Slow with one escape, fast with the other? Then the CTC team wants your footage!

Technique Critique
#21

@Drew thanks for the extreme closeup :rofl:

To be honest none of the two examples looks like stringhopping to me, and none of the two sounds as bad as you think! In fact I thought that at full speed they both sounded pretty good!

Sure maybe the timing could be improved a little, so I guess that’s good to know :slight_smile: But I don’t think the timing errors are as big as one note duration. I think that may be an artifact of YT’s slow motion mode. I’ve seen cases before where the full speed video sounds evenly aspaced but the 0.25 version sounds all messed up. It’s usually more realiable to check the slo mo in a proper video editor.

@Joep36 thank you very much, the filming on these is fantastic! And no worries about the sync, it’s again reated to YT’s encoding and it can be corrected in an editing software.

DSX is awesome as usual. As @Troy mentioned before your “USX” is really double escape (DBX), and it looks potentially useful. Form the close-up you can see both pickstrokes clearly escaping even without the slow motion. I’d definitely try to apply this to DBX phrases (e.g. bluegrass tunes and stuff) and see what happens.

Related to the last question, I think an interesting question is whether this is efficient double escape (or close to being efficient). The best test for this is to just try and use the motion for some fast 1nps licks (like a banjo roll), and see if you can speed it up without feeling like you are working super hard. If you feel like you have a speed wall around 120bpm 16th notes, with lots of tension / fatigue, it is the typical indication that the motion is inefficient.

In any case thank you so much for filming these! Ironically you are maybe a bit too good at the “other escape” to show the contrast we were looking for, but this is really great footage and I’m pretty sure we can find a use for it at some point :slight_smile:

@gabrielthorn Indeed in your case I’d start these pentatonic thingies on an “Up” and just blaze away :slight_smile: At the minute you don’t have “bad USX”! You have “good DBX”, which is great for many things, but not “mechanically optimized” for 2nps pentatonics. Your situation is similar to Andy Wood (not a bad place to be!): he does not really have a USX motion: he has DSX and DBX. When he plays pentatonics super fast he often ends up starting with an upstroke or adding a pulloff to turn the lick into DSX:

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#22

I’m starting all the pentatonic stuff with an upstorke these days, definitely better than before. Still feel like I’m handicapped some way, as I picked up the guitar again after all those years to learn Malmsteen and EJ stuff, but that’s life :sweat_smile: I need to learn to accept this for now and enjoy I can do some stuff with DSX. But the demons are still lurking deep down.

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#23

I’m sure that with some clever re-arrangements, pulloffs etc. you can re-arrange almost all YJM. and EJ licks for DSX.

Or in some cases you can modify the lick to sound 90% similar but be DSX. In fast playing usually not all the notes are that important, the less improtant ones can be changed and no one will notice.

Who knows maybe you’ll come up with stuff that is even cooler than the original :slight_smile:

#24

Thanks @tommo, yeh the double escape motion is definetly tense even at speeds around 120, its not mechanically smooth feeling at all and i cannot speed this motion up. I have messed around a fair amount with banjo roll type ideas, ive had a few moments where it feels right, but the speed is still much lower then any single escape motion i have.

I do have an usx motion which is smooth, however when it comes to synching with the left hand even on a single string everything falls apart…i havn’t put loads of time into it so i think theres potential there, i’ve just been focused on building a vocabulary around my dsx.
Heres my Usx trem

Heres attemting 2nps with this form.

Its not there yet, but i think i see potential. The strange thing is i can be in perfect sync using my Dsx on a single string lick, however i can barley sync it using my Usx. One thing ive noticed is the Usx on its own has much less control of timing/tempo.

Thanks again for taking the time to watch these.

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#25

Ha, great tremolo @Joep36
Long story short, the two most recent videos use two different motions. And the good USX motion is of course the one in the first video :slight_smile:

Probably the only way forward is to play the lines of the second video at (or close to) the speed of the tremolo video. Then there’s no way the inefficient / more laboured motions can creep in.

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#26

Gotcha!! Will give it a go in the comming weeks! Cheers @tommo

#27

Huh, that’s interesting… I went back and watched the slo-mo footage off my phone, and sure enough, the timing is a lot more even, still not perfect but not so exaggeratedly bad. Odd, that sort of temporal distortion is new to me.

I’m definitely still lagging a hair on the escaped downstroke as I move over the higher string and then reverse course to catch it with an upstroke, so that’s somrthing to work on (probably metronome/drum track work with a 16th note click), but it’s not nearly so exaggerated as it appeared here.

On the escaped upstroke bit, I’m pretty consistently picking through the higher string, muted, rather than rest stroking into it and stopping, but I’m actually a little less worried about this since this is a motion I basically couldn’t do at all with any sort of speed until a couple weeks ago when I finally sat down with the “test drive different motions” video and how it was supposed to work, mechanically, clicked. So, thanks, CtC! Some woodshedding should clean that up.

