Question on hand placement with DWPS (Steve Morse, Troy Grady, John Petrucci)

Playing Technique
#21

You might be right about the change of the basic picking motion from wrist to forearm. I had also noticed that JP “attacks” the strings in a rather brutal way when he plays faster stuff.

Thanks for the video, I had never noticed that kind of change in the thumb position.

I noticed that I am actually struggling with picking on ONE string when I play the high e string and the b string, so I tried looking for videos that demonstrate how a string and the pick “interact”, and I found two that are helpful (see below). Which brings me to the question: is there content by CTC that actually shows how you pick a string in detail? I know this sounds crazy, but I have been focusing so hard on the string changes that I never really became aware of what it takes to play on ONE string.

1 Like
#22

https://youtube.com/shorts/qE0l-Y_j1lM

1 Like
#23

Thanks for the recommendations. What these videos deal with is the “muscular” aspect of the picking motion - what movements are involved at what phase of a stroke and they advice you not to use the same muscles for both the downstroke and the upstroke.

What I was trying to get at (and I think I wasn´t clear enough about this) is the difference between going “through” a string as opposed to letting the string dictate the movement of the pick.

This student of Anton Oparin here has a close-up of what I mean:

The videos from Troy above were helfpul in this regard too, because in some of the close-ups you can actually see how in the instant before crossing the string the pick gives in to the force and moves a little to the side.

I might actually do a video on my specific problem, which is as follows: sometimes when I play the high e oder b string, the pick will kind of “slide” over the strings as opposed to going “through” it, so that the pick does not end up at the same “height” that it had before encountering the stroke.