Really cool footage of Jimmy Herring's picking hand

Playing Technique
#1

A coworker who’s a huge fan of his sent me this.

Video starts at 8:58, where the footage shifts to a close-up of Herring’s hand, in front of the guitar body. The angle is head on, wrong for most of the usual CtC analysis, but you can see what his wrist is doing, and it’s pretty cool.

At 8:58, he’s making what looks like a crosspicking motion, and kind of a unique (I think) one - his hand isn’t really deviating or deflecting through the strings, so much as his wrist is rotating above them, resulting in an escaped stroke in either direction. The speed isn’t exactly blistering through here, but it’s still reasonably fast playing.

At 9:11, he switches to a more “traditional” back and forth picking motion, for some trem picking along a single string.

By 9:15, he’s back to the rotational motion, and again the notes aren’t blisteringly fast, but it’s fast enough for most jazz, bluegrass, or fusion playing.

It’s pretty cool footage. Guy can play, for sure.

2 Likes
#2

Yeah, it does look a bit like a x-picking motion, but it’s hard to tell. Using a lot of rotational movement definitely has its perks.

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#3

Jimmy is great, and he does have a couple different modes that he clicks into, both double- and single-escape. In fact, we do what I think is a pretty good ten-minute walk through of his technique right here. The Jimmy analysis starts at about 45 minutes and runs to about 53 minutes or so:

We reached out to him earlier in the year or end of last year - they told us to call back, so it seemed like it might be something we can arrange. Great player and would be happy to do it.

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#4

I missed that, somehow - I’ll have to check that out. And if you guys ever do get him into the studio, I’d love to see that - the jam band scene isn’t really my thing, exactly, but he’s a great enough player that genre doesn’t really matter.