SRV and Others Speed Picking

Playing Technique
#12

Really? SRV played 16th notes in the 210bpm tempo? I had no idea he was that fast and I’ve got most of his albums. I would have thought his fastest stuff would have been more like in the 170s and not 210s!

Whatever the case may be he was an absolutely great player and I feel so fortunate to have seen SRV on hs final tour at The Tampa Sundome in the fall of 1989 with Jeff Beck as the opening act. In one of life’s cruel ironies, SRV talked to us at length during a break between songs about his addiction and said he was finally clean and sober for the first time in his life since about 12 years old! He said he had finally learned what the most important thing in life is, and that’s love, he said. “It’s the love you have for your family and friends, that’s the real deal folks.”

I’m pretty sure we were all thinking "This is great! Now we’re assured that this incredibly talented man will be a part of our lives for many, many years to come.

Then a few months later I got into my car in the University parking lot and turned on the radio as I was about to pull out of my parking spot and head to my next class. The horrible news came across the radio that a helicopter containing SRV cafter he was leaving a concert he had played with Eric Clapton had crashed and Stevie Ray had died. I didn’t pull out of the parking spot. I opened up the glove compartment of my Honda Civic and pulled out a pair of sunglasses to put on as tears began to run down my face… I sat there and listened to one of his songs they had put on - I think “Walkin’ The Tightrope” but I don’t recall for sure. After about 10 minutes or so I had regained my composure enough to drive but the world was never quite the same again.

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#13

Again, there are thousand ways to play a pentatonic scale and we’ve covered a lot of them, so I’m not really sure what you’re referring to. If a person looks like they are strumming then maybe they are! I’ve looked at Bonamassa once or twice and I’ve seen two-way pickslanting licks and crosspicking licks. I can’t lump any of it into a single category.

It sounds like you’ve got something specific in mind. Find a clip of a particular movement and we’ll take a look.

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#14

Yeah it’s not common and it’s not in studio recordings but live he sometimes ripped through licks. I believe, and I could be wrong, but one of his fastest live licks came out of nowhere during the El Mocombo show I believe and I think it was something like 208-210bpm.

It’s hard to find a clean visual example @Troy but something like this classic type lick is what I mean:

#15

As The Guy From Germany aluded, SRV is known for using rakes a lot, as part of what made his sound so explosive - he’d only fret one note, but mute the notes around it abd basically strum through them to get this huge, exaggerated pick attack. That’s probably what you’re seeing.

Also, I’ve read he held his picks backwards and picked with the fat, flat part, rather than the pointed tip, but I’ve never seen good enough video of his picking hand up close to confirm that.

Guy’s a monster, though, and blisteringly fast - I think the BPM metrics matter less than the absolute blur of notes he could produce for effect. Tremendous, tremendous player.

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#16

Haha, seems we’re still at that genius thing.
So what you describe is what we’d need to do to copy him, but do we still need to do that?
I think we now can - and again thanks to you - split technique from music. If I have TWPS and crosspicking in my toolbox (which I don’t have yet) there’s no need to care about their solution, we already know how to do that technically,
What’s left is figuring out if the notes we play are what we want musically.
To me that’s the point where talent or genius hops in. I think those guys (including all of your interviews) are indisputable genius, not for figuring out the technique, but for using it in a way thats creates personality.

I can’t spot the point where personality blends to inaccuracy, but I think we don’t need thousands of clones of the great players, therefor at some point it’s probably just ok to say I don’t wanna do it that way.
Understanding what they do seems to be a good idea always though.

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#17

Link didn’t work earlier. Here’s another semi example

#18

I read once that when Stevie ray vaughn used the fat edge of his picks,he destroyed hisss pick guards.by playing real fast speeds. I wonder how can some one rip there pick guard off ther guitar? Just by playing at that speed? I bet he broke a ton of strings that way also. Oh yah,b.b. King broke a string on his guitar,and still kept playing.while he replaced his broken string.

#19

Just found this one:

There are some nice closeups on his picking, quality is bad though.

So now I’d say he uses DWPS, which’d be no surprise. just makes sense for pentatonic playing.

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#20

The way he bows his wrist and anchors fingers on the pickguard at some points screams DWPS, but it’s also cool the way he mixes in some stuff for dynamics that’s less straightforward. I think on some rakes and stuff he orients the pick neutral or even upward while using a “downward-picked” downstroke movement while sweeping/raking in order to “harden” the pick/string contact and make the notes sound brighter. Not that nobody else has ever done this, and it’s very common for blues players to do it on single notes, but just an interesting thing to notice.

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#21

Yes but then watch him play scuttle buttin’ and it looks more crosspicked to me. I don’t know how you’d play it with dwps alone.

