Hi folks,
I joined this site a few months ago and have been having a blast absorbing all the material in videos and the forum. I recently got a bicep injury at the gym (doing chin ups…) that results in a lot of pain when playing the guitar, so I thought it’d be a good chance to take a break and go over videos I’ve recorded recently to check my progress on pickslanting and crosspicking.
Here are some clips - I’d appreciate your thoughts, particularly on the crosspicking which I am struggling with the most. I am adding my comments and self critique below.
- DWPS vs UWPS
I think I am probably a UWPS dominant player because it took me a bit to get used to DWPS. First I tried the gypsy style, then transitioned to using less forearm and more elbow to make it ‘closer’ to my UWPS (perhaps something I should reconsider after this injury haha).
From the clip I notice in the DWPS ascending version that the last upstroke on each string is different than the others, which might mean the regular upstrokes are not escaping as well. Do you agree? Could it be some string tracking mental “artifact”?
UWPS is pretty natural for me but I do notice it is a bit "violent", as you can see the bottom string is moving with my palm - I think I should work on digging in less perhaps.
- 2WPS
Before finding CtC I would do this sequence with alternative picking ascending and economy descending. Alternate picking felt weird descending and economy picking was error prone ascending. Becoming conscious of DWPS has helped with both.
As you might be able to see in the clip, because I learned the descending one consciously, the transition from one PS to the other feels more gradual than the ascending version. The ascending one feels like I am doing an "emergency" DWPS for that one note. This always made that note stick out dynamically. I am not sure which way to go here - the emergency one might have the advantage of less planning for improvised playing if I can work on decreasing the volume, but smoothing out the motion might work better for these kinds of licks.
- Crosspicking
When I found out about this in this site, I got the itch to abandon all motions and figure out the one motion to rule them all, applicable in all scenarios! (I know, I know). So I started practicing it too right before my injury. I wasn’t able to nail it - doing the motions based on the clockface didn’t seem to click with me as much, but thinking left and right kind of helped. If I locked the wrist and used the elbow as anchor I first came up with this weird whole arm pendulum motion which sort of worked except for the rapid fatigue it caused, then I tried using just the wrist and just going for it:
I am not sure if I am stringhopping in this clip. Looking at it kind of seems like a 9o2 (or 3o10 since I am lefty? :P) but I can’t tell for sure. What do you think? I first do the ascending arpeggio and try to keep the motion going for improvised descending lines. The arpeggio works pretty well but then I lose track of the motion and go in and out of pickslanting and random legato haha. I think as long as I get the motion right, it’s a matter of getting used to it for general playing. At the end I try to do the 3 string roll, arpeggio style, but the accuracy isn’t very good.
In the second clip I try to go as fast and hard as I can to see where it takes me. I believe this felt on the verge of being stringhopping. I see a curved path in the video similar to the first clip but indeed towards the end of the run I see extension on both upstroke and downstroke which doesn’t look so good. After the first run I try to change my setup a bit and see what happens but it doesn’t work very well either, I think there are a lot of double hits on the bottom string there. I guess try different things until it clicks is the way to go from here?
Thanks for reading, this turned out pretty long!