Single string picking - no escape or rest stroke

Ha! Thanks for the mention! But your input is just as valuable, and in several occasions better :slight_smile: I think the most valuable thing happening on this forum is that we are developing a precise methodology of filming, analysing and discussing one’s picking - a sort of scientific method for guitar :slight_smile:

In this particular case, I think @Hartaj703 has a great starting point with this tremolo motion! I like a lot the rhythmic feel of the most recent video.

Before committing to the fully trapped diagnosis I think we should have a look at some simple patterns that switch strings. New interesting things may happen!
And I think you have spent enough time on a single string :wink:

Something like the Yngwie 6s on a pair of a adjacent strings could be an option (6 notes per string, switching after upstrokes), or any other pattern that you like.

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Hi @tommo! Apologies for the delay, I just had a free moment to take the video. Thank you for the reply. Below is a video of me playing sextuplets at 115 BPM across 4 strings. I apologize for the audio (I hold my phone with my left hand to get the angle). I look forward to your reply!

Great camera work and great take!

To me, I still see that same curved motion. All the string changes are flawless though, so at the point when you need it most you’re getting a USX. I see this particularly in the second half, when you start descending. I grabbed this shot right before you change from the D string to the A string:

Look at that pick height! Very nice!

So if the motion your pick made was always like this, instead of the “C” curve (from our viewing perspective) I feel like this would be a perfect USX:

image

Of course, that’s not what’s happening, because once again the motion is about to do this:

image

for full context I’m focusing right around the 0:25 mark of your clip. But I think, even though that’s an isolated example, that this is happening pretty frequently.

Full transparency, I could be wrong, so I’m curious what others think. I don’t class myself as an expert at these analysis but I enjoy them and I’ve been a fly on the wall for countless of them on the forum so I’ve tried to learn from what I’ve seen - watch the pick path, above everything else.

I suspect your ‘problem’ is similar to my own, which is that we can move our hands plenty fast, but we’re not making a straight line with our movements all the time. It’s this inconsistency that robs the picking of its smoothness and I think that’s the difference between us and players that own this stuff and play at/above these speeds for a long duration and don’t ‘feel’ like they’re trying hard.

Now, what’s quite different from your clips is that my inconsistent movement was the product of attempting to do USX where the elbow was driving my mechanic. I should have known better, but I figure because I was rest stroking on the down strokes I’d be ok :slight_smile: That doesn’t matter at all since you can rest stroke and still be trapped lol! Again, your camera angle and filming is awesome, so we clearly see you are not using the elbow, other than as a tracking aid. I feel like your mechanic of wrist/forearm should be fully USX compatible.

However, often we hear advice to simply change the mechanic or embrace another escape. I suppose it would be interesting to see what happens if you played something that’s DSX compatible. I do see some DSX movement in your playing. If you tried something like:

--------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------x-x-x-x-x-x-
------------------------x-x-x-x-x-x-----------------
--------x-x-x-x-x-x---------------------------------
-x-x-x------------------------------------------------

If you start that on a down stroke and use strict alternate picking that should have you change strings on a downstroke. Maybe your brain would like that better? I dunno. Worth a shot!

So, I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV either, but that is my diagnosis :slight_smile: I’d love to hear what the cure is! I think this is great playing that just needs smoothing out. We need some experts:

I’ve seen @tommo and @qwertygitarr and @Johannes all give awesome critiques with actual advice on how to correct the issues. That’s by no means to discredit other awesome reviewers on here, they’re just the ones I’ve seen do the most critiquing lately so I thought I should invite them to the party.

Sorry that’s so long, I suck at being concise. Follow up question: did Teemu have any advice for you? He’s obviously very aware of CtC principals.

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To be honest… I don’t see any obvious problems here! This is well executed string switching at “shred” tempos!

A logical next step could be to work on musical examples like the Yngwie 6s and other simple repeating licks, trying to get good L/R synchronization. I wouldn’t even limit myself to USX licks, because as @joebegly suggested it may well be that you can execute DSX string changes as well.

If any problems arise there we’ll take a look!

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@joebegly Once again, thank you very much for such an in depth reply! It’s incredibly appreciated.

I definitely am seeking that relaxed feeling and do think that “curved” travel bath before I escape is a factor in preventing that feeling. When I look at other players, the only time I’ve seen a curved path is for DBX movements or cross picking and it doesn’t seem to exist as players approach their higher speeds. I also am not a doctor and just a novice student of the art!

@tommo - thank you as well for your reply! Do you not find that curved path before I escape to be a road block in trying to get more fluid and relaxed in my playing?

Apologies for the delayed response - I had to enlist the help of my girlfriend for these videos. Just doing this with my right hand was too tricky :joy: Below are the videos. This time repeating sixes with a change on a down stroke!

