The Lazy Sloppy Zebra or "Transition Time“?

[JudasPriester]

This is maybe a weird title for a post, but I share it in a few seconds (tl;dr!!) I found this old book by Troy Stetina “Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar” from 1990 and there is a chapter about speed practice, wherein there is a subentry on page 31 about “Transition Time” (Stetina, 1990). In short, this is about putting together the length of a note, the length of a pick stroke and finally the influence on the possible frequency of strokes when picking fast.

A zebra-crossing-like diagram, among the textual information that is in my opinion very useful, illustrates the concept and I recently started to incorporate the info into my practice.

Now I would like to consider the implications of the foresaid: Like Troy said, slow practice does not necessarily promise the ability for speed and fluidity when one does not know and yet learned the right movement, which is his most natural way. So one hint is trying tremolo picking to max out the capability and perhaps then return to slow (and synch) practice. Some nice side note from you Troy, what you once said in the forum: Probably only elite player are able to practice the right movement slowly and truly correct, but some beginners and maybe advanced players are not. You also stated (while explaining string-tracking in “Primer”) that one does not need to micromanage every single step of movements and that body and mind are able to find out things without planning and considering everything consciously. That is so true, but sometimes, at least for me, you have to. Maybe, as we know now thanks to CtC, because picking is a bunch of problems – a “layer cake” of issues –, it is just always another aspect of this bunch that bothers different players. At least I am a lazy person that is why I wanted to share some thoughts about “Transition Time”.

In other words, maybe the consideration of “Transition Time” can help one to see the relation of playing fast (and maxing out) and practicing slowly. It is then true, that playing fast is not always necessarily about performing the tiniest possible movements or just playing on the surface on the string (see EvH’s tremolo). That is also a sound issue and maybe helps one to get higher pace. However, I now guess playing fast is about the power and weakness of the pick stroke for a considerable part. I never noticed this aspect until I opened Stetinas book. The snap played slowly will then probably also help to learn the frequent change of the required tense and release after. Maxing out before practicing more complicated single-/multi-string is then a very important method, but one (again at least me) must draw the obvious conclusion out of it: Slow practice must be “fast” at the same time. Does this make sense? Has anyone tried that or do you all here perform that kind naturally (aka are not lazy )? Does that play a role at all? Comments appreciated!!

[Kean]

I remember reading that chapter in the Stetina’s Speed Mechanics years ago. Brings back memories! Adam Neely talks about “Transition time” in his own words, and how it relates to playing fast in this video. Definitely worth watching:

Check out what he says at 2:20 about “practicing fast movements slowly” It’s very similar to your observation about slow practice having to be “fast” at the same time.

[Troy]

Cool question, and I’m not 100% sure I’m following, but I think you’re getting at something which has actually been studied in motor learning research - this idea that the velocity of a given motion tends to be constant for a specific activity, even as the frequency of the activity speeds up.

To put this in picking terms, if you ask someone to play something slowly, most of the time, they tend to make a fast picking movement that pauses in between the notes. So if you were to graph the position of the pick in space, it would start to approximate a square wave when the player goes really slowly.

This is what I meant by it actually being hard for players to play “realistic” slow movements - it tends to be robotic. The slower you play, the more it begins to look like: Note. Stop. Note. Stop. And so on. This is not a realistic approximation of fast playing, because during fast playing, the movement is more continuous. The classic example of this is the super-slow “demonstration” mode that you’ll see players use on instructional videos, which doesn’t really approximate what they’re doing when they play fast.

To actually play a realistic, continuously slow movement, you pretty much need to be an expert. This would be more like telling someone to simulate running in slow motion. Probably someone from Alvin Ailey or an expert b-boy breakdancer could do it. But most of us will just make robotic movements and/or fall over.

So… You can look at these “punctuated” fast movements in slow motion, and they’re just not realistic approximations of the smoother movement that happens when you play quickly. The piles of slow motion footage we have filmed make this pretty clear. I’m not sure how you translate from that kind of movement into the more graceful one that you see when you slow down actual high-speed playing. Instead it really appears that the learning process works in reverse: You’ve gotta learn that movement, or at least start to grasp it, in its naturally smooth form, and then slow it down afterward.