#22

I don’t doubt it. I’m just saying there some very obvious DWPS in the clip I’m commenting on, not that it’s the only tool in his toolbox. There’s probably more techniques even in just that clip, I didn’t watch it the whole way through.

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#23

True. I never realized it before but you’re right

#24

Interesting thing about your Sayce clip is that he seems to be predominantly UPS, whereas it seems most of the players in this zone of fast blues picking (Hendrix, SRV) are predominantly downward slanters. Other thing is that even when Sayce switches to the pick, he’s using a hybrid technique to bypass string switching/slanting issues and get crazy across-string stuff happening at high speed. Why a LOT of great players–Hubert Sumlin, Albert Collins, Jeff Beck, Derek Trucks, to name a few–opt for that thumb-forefinger technique instead of using a pick at all. Sayce seems more like a thumb-forefinger player who sometimes uses hybrid picking to get the same effect, rather than a picker per se.

I’d take a little issue with the “speed” thing. BPS is just one measure, and deceptive despite its apparent objectivity. I think @Troy mentions this in the Eric Johnson stuff: that there are things that may not be insanely fast in BPS but seem a lot faster to the perception because they involve the wider-spaced sequences of pentatonics, as Eric demonstrates all over the place. There’s a punchiness about it that has its own kind of impact when you do it fast and fluidly, even if you’re not achieving the same BPS as a neo-classical Yngwie scale or the like.

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#25

I’ve been taking an intense look back at SRV recently in light of pick slanting stuff I’ve learned here. I think you’re right that he’s a predominant DWPS player but he deploys a lot of UWPS when he wants it, particularly that way he has of throwing in descending sweeps in the midst of a sequence–his hand just easily rotates in and out of that position, and I think he can switch from one to the other with equal facility. So maybe more of a TWPS? Somewhere on the site there’s a line about sweeping across the whole neck as a way of practicing the two movements, and it almost seems like that’s something SRV did a lot of.

Anyway, this clip has some pretty good views.

There’s a bit starting at 3:43 where you can see him moving very easily between the two–maybe cross-picking is the better term? The camera angle at 9:09 is quite good for looking at his wrist motion and pick angle. Right around 9:50 he starts doing a characteritic single note bend thing, starting out with repeated up-picks, his hand flying way out from the guitar, like a super-exagerated version of a DWPS exercise (he does it again a little further on). OTOH the bit starting at 11:53 looks predominantly UWPS and involves a lot of what sound to me like SNPS bits in between the doublets. It really just seems like he can use whatever is appropriate to the moment he’s creating.

His use of UWPS interests me b/c I’ve had breakthroughs over the years where I’ve been able to get something like that “wristy” SRV looseness–that feeling like you’re whipping your hand across the strings, hardly any tension in the fingers–but haven’t had a good way of understanding it and thus fixing it in my playing. At least for my playing, now that I’m revisiting this stuff with CTC in mind, a big part of what gets me there is being able to switch into UWPS mode and stay loose. Like, ascending riffs starting from a single downstroked note on the lower string and then 2-note-per-string after that, with the downbeat on the downstroke, so the two-note phrase occurs across the strings rather than along them. Just a punchier sounding thing. But then you want to be able to turn that around with a single-note upstroke at the top and then descend, so each TNPS pair now starts on the downstroke and string switching off the upstroke, standard DWPS style. (If you see what I mean–still a newbie at the terminology). When I’m able to do that fluidly is when it feels and sounds more like that wristy-loose movement SRV and some other blues pickers get. They do a lot of other things of course.

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#27

Honestly, if you have to think about all those different things when you;re playing, I don’t see how you;re gonna have any room left in your head for creativity. I’m starting to lean more and more towards the David Grier philosophy. There’s no way SRV was thinking abut all these things such as “which way do I need to slant my pick for this lick” or “how many notes per string is my next lick gonna have and what type of pick slant does that mean I’ll need”?

I love what CTC has provided for us, but people are horribly overcomplicating it in some cases.

#28

Well, sure, but practicing is very distinct from playing. Analysis is helpful to me in getting out of my own ruts so I don’t just end up practicing them in deeper.

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#29

I forget if it was Miles Davis or John Coltrane or some other jazz luminary, but one of them famously quipped, on the subject of how to become a great jazz soloist, “First learn all the theory you possibly can… and then forget it all.” What he meant by that isn’t that theory is useless - far from it, in fact. Rather, study it until you have it totally internalized, and then just play, not thinking at all about “Ok, this is a b5 over the II, I should be playing Locrian Dominant” (note to the theory gurus, I totally made that up, so it probably makes no sense at all, bear with me :slight_smile:) but just trusting their ears and the thousands and thousands of hours of practice they’ve put in to make sure all these concepts they’ve spent so long studying so they can just come out naturally in their playing.

