Our interview with the awesome @Bill_hall is up! This was a really fun conversation that had taken us so long to finally edit it, that doing so was like watching it with new eyes. The ostensible purpose of the interview was discussing Bill’s use of elbow technique, but when we took a look under the hood, there was a whole treasure trove of other cool stuff going on.
We pulled out one such example for YouTube where we talk about arpeggio picking. Bill says this was the first picking motion he ever learned how to do, and he never practiced it. In the interview you can hear me telling him not say that too loudly around other guitarists, which you’ll understand when you see how good he is at it:
This is wrist motion, and Bill’s using the “pronated forearm” approach, or what we called “David Grier” style wrist motion the most recent Pickslanting Primer update. You’ll recognize this in the Magnet shot because you can see the thumb-side anchor, and the air gap beneath the pinky side of the palm. This is one of the three main forms or setups that players will use for wrist motion, and in this case it’s the one used by Bill and also great players like David, Molly Tuttle, and Oz Noy, among players we’ve interviewed.
Many thanks to Bill for doing this one!
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Went to watch something else and was pleasantly surprised. Congrats to @Bill_hall, great job and killer playing as usual. He also has a YouTube channel with useful guitar lessons and dives into 80s guitar playing:
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Thank you so much, @guitarenthusiast! I really appreciate it! It was such a fun and awesome experience to be interviewed by Troy! He is such a great player and a really nice person also! It’s really was really exciting that he asked me to come and be interviewed. I was honored that he asked me! I think the video is really fun to watch and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did doing it! 
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I am looking forward to watch it!
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Watching it right now. We have the same technique, so I’m excited to watch!
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Great stuff, Bill–thank you!
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Really, really good. I thought that elbow motion always went with a pronated (DSX) approach but clearly @Bill_hall is shredding from the elbow with a supinated grip. Very helpful!
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These things are complicated for sure! But Bill looks like he uses a pronated forearm orientation most of the time. In the arpeggio picking excerpt above, you can see that the contact point is under the thumb, and the other side of his palm isn’t touching the strings, and there’s a small air gap there. That’s what happens when the arm is turned toward the thumb, i.e. pronated.
As far as the grip, that’s something else entirely. Pronation / supination really just refers to the arm position, not the pick grip. The pick appearing to be slanted one way or another really boils down to the way you’re holding it. If you press it into the cavity between the thumb and the index finger, you can get what looks like a downward pickslant even with this type of arm position.
The way the pick moves is yet a third thing. Even with a pronated arm position, bill can still play the type of EJ lines that we typically associate with players that use a more supinated arm position. This is maybe the first time we’ve seen that.
So, again, complicated, for sure.
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I remember we talked about this that day, @Troy. I mentioned how it looks like my pick was at a downward slant but whenever I play a downstroke it always clears the higher string unless I don’t want it to by tilting my forearm down. How my pick grip looks is different than the actual movement I am doing. I would say I am definitely in the pronated position most of time. The only real part of my hand touching the guitar is the pad of my hand beneath the thumb.
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Yes I remember that part of the interview. As it turns out these three things are all interchangeable. You can have any arm position with any escape motion and any pickslant. Not all of these combos will actually work which is why we see the correlations that we do.
As a teacher it’s enough to see what someone is doing and just make sure it’s one of the working combinations. The students then don’t need to get bogged down in the technical details. This is your approach to teaching and it prevents players from inadvertently overthinking things.
But if someone is watching our stuff on their own, they are essentially self-teaching. So we’re trying to make things as simple as we can for them over time to remove that “too much information” problem, which is real.
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I think you do an awesome job of explaining these things @Troy! Way better I am able to…that’s for sure! These things are so interesting to me and i am learning so much about how all these things work from all the great work you are doing in covering these things! I have a quick question for you… Do you think that players who play in the pronated position tend to use less Edge picking than someone who is not in the pronated position? I noticed some other players I was watching it playing the pronated position tend to play pretty flat against the string and I was wondering if the actual position was a reason for this? Thanks again for all the info… This is awesome stuff!