Edit: @joebegly forgot to address your Teemu question! He wants me to take the next couple of weeks before our next lesson to kind of step away from the grind of the metronome and just focus on relaxing my mind when I play. I treat guitar the same way as the gym (I track a list of exercises in Excel to see if my max BPM for each exercise is increasing over time). So, more playing while I watch TV, and learning new exercises/songs, and even taking a day off (which is definitely going to be the hardest part!) to just kind of see if this leads to a new discovery since I’d be doing things very differently than I normally do.

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Firstly, to me this DSX stuff looks smoother. Excellent work. I agree with @tommo that both this and your other videos showed good string switching. I did note that in my critique. However, I’m still in agreement with you that there’s something holding you back from feeling like you own this and even speeds 15 - 25 bpm faster than what you’re playing. Perhaps it’s that the string change is efficient but the notes in between are the more curved movement???

Just bear with me for a moment please. Here is a link to my video critique:

No need to read the whole thread, just checkout the 2 videos to the link. In terms of notes per second, both @Hartaj703 and I are in the same ballpark. I believe I was doing these somewhere around 16ths at 180 bpm. Troy’s overall feedback was that only since I was expressing feelings of ‘speed limit’ and not being able to fully control this that we should investigate an alternative. Granted, my string changes were not as clean as @Hartaj703 as I was swiping a lot in both directions. Aside from fighting nature by attempting USX with a DSX mechanic, there was some inconsistency in my motion. This I understood to be taken as lacking the smoothness of someone who could play the exercise I was attempting at and beyond my speed with total control. Let’s just say, John Petrucci, to throw out a random name :slight_smile: I walked away from the critique of the opinion that someone who can move their hands fast enough to play 16ths at 180 has everything they need to play even faster, but certainly to not feel limited at 180 as I felt. The answer was embracing a mechanic that set me up for more smoothness.

What is different, if anything, about this thread? Is the recommendation to keep doing what he’s doing, just attempt faster speeds? I can’t see how that curve he’s got (which is the inverse of a DBX curve) is helping. I believe if that curve were straightened he’d be in supersonic territory (if he chose to play faster than this) but certainly these speeds wouldn’t feel like he’s fighting anything, as he’s indicated he feels. Most of my career I have been stuck at roughly this same speed, so I’m extremely interested how 2 similar cases might warrant a different prescription :-). I had my marching orders and now my problem is hand sync at the faster speeds since my new mechanic makes my right hand faster than my left. What’s next for @Hartaj703 after viewing the DSX video?

Thank you again @joebegly for the reply! I am curious as to how are similar problems result in different conclusions. I agree with you that the curved path can’t be helping me. But I also am no expert. The gap between my single string speed and string changing speed is pretty large (115 sextuplets for 3 NPS patterns on my absolute best day vs 150 BPM sextuplet single string) and I’m just trying to figure out how to translate that speed to move across strings. Granted, that’s one of the hardest parts of guitar but if there’s a way to make the path to the promised land any clearer that would be great :joy:. If the diagnosis is to keep on doing what I’m doing and keep pushing myself then that’s what I’ll do! I’ve never had a problem putting in the work so :slight_smile: Thank you again for the replies and analysis!

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Hey @Hartaj703, @joebegly, sorry for the delay, weekends can be a bit crazy :slight_smile:

The shortest answer is that I like a combination of Teemu and Joebegly’s advices: spend some time working on more musical stuff (songs / riffs / licks) using these picking patterns at various speeds, and also try some variations of hand/arm setups and pick grips to see if your feeling of comfort improves.

The slightly longer answer is: I may be wrong but I think Joe’s and your case are actually quite different!

  • Joe was working on USX but with a DSX motion mechanic (elbow), so that the high-speed USX string changes were not working as intended (still sounded great, but resulted in the feeling that something was holding you back -IIRC :slight_smile: )
  • In Hartaj’s case, it seems to me that all string changes are working as intended. Though I acknowledge that your picking is not feeling as good as you’d like.

So let’s talk about the fully trapped trajectories that happen on a single string - I also agree that they sometimes look like a “inverted U” shape - but not for all pickstrokes. Sometimes I even see something that looks like a double escape, e.g. around 5 secs in the latest slo mo video.

Is this inverted U shape a problem? I’m not sure, it could just be the pick climbing up and down the string during fully trapped strokes. Something like this happens in Jorge Strunz’s playing and I don’t think it’s holding him back, it’s just pick & string doing their physics :slight_smile:

Futhermore, you are reporting a speed of 150bpm sextuplets on single string tremolo! That’s amazingly fast! I don’t think you could do that if your single string motion was somewhat inefficient. Do you feel discomfort when you are doing that, and what type of discomfort?