And yeah, sorry for the insane closeup. :rofl: I’m in for a Magnet on the Kickstarter campaign and things should improve on that front after that.

#28

To be honest, if the “one” is in time who cares if the notes in between are not exactly evenly spaced? :smiley:

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#29

Well, serious answer… They’re two very different sounds. There’s a very almost clinical-in-a-good-way “smoothness” and kind of machine-gun-like precision that comes from extremely even alternate picking, whereas less rhythmically precise but still squarely on the 1 picking has kind of a raweness and a raggedness to it that, again, can also be musically appealing. Not taking a side on which is better, like I’d hazard a guess that Lynch’s fastest alternate picking isn’t metronome precice and that’s part of what I love about his playing … but I’d really struggle to get that sort of ultra-precise in the pocket machine-gun-like smoothness out of a fast picked run because my timing isn’t meter-perfect within the beat. And, end of the day it’s probably not the end of the world because I’d say that’s maybe a little more appropriate anyway for the sort of stuff I write (I wear my rough and ragged bluesier influences proudly), but it’d be pretty cool to be able to do both.

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#30

Not sure if this helps, but:

I’m at this point both usx and dsx - when I first starded playing all my tremolo picking was usx and I was wondering why I had difficulties changing strings, then i tried dsx and it clicked for me then, it was prior to seeing CtC.
At this points it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s 2/4nps or 3nps. In fact I can do 3nps scale runs faster that the pop tarts lick.
But then again, I’m not the fastest guy out there.

Back to the video:

image
This thing going indefinitely, a left hand mobility exercise/warmup. It’s most suitable for USX, but - I noticed that I’m slower going to the next string than the rest of the notes on one string.
I don’t really know if that’s relevant to this topic, but better to share just in case.

EDIT:
Now that I read the topic more carefully I see that what I filmed and posted is not that much relevant to you guys, so pardon me for intrusion.

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#31

Update on that machinegun-like-smoothness post - for kicks I pulled up a 170-180bpm drumbeat, trempicked a few bars against that, and then overlaid a 16th note grid against that in Reaper, zoomed in enough to see individual peaks. Turns out at least part of my problem is I’m really NOT that consistently on the 1, and I’mm wavering back and forth. So, it looks like I have some metronome practice in my future, to get some practice really locking into the beat. :lol:

I know metronomes get a bad rap around here, and for good reason, and to be perfectly honest I’ll be using a drum loop rather than a simple metronome click just because I find that more interesting, but I think this is about the one scenario where they really make a lot of sense, not incrementally ratcheting up the speed or anything, just setting one off at a good clip, and working on getting perfectly into the pocket with it.

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#32

Thanks for filming all these closeups! They very clearly illustrate the difference between your efficient motion and your less efficient one. The fact that your stringhopping motion looks smooth in certain respects is the kind of challenge lots of players face, so this is actually a great example and we’d be happy to include this in our case study. Let us know if we can use a short section of these clips.

If you’re saying there is tension, and there is a hard speed limit in the same range that we typically see in stringhopping examples, well, then if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck… You get the idea!

Sometimes the only sensible diagnosis is clinical, i.e. based on symptoms. We see a motion that is double escape and the player complains of tension and speed limit, then we’re ok with calling it stringhopping because what else could it be? There may be slight technical differences between what you’re doing and what other more obviously vertical / bouncy motions are doing. But it may not matter from a practical perspective. Because efficient techniques don’t have these issues, so regardless of what is happening on a technical level, something is clearly not working right and that’s all we really need to know.

As far as what to do moving forward, both of your single escape motions look awesome. The USX on a note by itself looks amazing so that’s the one you want to use for synchronized sequences as well. When you try to combine this at slow speeds where you can “feel” every note, you just revert to the stringhopping motion, so that approach is not working. You have to find a way to trick yourself into using the fast version of the motion in combination with fretted notes.

Can you do something on a single string at high speed with open notes against occasional fretted notes, like AC/DC’s “Thunderstuck”, or the intro to the solo in Extreme’s “Play With Me”? Maybe this will be easier to do while maintaining the motion.

As for playing lines that require mixed escapes, going slowly just triggers the stringhopping motion. So I would say the only way is to go fast through trial and error on a wide variety phrases while alllowing sloppyness. I would make this a slightly longer term project though, something you experiment with when you have the time. Your other two motions already work great so getting them both happening with synchronized fretted lines is closer, so you may as well see if you can get the USX one happening.

Nice work.

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#34

They get a bad rap because lots of people use them and don’t seem to get results. We’ve seen so many clips of people playing with the click droning away in the background and they’re just not in time with it, even if they think they are. So eventually you start to question what it’s even doing.

