feel frustrated, I would certainly never know from your playing. It all sounds great. As I said, that lick in the “USX3” clip is great and I would steal it and use it myself. The attack is smooth, the playing is perfectly clean, what’s not to like? If there’s some kind of failure of technique I’m not really seeing it or hearing it!
If you learned precisely zero other picking motions, and just took the motion you’re using in that one clip, and built up a whole vocabulary of those phrases, over different kinds of tonaliies (major, minor, dominant, and so on), and learned to connect them over chord changes, you could stand next to anyone. How many alternate picking motions does Goerge Benson really have for lead lines? One? One and a half? His technique doesn’t even permit playing the line you’re playing in the “DBX” clip. And the guy can wipe the floor with anyone.
I don’t know what your musical goals are, but let’s say it’s improvisational type playing, playing through changes, that kind of thing. You can take just take the motions you have here in these few clips, which are already more than George has, and work on musical vocabulary. Lick writing and transcribing, connecting those phrases through changes. Any kind of line, single escape or double or whatever. Mix it up. You have the core of the physical chops now for this.
As you do this, you might be better served by placing the overt “working on mechanics” aspect a little toward the back burner and focusing on the musical side. You know enough about picking technique now to observe and notice cleanliness when it happens, both by sound and feel. This is a huge advantage compared to not knowing and being in the dark. As these little moments of cleanliness happen, you will make mental note of it, because it’s a thing you care about, and this will make it more likely you’ll repeat them in the future. Over the long haul, that’s how you improve accuracy, i.e. through the awareness of when something is accidentally a little better than it was before.
Again, I don’t know what your musical goals are, and it might be something other than improv. I’m just using that as an example of what I would do if I were in this situation. Just a little perspective.
Keep up the good work.
