Please evalute my picking, have no speed

picking technique or lack of

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Some people here will be able to tell a huge amount from a distance, but can you make the camera zoom much closer to your picking hand, so it looks more like the other video that one typically sees here? I know that such things are hard to do without a Magnet, but it’s probably worth the effort! :smiley:

Thanks for filming, this is a good enough angle for now!

In short, my first impression is that what you are doing here is musically good, but mechanically inefficient: we call this “stringhopping” and it means you are re-using the same muscles for both downstrokes and upstrokes.

So good news! You are not “slow”, you are just using the wrong motions for fast picking. We just gotta find you a new motion that works! :slight_smile:

Since you are a subscriber I’d recommend getting started by watching this whole section:

This case study in particular might give you some ideas how to move forward:

ok thanks, I saw Troys video on string hopping and I didn’t think I was doing that but maybe I am then. I also notice even when trying to do tremolo picking I seem to get cramped up quickly and the same happens when I try and play fast. I really appreciate the input I need to figure this out so i can play fast jazz bebop lines.
Ken

Let’s see a tremolo video and we take it from there :slight_smile:

PS: Re: string hopping I may be wrong of course. The test is always the same: how fast can you push this picking motion?

These jazz lines are fairly complex, with varying numbers of notes per string. What happens when you try to pick something more structured, say 4 or 6 notes per string? How fast can you push it and how does it feel?

I’ll make another video in 5 minutes

In general, if you can’t go fast, and/or you feel tension when you try to go fast, and your guitar picking speed is way slower than your table tap test results, that’s usually enough for us to say “stringhopping”.

In reality there may be some subtle differences as to what is actually happening at the level of the motions you’re making, i.e. maybe there are different kinds of stringhopping or something — it’s kind of academic. If your tests are way faster than your playing, and you have tension, that’s enough for us!

Please take the tests and record the metronome values so you know what your real potential is. This way you’ll know for sure if your technique really is limited by some physical factor, or if you just need to find a different motion that gets closer to your tapping speed.

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Tremelo
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ok thanks Troy I appreciate it

I vote for the motion starting at around 10 secs! Looks and sounds the most consistent to me.

I would guess that particular segment is upstroke escape, so you could start testing it on licks that only change strings after upstrokes - see how that feels!

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Not sure what you mean by that ?

I mean that the motion that you demonstrate around 10 seconds of your tremolo video looks the most promising, in my opinion.

As for the upstroke escape, here’s a link to the definition, images / animations there are worth a few thousand words :slight_smile:

To test if my observations are correct, try to use that motion with patterns that only change strings after upstrokes

OK thanks will look at these videos again… It’s alot more complicated then I thought