Rest stroke repping to correct string hopping?

Playing Technique
#1

I’m a little confused on how to approach practicing something since joining CtC. The concepts overall have helped me gain a lot of speed without trying to work up to it. However, After reading a ton of posts I’m finding a constant theme as it relates to getting better. You find the best picking motion for raw speed and comfortability and you practice at a decent speed where things naturally come together over time. You don’t practice slowly with a metronome to hammer out finer details. This is how I’m perceiving it at least, so I could be dead wrong in my interpretation.

My issue is string hopping when changing strings. You’re supposed to practice rest strokes… but I can’t practice rest strokes fast… but I’m not supposed to practice things slowly, even if it’s the same motion as playing fast?

Can someone clarify this for me because I’m going insane trying to stay at fast-ish tempos trying to discover the right motions that might make things come together. I think I’ve found a good single string tremolo picking mechanic, but it falls apart with string hopping when I start switching strings. I feel that I need to practice rest strokes slowly to get the feeling of them under my hands, but it seems like that’s the wrong thing to do based on the CtC methodologies.

How do I do this properly?

#2

Sorry for being pedantic - but string hopping is the opposite of a good mechanics :slight_smile: I think what you mean is that the motion you found works only on a single string?

Since it’s difficult to understand what may be happening from text alone, the advice in these cases is always to post a video!

#3

Good question! I think there is nothing wrong with trying out things slow and exaggerated as long as you make sure that you can speed that motion up to max tempo without any problems. The problem is when practising slow with the thought of that speed will come eventually, since there is a big risk of practising motions that simply can’t be played fast.

But since you mention that you get string hopping, there might be more to your problem than what you describe. I think a video of you, playing both slow with rest strokes and fast, would help very much for us to give you the right advice. Please include both tremolo and phrases with string switching.

2 Likes
#4

Sorry, I should have been more specific. Yes, for single string picking I’ve found something I can do fairly easily and consistent from 150-160 bpm (16ths).

#5

For sure! I’m turning in for the night, but I’ll be sure to post something tomorrow.

#6

Fellow recovering hopper here; looking forward to seeing the responses you get…:wink:

#7

PS: I should add that there is no obligation to do rest strokes if you don’t like how they feel. It was just a rough way to tell by feel that the pickstroke is trapped on one end.

In general the only “way out of stringhopping” is: play the lick you want to play at a speed that is impossible with string hopping

#8

I figured from everything I’ve watched / read that rest strokes can be used as a means to reinforce single escape picking motions if you’re having trouble with string hopping. It’s not so much that I want to incorporate them into my playing for everything, but more so as a method for forming the muscle memory for proper escape motion at high speeds.

I still don’t understand how I’m supposed to keep changing my motions until I find something that works for everything and doesn’t trigger string hopping. If it were just a matter of that then why are there materials suggesting to practice your picking motion with rest strokes to get rid of string hopping instead of just saying “play the lick you want to play at a speed that is impossible with string hopping”? What’s playing at a speed that is impossible with string hopping? So fast that I’ll just be able to execute without string hopping? Slow enough so there’s no way I can string hop because I’m focusing on the proper picking motion?

#9

I know, it’s not easy to find new ways to pick… but not impossible!

Rest strokes are one possible thing you can try, another is to change the pick grip, another is to change the various anchor points of your hand/arm on the body, approach angle of your picking arm, etc. !

All the knowledge is useful because you have now a reference for what the typical “finished products” look like.

But yes at the end of the day its this:

of course the idea is to try to play it, it is understood that the first attempts will probably not be 100% clean or even work at all. But the first step is always to get in the ballpark of a realistic motion that can do the thing

Edit:

Yes that’s the idea! For reference, most people find it hard or impossible to string-hop beyond 130bpm 16th notes or so. I myself probably even slower than that. Not a number set in stone, but gives you the idea.

#10

My most comfortable motion right now is forearm / wrist, light supination, angle pad grip. I can stay relatively consistent with the USX motion up until about 165 bpm, 16th notes on a single string. My absolute max (as of yesterday) is 170 bpm. It’s an endurance thing for me, which is where I’m also getting confused. What’s considered a baseline tempo for 16th notes that gives you the ok to continue forward developing that picking motion? Are the speeds I’m at with the aforementioned motions high enough that it’s a useable technique?