I may also may be totally missing the point of the “slow yet fast” Stetina graphs, and if so apologies! Feel free to correct.

[JonBjork]

This technique is extremely important imo. I first read about it in the same book as you and later got it “confirmed” by a classical guitar teacher when I attended G.I.T. Really improved my tone and overall synchronisation and it’s a concept I have in mind every day while practicing.

The only thing I’d add is that it’s important to make sure that the movement you use while playing slowly is the same as the motion you use when playing fast.

[Hanky_Pooh]

How do you guys think this topic correlates with planting technique? Wouldn’t planting practice be against this topic point? The resting would be longer time the pick is touching the string. Is planting technique training for pick stroking as fast as possible? What do you think on this @troy

Rick Graham has a degree in Classical Guitar, he talks about planting here… I started it at 1:00 , he gets to the single string planting at 1:55

A simple approach that transformed my picking technique

[JonBjork]

I think it’s another tool in the “practice box”. I use it mainly for practicing (and teaching) economy/sweep-picking but also for checking out how the most efficient picking motion for whatever I’m working on would look.

I made a choice way back to always opt for better tone versus minimal movement in the right hand, at some point you’ll end up almost choking the string. I’d rather have a good tone and be slightly slower than getting those extra nps’s in but losing clarity and tone quality.

[theGuyFromGermany]

to me that has always been the biggest problem on picking practice.
in the end every slow practice can only be some kind of estimation of the final result when up to tempo.
at least the force to hit the string need to be the same to get the real tone which implies either change the tone or the technique when practicing.
to me the way to get there (just in terms of my possibilties) was isolating paramaters to find out what needs to be kept in order to speed up without getting the (subjective) impression of changing the motion.
i’d say there’s no overall rule how to solve that problems there’s so many mechanical approaches out there, i cannot imagine that they can all be covered with just on rule.
anyway its kind of important to point out that it’s worth to think twice of how to practice speed before wasting loads of time.

[Frylock]

Rick Graham has a degree in Classical Guitar, he talks about planting here

First, I’ll note that in Larry Baione’s DVD companion to Will Leavitt’s “Modern Method for Guitar” (Berklee), Baione also advocates using rest strokes with a plectrum all the time, so Rick Graham isn’t just a voice in the wilderness on this topic.

But regarding classical guitar instruction: classical guitar doesn’t use a plectrum. The “planting” in classical guitar is a fingerstyle thing. I think it’s legitimate to investigate whether applying the same principle to plectrum playing has benefit; the gypsy-jazz application of the restroke suggests “yes”. My concern is with Rick’s definition of “minimum”. He’s suggesting that resting against the adjacent string and then returning to rest against the bottom of the original string is the most economical movement, which seems to be plainly untrue. Even if we accept that it’s a good idea to return to rest against the bottom of the original string, it would be more efficient to only travel the minimum distance past the original string that allows it to sound (rather than traveling all the way to the adjacent string) before returning to that rest position on the bottom of the original string.

I think what Rick is talking about is an antidote to exaggerated picking movements where the pick travels further than the adjacent string, or generally flails around wildly in the air. What Rick is talking about is more economical than that, but at least in the form he’s demonstrating here, it’s not the “minimum” movement by any stretch.

(Edit: What I’m saying below is probably easiest to visualize with some amount of “leading edge” edge picking, especially in the context of a gypsy-jazz downstroke.)

Where things get interesting, and connecting this back to gypsy-jazz, is that if you use a DWPS movement with a large amount of slant, you can end up with a picking movement where the shoulder of the pick hits the adjacent string after the tip of the pick has travelled only a very small distance past the target string. (When I talk about “shoulder” in this post, I mean some position along the edge of the pick thats away from the tip, theoretically any point along the edge above where the “tip” meets the string, but in practice roughly one string-spacing distance from where the “tip” of the pick meets the string). If you rotate the angle of the picking motion so far that the motion is completely vertical to the plane of the strings, the timing of which hits first, the tip against the target string, or the shoulder against the adjacent string, will be entirely dependent on the orientation of the pick within your grip. If you did completely vertical pickstrokes with the pick oriented so that the “guitar side” edge of the pick was parallel to the plane of the strings, the shoulder would hit the adjacent string at the exact same time the tip hit the target string. By rotating the pick, you could even cause the shoulder to hit the adjacent string before the tip hits the target string.