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gotcha - I have associated the supinated arm with hand position and thought of it was dictating the pick grip. I see from your response below that everything is interchangeable. Revelatory!
If you use the “hockey stick” form, where you bend the wrist so it points a little toward the headstock, this has the effect of flattening out the edge picking. Meaning, you’re turning the hand so the grip is more parallel with the strings, for flatter contact. You do this, David Grier does it, Molly Tuttle does it, and they all use some amount of hockey stick form in addition to the pronated arm.
One thing I can say about this is that these are all acoustic players where flat edge picking is very common, for tone reasons. A heavy gauge pick played flat is how you get the bluegrass sound. It’s bright, but not super bright because the pick gauge is adding back some bass.
By contrast, Oz Noy who we filmed is also a pronated player with the hockey stick form, but he uses more edge picking. And you can see in the Magnet shots how he bends his thumb to get that. If he didn’t do that, he’d be flat on the string too, probably because of the hockey stick. And of course Oz is more of an electric player. In the interviews, he used our vintage JCM 800 with a Tube Screamer and what looks like a Dunlop Big Stubby, which is a comparatively massive and glassy sounding pick with a lot of chirp when you play it with edge picking. You can definitely hear a bunch of chirp in the attack in almost all the examples.
So I think it’s possibly tone-related. Is pronated more common on acoustic, because acoustic players like to have a flatter attack, and the hockey stick gives that to you? We’d probably need to survey more players, but if this turns out to be true it wouldn’t surprise me.
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Thank you for the reply @Troy! That makes total sense that the hockey stick would play a big part in that. Now that you mention it…I think that the tone aspect does play a big part also. I remember consciously not really wanting any kind of chirp sound from my pick when I was playing the electric years before I started playing a lot of acoustic and I kind of remember flattening the pick to get rid of the chirp without really being super conscious of it I just knew I like the tone better when I had it flatter. It’s funny… I had forgotten all about the chirp aspect of it until you mentioned it. I have experimented with different picks over the years and I always go back to the standard 351 heavy because it just sounds the best to my ears. When I use a heavy pick like a stubby I remember it being really chirpy and when I used the Jazz 3 it just didn’t feel as good as the 351. I just chalked it up to not being familiar with those pics but after watching your recent video it makes total sense to me that the reason why I like the 351 Fender heavy is because I don’t use a lot of edge picking and it sounds great with my technique on the acoustic or electric. So I guess it would be a combination of the hockey stick form and the tonal aspects. That makes a lot of sense… Thanks for answering that for me! I really enjoyed the Oz Noy interview…he plays such cool stuff! I’m going to watch that one again when I get a chance… It’s been a while since I watched it and it would be fun to see it again. Thanks again for responding!
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Really great interview, cool stuff. I’m an elbow guy too so this was awesome to see!
As far as the alternate picked 1nps stuff goes, Bill - the picking hand 3rd and 4th finger I notice are rubbing against the guitar as you play. Well, maybe not rubbing against it, but I do something similar for a lot of my sweepy/ alternate picked crap I normally do also.
So… I wonder, is that a part of the equation,? Are those fingers referencing your pick depth or something? Just curious. Thanks in advance…
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Hello @Scottulus…thank you for watching the interview! I would say the I do sort of glide on my little finger a lot…I feel the gliding more on my little finger than my third and I guess it does sort of keep the pick depth even. I am not pressing down on my fingers of the right hand hard or anything like that…they just sort of just glide. I feel the anchor point on the ball of my thumb side more. But the pinky definitely helps stabilize my right hand to some extent and I am sure it plays a part in the equation some. Thanks again for watching! 
Thanks so much for your reply, Bill. Useful information, so I appreciate your answer. Are you holding the pick in leading edge, or trailing edge?
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I hold it pretty flat with a slight leading edge but some things might have a slight trailing edge to it @Scottulus. But generally it is pretty flat. I just prefer the tone when it is more flat for the way I play.
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I really enjoyed this one. Bill is a bad bad man on that acoustic.
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