Roy Marchbank's pick and his monster alternate picking

General Music Discussion
#1

I was going to share this recently uploaded video by Roy Marchbank to the pick’s thread then I decided that he deserves his own thread.

Roy used to glue three 3mm picks together to obtain a super thick pick that his whole alternate picking technique is apparently built on. But now it seems that he has his own signature pick:

This guy’s alternate picking is just scary. I wonder what is exactly in the shape of this pick that makes string switching easier according to him…

Anyway, his YT channel is worth checking out.

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Haha what is this ? you guys check this out
#2

indeed! i’m going to start subscribing to him. I hope I learn something

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#4

Wow. Insane. I tried large picks, hufschmidt, v picks and the like and felt like I was learning to pick all over again. I guess I can’t get past Jazz III’s and similar.

#5

I was about to post this to the forum as well! Roy is a fantastic player, some very scary speeds he’s got there. This video is worth watching as well. Some more monster picking demos and he talks a little bit about his picking technique. Crazy stuff!

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#7

I believe the 3 picks are bevelled in a way so it has one tip, meaning only one pick stroke. If you look at his new pick it’s more like a standard pick (just massive!) I think the 3 glued together are just a more primitive version of it.
I know what you mean about Yngwie, compared to someone like Jason Richardson he isn’t as clean, but I still like what he does, and no denying he’s a pioneer of the ‘shred’ scene.
I’m not sure what swiping would feel like what a 9mm pick. I’ll be buying one at some point so i’ll let you know. And yes, his fretting hand is insanely efficient. No idea how he does it to that extent. Very interesting player.

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#8

Not sure if you guys are talking about Yngwie these days, or Yngwie back in the day. I haven’t listened to much Yngwie beyond the first few albums and the Alcatrazz stuff. But Yngwie back in the day was about as spotless as you can get. Of course there are occasional flubs. You are going to hear that. It’s the nature of the flub that defines the cleanest players.

For example take a listen to the outro of Overture 1383, and you’ll hear that one missed string change in the final ascending line, right when it switches from scalar economy to single-string fours. This is the kind of error the best players make - super specific, limited to a single note or string change.

I dig hearing those because what that tells me is that the whole damn thing was live, possibly improv, and not edited. That’s how good these players were. The tape rolled and you got it. If you didn’t, you played it again until you did!

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#9

I was more referring to Yngwie now, probably should have made that clearer.


Still a better picker than i’m ever likely to be, and maybe this Guitar World shoot was just an off day. I saw him a few months ago and he was still fantastic. Any flubs were masked by the frequent guitar spins! So yeah, not really ripping on the guy. Still one of my favourite players!

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#10

Five-string arpeggios never really fit the dwps strategy, not now, and not back in the day — and this clip is pretty much a poster for that. I.e. Not really an off day, just the wrong choice given what we know of Yngwie’s technique.

But the ascending economy scale around the 20 second mark? Probably as devastating as has been done in any era.

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#11

That’s interesting, I hadn’t really thought that might be the issue! That was actually the reason it took me so long to get 5 string arpeggios down. This was long before I knew about pick slanting. Spent to many hours with a metronome wondering why every 5 string sweep sounded, not knowing what downward pick slanting was, let along that it was the reason I couldn’t do it!

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#12

To clarify, I’m referring to the descending side of the 5-string arpeggio. When you descend, once you get to the G string, you run out of options, and that’s why those notes go missing. In this thread, @dr110 pinpoints the problem precisely, in giant red markup!

The ascending side of that pattern is much more doable. But again, You’d have to understand why, and if you don’t, you can still flub some of those string changes.

Which just goes to illustrate that the greats do what they do by feel, in almost magical fashion, without needing to pick their technique apart in a conscious way. Most of the time that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. This is one case where the implications of attempting certain patterns would be clearer to someone, even a beginner, who had to “learn” the system first.

Not a knock on the greats. They showed us the way, and we’d be lost without them.

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#14

Roy’s picking is so fast. I thought for sure he was speeding up videos at first but it appears he’s legit. Sounds pretty darn clean too, like one pickstroke per note rather than flubbing it.

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#15

BUT, he was able to do it! incredible!

#16

Amen to that. And Amen some more.

#17

Actually it seems that Yngwie always misses a note in the descending part of the 5-string Am arpeggio, consistently with what Troy is saying. You can see this very clearly on the REH instructional video. Interestingly, that is also one of the first licks Yngwie shows!

PS: sorry for the off topic - Yeah this Roy fellow can pick insanely fast :open_mouth: In my brain he is stored under “never attempt any of this”

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#18

I was thinking about buying his pick, but then i saw the price…

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#19

This might be of interest to everyone here. Roy filmed a video with a classic ‘Code’ angle.

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#20

amazing picking for sure!!!

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#21

I clocked some of that last clip in Transcribe!, Roy was hitting about 21-22 notes per second when tremolo picking. Very fast, but not unheard of.

I think his picks must be made of a very hard material. When making initial contact with a string, a very hard pick will will effectively sound a note determined by the picking position (similar to a slide touching the string or Bumblefoot’s thimble-tapping technique), before it pushes through the string and sounds the intended note.

As most people pick somewhere between the fretboard and bridge pickup, the resulting non-musical pitch is very audible when playing on the bridge pickup.

I can’t perceive it with a nylon pick unless I’m picking a string that’s damped with the left hand. I perceive it more clearly with something like ultex, but it’s still in the realm of what I would consider “attack” when note are being fretted. With lexan (the material stubby picks are made from), the non-musical contact pitch is very noticeable to me on every picked note, and I don’t like it.

I think some people call this “chirp.”

Roy seem to get around the shrill sound of the chirp to some degree by picking at the bridge itself, but this results in a very thin tone, and it means he can’t effectively damp strings with his picking hand. I suspect that this is why he needs the ribbons on the neck for string damping, and why he favors the synth pickup.

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#22

I thought about that guy and his approach. Seems like it’s like wrote in my offtopic post. By using more curved surface (like his pick) one could make good, predictable, well controllable picking… however sound becomes more flat, not so bright. Although, I started to think that it’s unavoidable tradeoff if you want to get high speed picking.

#23

It’s been an interesting thread to read so far. Will pass your thoughts to Roy. You can always direct your questions directly to him at:
[email protected]
He’s always happy to answer mail when he has time.
That way you get to know exactly what you want from the horses mouth and there’s no need for guess work. Oh and I agree - if you liked the taster drill then subscribe to his YouTube channel now as there are weekly if not daily updates on technique, applying that to compositions and a few new interviews with Rowan J Parker, like the one above. Kind Regards to all. Jilly.

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