Hi everyone!
I just finished making my way through the Pickslanting Primer (I haven’t gone through the riff clips at the end but I’ll do that soon) so I figured now would be a good time to get an initial critique. Although not this forum’s focus, I also have a number of fretting hand questions.
I’ve found a pronated DSX motion with UWPS feels most natural for me currently, similar to David Grier’s form. One thing that comes to mind is that David Grier plays on acoustic and none of the interviewed electric guitar players seemed to use this form - the closest is probably Andy Wood who appears to use a more neutral forearm angle. Are there any electric players on this forum that uses a pronated DSX motion, and are there any unique challenges this might present? One that comes to mind is secondary escape motion (something I’d like to eventually incorporate but I figure one thing at a time). It seems like more pronation might make a secondary USX motion more difficult due to the garage spikes problem.
Another weird quirk I notice in myself is that, due to the pronation, I seem to have gotten in the habit of naturally using my picking hand thumb to mute the adjacent string. This feels really convenient… perhaps too convenient, as I don’t recall it mentioned anywhere in the Pickslanting Primer which makes me suspicious. Is this a bad habit that could cause problems down the line? A google search only seems to reveal one guitarist who talks about muting with the thumb this way and… well, I won’t name any names but it’s someone I don’t particularly trust (very scam artisty vibes, perhaps you can guess who).
The last question I have on this topic is from The Tracking Mystery - how much arm vs. wrist movement is involved when moving between strings. I believe that video involved a more supinated USX motion, has anyone found that DSX involves more or less arm movement? Up to this point I’ve been using the approach “wrist is for picking strings, arm is for changing strings”, but after watching that video I feel like I should reevaluate. I definitely find myself hitting the wrong strings somewhat often on wider interval exercises such as octaves and 9ths and I wonder if a fundamental technique change could help with this.
Okay, enough talk, here’s a short video clip. I haven’t hit any major (picking hand) issues yet, but I would love to hear anyone’s feedback on anything I’m doing that looks problematic.
And the same thing from a more front-facing perspective (same video, 22 seconds in if the timestamp doesn’t work):
Okay, moving onto fretting hand. Yeah, in the video above, I played that really simple chromatic pattern because, well, my fretting hand just sucks and I can’t play anything “real” yet at a speed fast enough to even work on picking motion (as it is in the realm of “even an inefficient motion will work”). So please let me know if I’m doing something obviously horribly wrong in the following clips.
Here is me attempting to play… uh, I can’t remember what the name of this pattern is, but it’s 3NPS where the 2nd through 5th string are repeated so there are 6 notes to allow for consistent downward escape. (same video, 45 seconds in if the timestamp doesn’t work)
As you can see, it’s terribly messy, in particular descending… and this is only 90bpm. Looking back on my practice notes, I first started trying to speed up my left hand… gosh, almost a year ago, and made very little progress, consistently getting stuck around a depressing 80-90bpm 16th notes. My approach was the classic “start slow and increase the metronome only when you could play it perfectly”. Clearly that did not work. More recently I made a major breakthrough when I switched to practicing short bursts. After a month of practice I was able to play short sequences of 3-7 notes as fast as 140bpm, albeit inconsistently. This is much more promising, but now I’m running into a specific left hand issue that I’ve been trying to work on but haven’t found a great approach.
Specifically, when playing descending patterns (e.g. 4-3-1-4-3-1-4-3-1), I often can’t make my fingers lift quickly enough and it mutes the next note. Here’s a video of a few examples where you can hear badly muted notes: a repeating 4-3-1 pattern, a pinky trill, and an ascending/descending chromatic pattern at three different speeds which devolves into an utter disaster. And… these aren’t even remotely fast, they’re 80-100bpm 16th notes. (same video, 58 seconds in if the timestamp doesn’t work)
For the last month and a half I’ve been attempting to strengthen my left hand using repeating patterns 1-4-3-4, 1-4-2-4, 1-4-1-3, and 1-4-1-2. Additionally, two weeks ago I added 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-4, 1-3-4, 2-3-4, 3-2-1, 4-2-1, 4-3-1, and 4-3-2. I’ve been doing each one for 1 minute each (trying not to overdo it and injure myself). The problem is, when I practice something, I try to focus on a specific aspect that I can improve, but it doesn’t feel like there’s anything I can really control here. “Lift your finger faster” is about as useful as “just play faster, dummy!”. As tommo wrote in another thread, don’t just repeat something 1000 times hoping for better results, and I agree.
Perhaps this is just a matter of building finger strength and muscle memory and I just need to keep at it, and if that’s the answer then I will happily accept it. I just don’t want to do what I did before and waste another year trying to speed up scales incrementally and getting nowhere. One idea I came upon is practicing legato with only hammer-ons (even descending) which is something I hadn’t seen before but seems potentially helpful.
If there’s anyone on this forum that had similar fretting hand struggles and was able to work through them, I’d be interested to hear what your journey involved. Did your fretting hand speed and control slowly increase over time (perhaps years) naturally? Was there something in particular you discovered that helped? Or… are people like me doomed because fretting hand potential has a neurological ceiling and mine just happens to be really low (I hope not and try to avoid thinking that way but sometimes negative thoughts creep in)? My impression (and I could absolutely be wrong!) from reading this forum and others is that people who can play fast were physically able to do it pretty much from the start and it was just a matter of muscle memory programming. That Shawn Lane clip that’s often posted - his advice about starting with speed simply feels physically impossible for me to do. I do wonder if there is something like the tapping test for fretting hand fingers.
Thanks for your time.