Swiping and Self-Worth or: Becomig a "real" (?) guitar player

Playing Technique
#66

Well, in my experience so far, I definitely swipe (unintentionally) but its not always in the same places, not audibly the same and sometimes I feel it, other times I don’t.

I don’t think its something that could easily be ‘micromanaged’ out quickly, more of a refinement over time. If you are learning a piece (and want to perform it reliably live) I would 100% try to rearrange the fingering to suit your strongest picking escape. ‘Improvising’ may well bring problems at times, but it can be lived with.

If its that problematic then, maybe just try it on occasion when you need a break (or a laugh) theres no point beating yourself to death with it.

#67

I think you see Swiping as a mistake, or cheating or a flaw in playing. I see it as the exact opposite, because imo it requires a lot of skill to Swipe and for it to sound good, you need really good muting skills paired with right hand mechanics, and be able to add other techniques on the fly like the Batio ascending four note groupings; even with his systematic swiping he needs to add a secondary motion at the right time to get a USX string change that happens on an ascending portion of the groups. And he has to do all that cleanly which he does. So I guess it just depends on how you look at it. In my case my ego would feel better if my swiping was better because I would be able to tackle some lines with alternate picking that are currently very hard for me much easier and make them sound good at the same time.

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#68

I am glad I am not the only one who feels it this way. I only have one phrase where I do this, and it was quite the pain in the rear to train it into my rest stroke technique. Absolutely I don’t know if these people who view it as it is a hack, if it is more second nature to them. But it is not second nature to me, and it was tedious to build up swiping in that one phrase.

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#69

Yeah in my case is not second nature because first of all with my mechanics it works like Batio pretty much, only descending and specifically to avoid the USX string change, it’s very systematic. So I think on my own I never really did it. The second reason is I always thought I had to avoid the strings, basically do escape motion, my DSX came natural, USX not all. Instinctively I tried to use finger motion and weird movements to try to do it, it enevr worked. Until I figured out my wrist motion and anchoring better (thanks to this website mostly), and developed more naturally a USX secondary wrist motion. Again it came natural once I figured those things out.

Now, I recall seeing a Troy video where he talks about 2wps, and how he thought he was clearing the strings completely always, yet under inspection he was still employing swiping but the escape motion made the swiping much less noisy. I think that’s my case for a lot of the descending stuff, my motions for escaping just makes the swipe much more silent. But to me where it’s really harder is when you don’t attempt to escape the string at all and just go straight through it, I realized that approach would economize and make my motions far more efficient in certain scenarios, that becomes very evident in those 4 notes groupings I was talking about, or the Batio descending fours aswell, on the descending fours done the Batio way for example, if you have good swiping plus DSX, essentially it turns from a 2wps pattern to a one way pickslating or single escape pattern plus swiping economizing a lot of motions of the picking hand. But it just doesn’t come natural for me, I think it is specially difficult on the top strings, the high strings, where muting with the right aswell doesn’t happen that much, because I find in the lower strings you can get away with palm muting a lot more, so you have the picking hand muting and the fretting hand muting. But just fretting hand alone it’s tougher to make it sound clean. That’s why I’m always amazed when I see Batio or when I see Rusty Cooley going into hyper speed mode.