I think what I’m talking about above explains why gypsy-jazz players love the rest stroke. It provides the consistent external feedback of landing against the adjacent string, but the very “vertical” nature of the gypsy-jazz picking motion is such that on gypsy-jazz downstrokes, the tip of the pick only clears the target string by a very small amount before the shoulder hits the adjacent string. So with a gypsy-jazz stroke, the “returning to rest against the bottom of the original string” that Rick Graham talks about becomes easier, because the tip of the pick hasn’t strayed far from the original string by the time the shoulder “bottoms out” against the adjacent string. You could argue that when the gypsy downstroke bottoms out, the tip is still close enough to the original string that an additional movement to actually bring it up to rest against the bottom of the original string isn’t even necessary.

In practice, doing what Rick is talking about in that video might help people improve their alternate picking, but his explanation of why it would help doesn’t make sense.

At 2m49s, Rick says “what that does, is that trains the right hand to only make the minimum movement possible with the right hand”, which isn’t true. It’s more efficient than a completely undisciplined right hand, but it’s more than the minimum movement. But it’s worth noting that Rick had primarily been advocating “conventional” one-way rest strokes for conventionally directional “economy picking” licks of the Frank Gambale school, and this talk about the exercise also being useful for alternate picking seemed to be more of a “by the way” rather than being Rick’s primary point.

[tommo]

it would be more efficient to only travel the minimum distance past the original string that allows it to sound (rather than traveling all the way to the adjacent string) before returning to that rest position on the bottom of the original string.

I’m not sure this is true if we take the momentum of the pickstroke into account. I like to have something to stop my pick, so that I can invert its motion with less effort. this may be because I like big/heavy pickstrokes though. For example, when I’m playing on the same string fo a while I like to rest stroke in both directions!

[theGuyFromGermany]

It’s more efficient than a completely undisciplined right hand, but it’s more than the minimum movement.

i’m not sure if i get that isnt the distance between the strings plus crossing the string the minimal movement?
thats just for my understanding.
IMO minimizing is not the best way to solve shifts - at least not in all cases.
eventhough i understand the benefit for his mechanics - its just not a general receipe.

[Hanky_Pooh]

Buahahaha, hey Fry!!!

I just wanna throw out there that I am not a Rick Graham fanboy, he’s just a fellow sweeper. I want to rebuttal for him a bit here.

I have never heard of Larry Bachoney and Willy Levitz-arooni. It’s very possible that Rick Graham hasn’t either.

For single string alternate picking, Rick is talking about planting on the exact string you just picked. Pick the string, plant on the reverse side of it. In regards to “minimum”, how do you make any less movement than that? That is the minimum possible. Pick planting on the string you just picked.

When he says plant on the following string(which isn’t even mentioned after my 1:00 link timestamp), he is talking about the economy picking string change. This is the rest stroke everybody sees in economy pickers.

@JonBjork I agree, tone is more important

[Frylock]

Before continuing, I think it’s worth mentioning that I’m not even claiming that it’s necessarily even desirable to make the smallest possible movement in most “alternate picking” situations. I think @Troy has done a good job of making the case that until you start talking about really extreme speeds, people tend to overestimate the value of “small movements” in alternate picking.

I’m not even disputing that the exercise might have value. I just think that if the exercise has value, it’s for reasons other than the “efficiency” explanation that Rick gives.

With that out of the way:

@tommo: In the scenario you are describing, I think it is more about the resistance of hitting the adjacent string serving as a signal to your brain that it should tell your muscles to move the pick in the opposite direction. Not to say that it can’t work, or can’t feel good, but if we’re talking academically about what is “efficient” I think you’re underestimating how much energy it takes to travel to the adjacent string and back, even if a tiny amount of that energy is “stored” in the adjacent string like a spring, and returned. But that “efficiency” aspect is a moot point if you can pick at the speed you want for as long as you want.

