Please help me find a way to smooth picking

Technique Critique
#1

Hi,
I’ve been playing for 10 years and I’ve been able to play something advanced pieces like Turkish March or Winter by Vivaldi. But I was never able to play faster than 130. My pickibg technique was to play my pick paralel to the string and hold it loose enough to pasa the string. Which was fine miś passing from one string to next but not for tremolo. Now I’m tryng to find a new way but I can’t have nice, smooth and constat attack for life. I ve been tooling with my grip and have placement but I ce never quiet found one where everything was okay. Can you Please help? Here are some examples. Let me know If more are needed.

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#2

Great filming angles!!!

I see a lot of the pick getting snagged on the string. It’s causing the amount of edge picking to be different on the upstrokes vs the down strokes and just in general probably robbing you from the ‘smoothness’ that you’re looking for in a fast picking motion.

Maybe try some different pick shapes? Looks like your pick is very pointy and you’ll probably need more edge picking than what you’re using if you’re set on that style of pick. You can also experiment with how tightly you hold the pick and how deep it is going as both of those things can contribute to snagging.

Don’t be afraid to make the pick strokes bigger either. The motion you are using looks like it might be trapped in both directions and that will cause other issues even once this smooths out. Sometimes intentionally allowing the string to hit (i.e. “rest stroke”) the next adjacent string (so either the “D” or “B” string since you are tremoloing on the “G” string) helps in making it escape in one direction.

So I guess that’s a lot of changes I’m suggesting but that makes sense, right? :slight_smile: If you determine something to be not working for you, we’ve got to change something. Good news is you don’t appear speed limited or anything. Though, you may be holding back and could probably go even faster. Again, another change :slight_smile:

Anyway, great start! I’m sure once you find the right combination of motions you’ll be doing some pretty fast and smooth picking.

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#3

Hey, the two things that jump out are as Joe mentioned, you seem to be making a fully trapped motion. Are you familiar with Usx and Dsx?
Second it seems that maybe the downstroke is getting a bit jammed. Can you feel this as you play? In the slow mo section, it looks like you are having to force the downstroke a little more than the upstrokes. This could be happening due to the wrist motion you are making, rather than the amount of edge picking, or a combination of these.

With your arm and hand position, you look like you could make a fast dsx motion. At the moment, it looks like you are forcing the downstroke straight down towards the next string. If you alter your wrist motion so the downstroke escapes, (moves slightly away from the guitar in a diagonal) you could hit on a fast dsx motion.

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#4

To me it looks like you are clenching too much and in order to make the pick strokes small. Doing that will tend to make the strokes uneven, which is what I’m hearing at least.

If you have to do that in order to play fast, I would play around a little more with it or grips, and angles to see if you can find a motion that requires a little less effort, and can get a more even pick stroke.

1 Like
#5

Hi @drumbly , great filming :slight_smile:

Like others have commented, you have great potential for fast picking but you seem to have

  1. a very small range of motion
    combined with:
  2. the pick getting stuck on the string (it seems to happen on downstrokes).

1 would not necessarily be a problem if it gave you the desired results, but in your case I think it’s worth asking yourself: are you intentionally trying to make the pickstrokes small? If so, what happens when you stop controlling the motion size and just try to pick fast?

2 could be due to a “garage spikes” problem (see link below), or maybe just to the fact that you hit the string with approximately zero edge picking. For the “quickest fix”, I would try to increase the amount of edge picking a little and see what happens.

TLDR: play a bit with the way you hold the pick so that upstrokes and downstrokes feel approximately equally smooth (no feeling of “stickiness”). Then, try to play a fast tremolo without worrying about making small motions. Just focus on going fast and smooth.

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#6

I can vouch for Tommo’s suggestion—it worked for me!
Not that I’m a Speed King now but at least I know how I CAN play fast and it’s a matter of synching up the hands and making the string changes work for me rather than against me. (I am a upward pick slant player who uses a downstroke escape motion—you can imagine the difficulty I had with technique books that wanted me to start passages on a downstroke and change strings after an upstroke!)