I suspect guys like Stevie Ray are exactly the same - I guarantee you he isn’t thinking about pick angle while he’s playing, probably because that’s something that doesn’t even occur to him he SHOULD be thinking of. I think it’s all just happening, because on some level his body knows it works, so it’s just encoded in the muscle memory of how he plays a particular lick or run.

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#30

Yep, the fact that he didn’t consciously think about those thing doesn’t change the fact that he did them. If we inform our practice with analysis of what he did maybe we can shave off a few of the thousands of hours of practice it might take to develop our own take on the same technique.

And to echo the point further up about the difference between practice and performance: even if SRV didn’t apply the same mindset as Troy, I don’t doubt that he spent a ton of time away from the spotlight attempting licks over and over until he “felt” his way into a version that worked.

To me, the whole point of CTC is that once one person feels his way into a solution that works, the rest of us can try to learn by watching him, instead of putting on blindfolds and hoping that by shear chance we’ll fumble our way into the same solutions he did. Sure, experimentation and feeling things out still play a role, but analysis of people like SRV provides sign-posts that help us evaluate and tweak what we’re doing with an understanding of “what is known to work”.

And Troy has reported that an ongoing theme with elite pickers is that most of them developed their technique within an intensive period of less than two years. So if you’ve been playing your heart out for two years and you haven’t re-invented picking yet, chances are you never will, and it makes sense to look at what has worked for other people. With most other instruments, that sort of “struggling in the wilderness” is widely viewed as wasteful or even harmful to the development of “proper” technique in the long run (due to the development of “bad habits”), not as “necessary to creativity”.

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#31

His brother Jimmy once told in an interview that his uncles of both sides played the same style and most people couldn’t even tell a difference. Seems the chances are pretty good that actually somebody tought him how to do that.

And if you look at it with pure logic - DWPS on pentatonics …checked.
Reststrokes (which he uses a lot in the accoustic) are probably the best choice when switching between agressive strumming and scale playing.
Technically you can explain all of this (or at least most) without rocket science.

In the end it’s not the technique that makes the great players ‘great’, it’s the flawless and confident way they use it, combined with the right choices when to leave the ‘laws’ of technique (and theory).

CtC gives me good hope that the technical part is approachable for a good percentage of players (at least in near future), but to get really great it takes more than that, escpecially time with the instrument, and practice is time with your instrument.

And beside the time that’s saved by better knowlledge of the technique and how to trigger specific motions, we can even estimate the efforrt to put into specific techniques, which enables us to clain realistic goals.

To be short: understanding the technique is not against creativity, it helps you to focus on it.

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#32

If you mean the “just feels right” approach, when I put that into my practice and really focused on it, it has worked for me, and produced something more in the way of a cross-picking movement than anything else. But I would find it difficult to stay on that bicycle for more than a week or so. Stiffness creeping in, or old habits reasserting themselves. Generally I would try flipping my usual patterns around, try starting on upstrokes where I habitually used downstrokes, that kind of thing, just to shake things up, break some ice jams… for a while. Because without really understanding the mechanics of why it was working, I couldn’t figure out what to do when it stopped working. So the CTC thing has been hugely useful in that respect for practicing. Getting those big, wide-open sounding pentatonic blues things going has always been a big challenge for me, sometimes I can do it, sometimes it goes away, so thinking about it in this more granular way–like, just having a logic for when you want to sweep vs alternate, not that it’s an absolute rule but knowing that’s going to be more efficient (read “EASIER”!) for certain things, is huge.

There’s a learning styles thing, too. I think some players have a gift for imitation–for really fitting their ear and mechanics to reproduce not just the notes but the “feel” of other players, without necessarily involving the cerebral cortex so much. Sit down with a record, go over that guy’s lick until you really get inside how he’s playing it, why the same notes sound better if you do it this way instead of that. One way that works is that those licks act like anchors (in a good way), reminding your brain of that this feels right feeling, so you can return to them as a way of keeping you in that groove while you’re moving around in a solo. I think SRV has that kind of thing going. I think the players for whom it works are some of the best in the world.

I think that’s also a very powerful way to learn, and sometimes, again, it has worked for me, but then I want to add something out of my own head that maybe doesn’t fit so well and… then it’s really great to have a logic for analyzing what’s wrong rather than just If I just do this a lot more and more and more it will get easier. But I also highly prize the ability to come up with crazy shit on the fly in performance. Like @Acecrusher-- “Learn it all, then forget it,” is a great way to put it. Or as a guitar teacher once put it to me when laying out some complicated etude for me to try and master, “You gotta go to prison in order to get free.”

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