@theGuyFromGermany: My interpretation of what Rick was saying is that he’s advocating traveling to the adjacent string and back on every stroke, even if you aren’t switching strings. E.g. downstroke on the A string, keep going until you touch the top of the D string, then come back up and stop against the bottom of the A string. Maybe that’s not what Rick is really trying to say, but if it is, then I don’t agree that that’s the minimum movement. The minimum movement would be a downstroke on the A string that stops just beyond the space that the A string is vibrating in.

@Hanky_Pooh: Same as what I said to @theGuyFromGermany. It sounded to me like Rick was advocating traveling to the adjacent string and back even when there is no string switching. If he’s not, then fine.

[tommo]

@Frylock actually, from a physics (very rough) toy model I’d still argue that the rest stroke helps… let me try suppose P is the momentum of the pick after it sounds the first string. Neglecting air friction and… things to do with the human body, we have to convert it to -P. So, if we have to invert the motion in mid air, our muscles have to provide the full difference,

P_new - P_old = -2P.

If we rest stroke, the adjacent string has converted P to 0, so our muscles only have to provide -P, saving energy. I know I neglected a lot of details though!

EDIT - For clarity: the toy model here assumes that the pick would continue to travel indefinitely along a straight line (with momentum P), unless a force acts on it to change its motion (provided by the picking hand and/or the next string)

[theGuyFromGermany]

My interpretation of what Rick was saying is that he’s advocating traveling to the adjacent string and back on every stroke, even if you aren’t switching strings. E.g. downstroke on the A string, keep going until you touch the top of the D string, then come back up and stop against the bottom of the A string. Maybe that’s not what Rick is really trying to say, but if it is, then I don’t agree that that’s the minimum movement. The minimum movement would be a downstroke on the A string that stops just beyond the space that the A string is vibrating in.

ah now i got you. my interpretation was that you go just to the next string and over, which’d be the same string if not switching. i’ve no idea which one is correct. but i dont mind really, i was just cusious what was wrong about that minimum cause my definition is exactly that.

for ricks playing that makes sense but basically its more about tracking than than about the main pick mechanic.
if i remember right there’s another clip about that talking about string displacement - that might be more interesting for this forum cause its a topic that shouls be concerned for all mechnics.

[Troy]

The resting would be longer time the pick is touching the string. Is planting technique training for pick stroking as fast as possible? What do you think on this @troy

This planting on the opposite side of the string, if I’m understanding this correctly, that’s actually the technique we use in rock soloing all the time to get that staccato sound with a little chirp attached to it, right? Like Joe Walsh on Life in the Fast Lane, or EVH in the first few notes of the “Outta Love Again”, solo and so on.

It’s one of those little things that falls into the category of techniques that every single player probably uses, and yet nobody was ever taught. Or maybe I’m wrong. Was anyone ever specifically taught how to do this? Does it have a name, aside from planting?

[Hanky_Pooh]

Yeah, It’s the stop note/chirpy thing. Rick is doing this as a training exercise to develop small picking movements. And it’s all staccato sounding. I assume the concept is to stop doing it staccato when playing normally. Like it’s a muscle memory developer.

This led me to think, what happens if you start sounding staccato all the time by doing this exercise… or, would it effect the pick to note ratio that’s the topic of the thread here. Maybe it’s not a good idea to practice what Rick Graham is saying. Or, does it really work? It’s not making me go Staccato in high speed.

If it’s been proven that small movements do not increase speed. Then I guess there is no point to what Rick Graham is saying. Unless it’s maybe to get used to adjacent string planting to train economy picking. How did I get into these crazy posts

I don’t know if there is another name for this. Good question though.

[Frylock]

If we rest stroke, the adjacent string has converted P to 0, so our muscles only have to provide -P, saving energy. I know I neglected a lot of details though!