I ask because I posted my first technique video where I can easily and cleanly play 16ths at 190-200, but it’s mainly elbow with pronation. I string hop way worse with that technique when switching strings and while it’s comfortable doing trem picking on one string, I really don’t like how limiting it makes my playing overall.

I’ve been practicing wrist motion, trigger grip for the past few days and DSX is pretty easy with that. When I try to practice USX using wrist I can’t find a position that’s comfortable and where my wrist also has some light extension as suggested for that motion. There always appears to be an ever so slight amount of flexion in my wrist. I’m wondering if it’s my arms being long that’s causing that issue? With the wrist motion, DSX, I can easily do 16ths at 160. USX I can kind of get there between 140-150, but it feels a little awkward.

I gotta post some videos today, sorry. Words can only describe so much! Thanks for your input with this stuff.

1 Like
#11

150-170 is low as a top speed. Have you taken all the tabletop tests? I really can’t imagine someone topping out at 170 on any of those unless they’re injured or somehow limited in other physical respects. No offense if someone is, of course, but they would probably already know that and not be surprised by that result.

190-200 on elbow sounds much better. The elbow joint is not capable of stringhopping because it just goes side to side. It can’t go straight up in the air, away from the guitar, without doing something that’s not elbow.

Let us know what speeds you got on the various table tests, and video of the elbow technique would be helpful.

#12

@Troy @tommo

Here are my results for the table top tests:

-Forearm motion (my favorite): 210 bpm is comfortable, 220-230 is doable, but requires some effort.

-Elbow Motion: 210 bpm is comfortable, 220-230 is doable, but requires some effort.

-Wrist motion: 190 bpm max

Videos (all at 165 bpm):

Forearm / wrist, supination, angle pad grip:

Forearm / wrist, supination, angle pad grip closeup:

Forearm / wrist, supination, angle pad grip closeup, slo-mo:

Elbow / wrist, pronation, trigger grip(?):

Elbow / wrist, pronation, trigger grip(?), closeup:

Elbow / wrist, pronation, trigger grip(?) closeup, slo-mo:

Bad attempt at wrist motion, trigger grip:

Bad attempt at wrist motion, trigger grip closeup:

Bad attempt at wrist motion, trigger grip closeup, slo-mo:

#13

Thanks for doing these! These all look great. There is no stringhopping here, motion looks perfectly consistent. If you didn’t tell me there was some kind of issue with your picking motion, I certainly wouldn’t know it looking at most of these.

Just as a general FYI, these motions that you’re calling blends mostly just look like wrist motion to me. For example, in the first two clips, most of the motion is the hand moving back and forth. You can also see in slow motion that the path the pick is traveling is a straight line and not visibly curved, and the pick’s orientation doesn’t appear to be rotating like it would in a forearm technique. This is a case where I don’t think the forearm is really contributing anything that matters to the resulting picking travel, so to me I just call this wrist motion.

The same is true of the elbow-wrist clips. Those are mostly just wrist motion since the hand is moving relative to the arm much more so than the arm itself is moving at the elbow joint. People aren’t robots. Parts move. Even dyed in the wool wrist players like Andy Wood will show some elbow joint action, especially at fast speeds. But he never looks like Vinnie Moore or Bill Hall or any of the other elbow players we’ve looked at.

Anyway, part of the reason I look at these clips and don’t see any issues is because you’re playing comfortably in a medium range of speed like 165 with a click going. So that doesn’t really tell us much. It only tell us that you can do that tempo and everything looks great.

Again, if you were writing some tune in this tempo range, nothing wrong with these motions — feel free to use them. However if you feel limited by feeling like you don’t have much speed beyond this, let’s see a clip of your fastest motion, whatever that is. Do it while going at max speed totally by feel with no metronome. Don’t try to hit any specific tempo and don’t try to “do” any particular form or arm position or pick grip that you may have learned about watching ahead in our instructional stuff. Just choose whatever seems to go fastest by feel and let’s see what that looks like.

Otherwise good work here, you’re well beyond a lot of people that roll in here.

#14

Thank you for checking these out so quickly and for the kind words!

I figured I might be misinterpreting my motions. For the first three clips that I’m calling partial forearm motion, I initially thought it was forearm because I definitely feel a burn going on in that region when using that motion. That, and it looked like the forearm muscle was turning during my upstrokes. Either way, I stand corrected!

When you say “straight line”, do you mean that the pick motion itself is a trapped motion, or a straight line, but with a discernable USX motion?