So the next question is… why can’t you change strings at your top speed? What exactly happens when you try to do it? Maybe try to film that and we’ll take a look.

…But in the meantime these 115bpm sextuplets can serve you well in a lot of musical scenarios… so I reiterate the suggestion to start playing music with the technique you already have :slight_smile: :+1:

Finally, I’ll also tag @Troy just in case he sees something I’m not seeing!

Edit: also found an old practice video of mine where you can see a combination of fully trapped pickstrokes + occasional escapes. I think you can see the “inverted U” shape also here as the pick climbs over the string to go to the other side

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This is most certainly correct, thanks for pointing this out. I guess a huge difference is I feel like what I was doing was just a square peg in a round hole. @Hartaj703 is surely on the right track. Good mechanic, good control etc. The similarity I was thinking about is the feeling of limitation at speeds where we shouldn’t feel that way. Also the ‘non-straight’ pick path in both our cases. However…

This is extremely thought provoking.

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So I just rewatched the super slow version of my critique video and saw tons of this “C” curve in my own playing too haha! Not sure if it’s apples/oranges but I do know my motion was classed as not smooth. This is a cool learning opportunity. I’d be interested to see what @Troy thinks about this. 2 questions I have that directly pertain to this thread:

  • What is it about @Hartaj703’s mechanic that makes his path travel like this and not more of a straight line? I’m sure I’m missing something, but I thought a wrist/forearm blend like he’s using is a recipe for USX. He’s obviously getting USX on the string changes, but what is causing the other notes to have a more trapped trajectory?
  • Is there anything with this “C” curve that we should be trying to avoid? Is it ok in general or at least in this instance where the string changes are clean?

I suspect there is always going to be a little of a “C” shape around the string, since the pick must climb over it to get past (the string also moves a bit but not as much). I mean, both you and @Hartaj703 can pick crazy fast, so whatever you are doing must be working well. Also, how would you make the “C” go away? Particularly with elbow motion, there’s not much you can do beyond moving the elbow on its only axis.

In terms of @Hartaj703’s motion, the last two videos displayed a pretty solid DSX motion, almost only wrist (discussed this with Troy as well). EDIT: maybe I’m seeing what I want to see but the DSX example also looks more like a “linear” path.
Hartaj, Could it be that your “primary” motion is actually DSX, and then you use a secondary motion for the upstroke string changes? Was the last example more comfortable than the one with upstroke string changes?

Linking the chapter on primary / secondary motions for completeness :slight_smile:

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Thanks @tommo, good responses as always.

No I don’t think you’re seeing what you want to see. I noticed/noted that in my critique of his latest. I fully agree it’s more a straight line. Curious what his response is about if this ‘feels’ any better.

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Hi @tommo & @joebegly, apologies for the delay! I read through your responses earlier but wanted to make sure I had video before responding!

Thank you for such in depth responses! A lot to go through :joy: !

I don’t know if I’d call it discomfort it’s more of just the movement not feeling fluid. Even doing a chromatic run at 170 BPM and above gets that same feeling of being unable to track across the strings in a fluid motion. Maybe that’s just something that comes with time?

It’s interesting to see that “inverted U” shape occurring in your video too. This gives me some hope that I can still get where I want to go with it occurring!

I think answering this question is the one that will help sort this all out. I’m not entirely sure “why” my motion path ends up being this way and what I can do to rectify it without introducing elbow movement or if it even needs to be.

I’ve actually never considered that possibility and now looking at the videos, it does look like a much more straight path to me. It’s really strange to me to think about this because historically speaking changing on upstrokes always felt easier to me. Even earlier in this year it felt more comfortable! I did show Teemu a video of me when I was 17 and he said it looked like I was more of an upward pick slant which does align more with favoring DSX and using a helper for USX (in my case I think I use forearm rotation to USX). (It’s pretty hard to tell from the angle but here’s the video if interested Necrophagist stabwound intro solo - YouTube)

I have a couple of videos for you to review. I’ve been focusing on keeping the pick a lot looser in my hand to avoid tension so there are varying degrees of attack in these clips. The first clip is just me attempting a couple of runs at 200 BPM going 4+4+1 (Slow mo and regular). A lot of takes I notice me missing the final upstroke before going to the next string change. I also see the introduction of swiping to compensate for these missed strokes.

Next video is me taking 3 NPS scale and breaking down the core beat to beat movements @ 200 BPM(1+3, 2+3, 1+3+1)
The 1+3+1 sequence gives me such immense trouble that I can’t even describe it. Getting that last 1 to accent the next beat is so difficult for me and leads to a lot of missed strokes. Very curious to get your diagnosis on all of this!

Once again, thank you so very much for the amount of effort you guys are putting in to help me!