Change in momentum can be expressed as a product of force and change in time. What your model doesn’t account for is that you are generating a bunch of unnecessary momentum when you move the pick from the “minimum” displacement below the target string to the adjacent string. And then you’re starting further than necessary from the “upper” string at the beginning of the upstroke, so you have no choice but to generate more momentum than necessary on the return upstroke. We can see this more clearly if we imagine a larger inter-string distance, like say, an inch, or 3 inches, or 12 inches. If the strings were 12 inches apart, nobody would try to claim there’s a net gain in efficiency by doing a rest stroke: you’re doing a bunch of unnecessary work by moving the pick to the adjacent string. The amount of “excess” momentum you are generating on your way to the adjacent string (and the amount of “excess” momentum you will be required to generate on your way back) will decrease as the string spacing decreases. But even at the typical practical string spacing of roughly 11mm, I expect that the most “efficient” approach is to limit the amount of momentum you generate in the first place, and that comes from applying some “minimum force necessary” over some “minimum change in time necessary” to create a satisfactory sounding pickstrokes in each direction. There might be aesthetic reasons to use an approach other than the most efficient approach, but it would be a mistake to think that those approaches are more “efficient” than the minimum. If you choose to use such big and forceful pickstrokes that the “momentum savings” of stopping against the adjacent string will be worthwhile, then sure, that’s “more efficient” than picking that way without stopping against the adjacent string, but it’s not more efficient than using smaller and less forceful pickstrokes.

But as I think I said in another post, limits to do with “efficiency” only matter if they present a practical problem. If the technique you are using regardless of its “efficiency” allows you to make music come out sounding the way you want, that’s the only thing that matters.

[Acecrusher]

We can see this more clearly if we imagine a larger inter-string distance, like say, an inch, or 3 inches, or 12 inches. If the strings were 12 inches apart, nobody would try to claim there’s a net gain in efficiency by doing a rest stroke: you’re doing a bunch of unnecessary work by moving the pick to the adjacent string.

I agree with your post and the quote above is a good way of explaining why the rest stroke is not the most efficient approach. That some people have used this technique and achieved a certain level of proficiency proves nothing. I believe they would have progressed faster and possibly further had they chosen the most efficient method which is to use the least amount of motion necessary to play the required notes. Any motion beyond what is absolutely necessary to play the notes properly is wasted motion. Wasted motion obviously takes a certain amount of time, so the speed at which you could potentially be playing the sequence of notes is decreased when using rest strokes. The speed is decreased by the time necessary to create the wasted motion per pick stroke, multiplied by the number of notes in the sequence.

[Acecrusher]

If it’s been proven that small movements do not increase speed.

A small movement may not increase the speed of the pick, but if you move the pick at a speed to which we will assign the letter x, then in comparing using small movements to large movements, suppose just for the purpose of comparison that the large movement requires moving the pick twice the distance that the small movement requires. In that case, the speed at which one can execute the movement is x/2 when using the large movement. Therefore, while the motion of the pick is the same whether using the small movement or the large movement, the amount of time it takes to complete the motion in this example is twice as long when using the large movement as it would be if one were using the small motion instead.

To put it in other terms, suppose you’re driving a car at 60 miles per hour. You have the choice to either drive 30 miles or 60 miles. Driving 30 miles (small movement) doesn’t increase the speed at which the car is moving compared to driving 60 miles ( larger movement). However driving only 30 miles (choosing the smaller movement) cuts the time necessary to complete the task by 50 percent!

[theGuyFromGermany]

But that’s not how it works.
It’s a repetive motion, a better view on that would be a pendulum.
And in that example the range has zero impact on the frequency, eventhough a wider range increases the speed.

To be honest I can’t explain how that happens (in body/joints/muscles) but it seems what we control is the length of the pendulum (just to stay in that example) and that influences the frequency.
I think we can assume that in general (means playing even volume) we put the same amount of energy in the picking, we speed up by shortening the length of the pendulum which results in a smaller range, therefor the range is the result of the speed not the other way round.

I’m pretty sure we all experience that when we ‘feel’ the sweet spot (in terms of speed) for a motion, which means the repetition runs basically on its own.
If you try change the natural range of it the whole thing falls apart because you need to invest energy during the entire movement.

I think that’s what Hanky_Pooh tried to say, it makes no sense to focus on the range of the motion (in terms of speed), you need to focus on the frequency, the smaller range is ‘just’ a result.