Once I get into 180 bpm and beyond my motion seemingly becomes mostly elbow. I get what you’re saying though. Here is me gunning it with the elbow motion:

I can push it a little further, but that’s my max. It feels smooth, almost uncontrolable, and that’s about where it stops in terms of comfort. I try applying that motion to the wrest of my playing and it’s like I’m doing everything left handed. I do not like it at all.

That brings me to the following - Yes, I can go faster with that motion, but it limits me in a lot of other ways. The Motion where I’m using USX, angle pad grip is where I feel most at home, but I cap out at 175-180 bpm. Should I really abandon the motion I like more just because it’s slower than the elbow motion? I mean, reps and pushing myself to get faster should be able to get me to the bpm territory of my elbow motion with a little work, no?

If I push my USX / angle pad grip past 175 I start getting garage spikes and string hopping. That’s about where the motion falls apart so, should I work on getting more comfortable with slightly slower tempos (155-165 bpm) and then work on pushing it?

It’s confusing to me because it seems like the general consensus here is that you should lean into whatever motion you can do fastest, tremolo picking on one string. So, motions that are a little slower / different grip / more comfortable overall aren’t worth the effort in terms of working up to a max speed? There has to be some part of getting faster that requires pushing yourself into a discomfort zone versus just using whatever is fastest and stick to that. If you branch out into different picking techniques it stands to reason that you won’t have the same max speed with all of them, so what is the proper way to push myself according to CtC?

In all the videos on the different picking motions you seem to encourage trying different approaches whereas on the forum it seems to be suggested that if you try something that isn’t getting you as fast as another motion that it’s akin to fitting a square peg into a circular hole. I hope that doesn’t come off as antagonistic, I genuinely seek clarity on the matter.

#15

This looks awesome. I can’t really overstate this. This is the kind of motion everybody wants. You can have multiple motions. Eddie Van Halen does/did. (Sorry not ready for the past tense with him yet!) Lots of people do. Wrist motion in particular often transitions to elbow at fast speeds. It looks like your “wrist-elbow” clip is an example of that. So you can have both of those motions, along with whatever others you know. The world is your oyster.

As far as “reps” and “working up to speed”, you’ve never heard me mention those things because we have zero evidence that this actually does anything. A sloppy inconsistent motion with random variation will get faster as a player learns to just move back and forth. And motions where you’re tensing up random muscles that are unnecessary might get faster too as you learn to not bother with those. And you’ll almost certainly learn to do motions for longer and longer stretches as they become more memorized. If you’ve ever experienced your fast elbow motion suddenly stopping for no reason, or missing notes at random, that’s what’s happening there.

As best I can tell, all evidence of a person doing the “working up to speed” thing is anecdotal at best. So I’m left to surmise that players who claim this are just doing variations of what I’ve outlined here, and what you’ve done in a matter of days / weeks, just much more slowly because they tried to be consistent and not actually promote that trial and error type variation that actually produces the meaningful change.

So anyway, yeah, your elbow motion rules and of course it’s going to feel weird to try and link up the fretting hand with that. It’s like a whole new sports car you don’t even know how to drive. Through enough attempts you can figure out how relink those, maybe on s simple single-string patterns as has been noted here.

That’s the best information we have on this subject. But you’ve got a killer motion here, I’d use it.

I know you said I think in a previous thread that you think elbow motion looks silly, but I’ll reiterate that I think it looks awesome. We were sitting on the couch about an hour ago and Reyenne goes “let me try” an takes my guitar and does this:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CLf0_dUlPFm/

I almost want to tell her to keep at it at this point. Why bother?

#16

That’s the perfect way to put how I’m currently feeling about that motion. There’s a ton of raw speed there and outside of practicing basic accenting with the metronome, it’s been a little difficult to reign it in and get something workable out of it. Especially when I start trying to sync it with my left hand.

That’s insane! Look out, Troy! :laughing:

Based on the results I’ve been getting with CtC, I really can’t argue with that. The whole process of trying new motions at moderately fast speeds can be punishing at times because I’m shooting in the dark trying to find my primary motion. I’m going to keep messing around with the angle pad grip thing I like and see if I can coax some untapped speed out of it. I think I need to try picking the string lighter as a starting point. My main goal here is to be able to do 16ths at 200-210 bpm and I’ll be happy. I am curious though - what is your max comfortable speed, @Troy ?

Outside of all that, I’m going to begin hand sync with the Yngwie sixes pattern and branch out from there.