Could it be that you are over-anticipating the string change, making you ‘reach out’ to the next string, when you don’t really need to? Kind like a tiny motocycle rev type motion that interferes with your efficient motion. I wonder if you tried the 4+4+1 in reverse (from D string down to low E), whether you it would mitigate that and maintain a straight line. Might be interesting…

Thank you for filming these, very good angles and lighting as usual! I haven’t had time to look at all the videos in detail yet - in fact it would be helpful if you could make one video per example (e.g. your first 8-second video + slo mo is the prefect length) - so it’s easier to review specific licks etc.

My initial quick impression is that this is roughly the same speed as before (or a bit faster, which is already plenty!), and again I don’t see obvious issues: my advice remains boringly to move away from “academic” exercises and start working on songs where these (or similar) picking patterns are used in various musical ways. You can of course write your own riffs and solos for this purpose :+1:

Another good thing about working on songs is that they give you a more “realistic” feel of how fast lines work inside actual music. You rarely find a song which contains 10 repetitions of an ascending scale - typically you have some slower melodies, maybe some bendings and vibrato (vibratos? vibratoes?), and then some fast bits here and there. Or maybe you have a 16th note hard rock riff which is mostly medium speed but also has some fast sextuplet runs connecting the chords. Etc. etc.!

…and it is a challenge in itself to do that one fast repetition in the middle of other rhythms, and / or to connect different types of fast licks - even if you are good at each lick individually. I think you are definitely good enough to move to this stage!

Another note is that I am still curious to see what happens when you try and change strings with your top speed that you mentioned (150bpm sextuplets). Don’t worry about being clean, we just want to see what problems occur (if any!)

Finally, I’m relieved to hear that you don’t feel actual discomfort / pain. Whatever awkwardness you are feeling is not obviously reflected in these videos - overall your picking is looking great! So I would hope that with some time, and with the introduction of more variety in your practice, you will make microscopic adjustments that will make things feel more comfortable. If that won’t be the case… we can take a look again :slight_smile:

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Yeah sometimes sheer discomfort can occur from doing the same thing over and over again. You might want to ditch this stuff and play some actual music as @tommo suggests and see if a day or three away from it all results in a greater sense of ease.

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How cool would it be if we had a thread (or even CtC page) with just gobs of licks/riffs from well known shred standards? Don’t get me wrong, these exist on the platform, but you have to know what to search for and they are scattered. One location would be great. I agree playing exercises gets old. I say that as someone who sometimes goes weeks without playing an actual piece of music haha I don’t know what it is about exercises that makes me and others gravitate towards them. I think at times they can actually do more to hold us back than anything. Actual music is king.

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PS: also you are working with Teemu, arguably one of the best teachers on the planet when it comes to electric guitar. Maybe you can ask him for song suggestions, and double check if he agrees with the main points above :slight_smile:

Same boat! The above advice applies to myself as well! :wink:

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Hi all - just managed to log on and respond to all of these now. Again, thank you very much for taking the time to respond, critique my videos, and solution with me. I am extremely appreciative of it!

Welcome to the party @PickingApprentice! I’m wondering if it’s a mental thing. I missed this comment when I was going through the thread a little bit ago and didn’t pull together the video but can if needed!

@tommo, @joebegly, & @guitarenthusiast
It’s been a REALLY long time since I’ve gone through any actual music to learn/practice. I’ve had the mindset this year along the lines of “when I can play this exercise at this speed then I can go learn the things I want to play!” when in reality I’m just working on these exercises that have little application. Teemu even suggested this earlier in the year but I ended up feeling really technically insufficient (I was dealing with some aches and pains from playing) so we worked on a lot of that throughout the year.

@tommo here is a clip of me performing sextuplets @150 bpm going 6+7 (last note is just to accent).

Thank you again!

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This is also great! 150bpm sextuplets is equivalent to 225bpm 16th notes. This is faster than Petrucci in Rock Discipline (where he struggles to hit 216 in the famous chromatic exercise). Most real-world playing is slower than this! I’m not sure what else you need before you start playing music :slight_smile:

Ok, not all the reps are perfect, you can tell yourself from the slow motion video, I saw a couple of omitted pickstrokes and something like an unintended sweep.

But - in some repetitions everything happens correctly: see for example 0:41 in the slow motion video, where the string change is flawless. One thing you could try to do is to memorise the feel of the “correct” reps VS the incorrect ones, now that you have all the understanding & filming skills necessary :slight_smile:

…but yet again, I wouldn’t waste too much extra time on these academic exercises. You can use these exercises as sanity checks once in a while, but it’s time to move on!

I can fully relate to this, that’s how I practiced for a long time - and it got me stuck for years! Still trying to fight the impulse to work this way. But the reality is most of the great players out there worked on songs more than anything else. There’s just so much to learn from songs that is not covered by “metronome work”.

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