Synchronizing something a tremolo to a click is not about playing in “time” with the lick, per se. It’s about learning to fire off your tremolo in units of two, four, six, eight, etc. pickstrokes at a time. Once you can do that, then it is relatively trivial to line up the first note of each of these chunks with the click, or with your foot, or with nothing at all, even if the tempo is changing.

When you see people who can’t synch a tremolo, it’s because they only know it as a continuous motion. Instead they need to learn fourfastnotes. Twofastnotes. And then just repeat them. I did this with no click. I didn’t even own a metronome. Because the click is secondary / external. It’s the chunking that you’re really trying to do.

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#36

Oddly, though, that’s the part that I seem to be struggling with. I’m not claiming my tremolo picking is the greatest, exactly, but it’s easily within fast enough range. 180-200bpm, I can count “one… two… three… four…” and feel in the groove, downpicking on the beat, or tap my foot at the same quarter note pulse while doing the same… but then when I do that to a click track, even one with a 8th or 16th hihat groove going on, and then overlay it on a grid and actually look where the beats are falling, there’s a LOT of variation present, call it a 32nd in either direction.

Moot point if it sounds good, of course… but it doesn’t sound especially precise either, so clearly there’s some work that needs to be done here. If you’ve got suggestions other than practicing to a known tempo source, then of course I’m all ears. :+1:

#37

Yes of course, im happy for any of it to be used. Let me know if you need any more.

As it stands its hit and miss with the usx and synching anything, but i also see/feel the potential, its smooth and sloppy rather then filled with tension. I just find it bizarre even on single strings how i can sync it with dsx, but making the slight adjustment to the usx throws everything off. Ive just been attempting it at speed little and often, definetly seeing improvements though which is great. Im not looking to replace my dsx as i like the results i have achieved, but it would be great to have as an extra tool. I think once im more comfortable with synching with usx i will be in a better position to attempt mixed escaped lines.

I may post some progress videos if thats ok?

Thanks

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#38

Excellent thanks. We’re done editing the next update and should have that out in a few days, so you can watch yourself on the big screen (or the little one) soon.

Re: your progress, yes keep us posted. This problem of not being able to do the motion once the other hand joins in is common. It doesn’t seem like strictly a “synchronization” issue, where you have two hands moving fast but just not together. Instead it seems more fundamental, like the very nature of the motion changes once the other hand tries to move. But I think it’s a common problem and I have experienced it myself when I try to play lefty.

As you’re suggesting, I suspect that some amount of repeated trying at the faster speed is necessary to get it to work. There may be more to it, but my guess is that if you only try to go slowly with both hands, you’re not really doing the same motion as the faster one and so not really solving the problem of whatever is going wrong at the faster speed. Some type of ping ponging back and forth from fast to slightly slower, to fast to a little slower, might be more how you learn to maintain the realistic nature of the motion while while the other hand joins in.

Let us know what you come up with as you experiment.

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#39

Descending with a down, ascending with a down, ascending with an up and descending with an up. I can do both fine. I don’t descend 2nps starting on an up often tho which is why I was awkward with that here. Probably not a great candidate for this specifically. The only thing I’m still working on is DBX. Would LOVE to have Troy dissect that for me for real so I can get on with making music using crazy crosspicking.

#40

I had the same problem you have in your USX motion, as far as I can see, your USX motion in different in feel from DSX while changing strings because when you change strings after downstrokes in DSX your pick DO escape in your all downstrokes while in your USX motion it seems you truely escape only in your last note(which is up stroke) and not on your all up strokes(do you see the blip in your forearm while changing strings in your USX?, it doesn’t happen in your DSX)which can lead to inconsistency in your feel of changing strings.
So how to fix that? my solution to this problem was pretty simple, in your DSX your string tracking comes from your finger which anchored to the guitar(you just bend the finger and the hand comes in the same angle of attack to each strings which makes your motion constant and doesn’t change,so in your USX do the same thing, make the string tracking from your finger which anchored to the guitar and remember to not do the blip from your forearm because if you truely do USX it is not necessary
It can help you if you curl the finger anchored to the guitar as much as you can(i personly anchor it in the bridge pickup) in the high e string and bend it as you string tracking in the lower strings and the reverse.
Just make sure the string tracking comes truely from that and not from your wrist or forearm or something(it changes your whole angle of attack and lead to errors, for me really doesn’t work,just try that and tell me what you think)

#41

Hi there!

Glad to be part of this great community! I never paid that much attention to my alternate picking technique, but I’ve made it a mission to REALLY master any type of line, fast run I’d wanna play.

Here are my current main motions. I think I’m an upward pickslanter, I like to start things on an upstroke. My goal is to become equally proficient with downslanting. Any input is highly appreciated!

#42

Not quite the Halloween theme, but close enough to now have it stuck in my head. :slight_smile:

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