“Sure, kid, you can absolutely make a good living playing in a rock band. You should definitely do it.”
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I don’t have a specific advice I hate the most (though I could probably come up with a list 
).
However, I find it very frustrating that guitar education is still largely dominated by superstition (and I don’t mean the song, the song is cool!)
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Even the wiring of electric guitars is ridiculous (non-differential and usually fully passive components). But even so, I still love them, perhaps it is an illogical childhood thing that stuck with me as an adult!
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Hmm, I’m not a physicist but an Engineer and my suspicion is, the faster you go the more the acceleration will be a square wave and it’s amplitude will pretty much be all the power you can apply. Thus your “hand velocity” will be a triangle wave with the maxima somewhere around the string impact.
Of course this neglects a lot of mechanical and biological effects. Maybe @Troy can add some facts from the @milehighshred experiments.
Thomas
I prefer the term ‘Economy of Motion’, as it’s not specific i.e ‘small movements are fastest’ or ‘you must make the smallest movement possible’ at least gets you think about being efficient.
At rhythm-playing speeds, John used wrist motion and it was sinusoidal. At “hyperpicking” speeds the motion of the pick is more of a triangle wave. And it looks it visually, which you can see in the YT closeup. The pick more or less changes direction instantly.
The actual muscle activation looks triangular as well (second image), but it’s harder to get a clear picture of that because EMG data is a little more spiky than you’d think. Edit: Or maybe it’s just a high-amplitude sine wave on a scrunchy X-axis? Can’t really tell. Also, John’s massive triceps clipped the inputs so we can’t see the top of those peaks at all!
I can’t say if all picking motions are going to look like this, because it’s not clear other picking motions operate the same way or even have the same high speed potential. Players describe hyperpicking as feeling like a spasm. The lab results show that it’s not actually the case though. Spasm, or “tremor” in the physiological sense, is random. This is regular and controlled, whether or not the player senses it that way.
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Dude, this is one of the most awesome things anyone has ever said about me 
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I LOVE THIS DATA! What I meant by “square waves” was in terms of velocity, e.g., smooth movement in one direction, a sudden change in direction, smooth movement in the opposite direction, etc.
The plot of John’s hand over time makes triangle waves, meaning that he basically has constant velocity in each direction, and then he has this unbelievable magical way to suddenly change his hand direction!
I believe that for really high speed two things are necessary: (a) the path of the pick must be per CtC, and (b) the velocity of the pick must be like John, e.g., magical changes in direction almost as if a rubber ball was bouncing off of a wall.
Thanks for the insights, Troy!
Can you give me a hint, what ECR, FCR, PT and BRD mean (figured TRI out on my own
Ironically again one can interpret this as “small movements are fast” and fall into the coincidence/causality trap. It’s probably more like “very fast movements are small” as you stated.
At least we can say “very large movements are slow”.
Is the hyperpicking data available in a better resolution? In the picture above the waveform is almost invisible but this seems to be more due to the axis scaling caused by the larger movements.
Thomas
Very fast movements that change direction rapidly are small
What is very large? What is slow? I mean, Eddie Van Halen’s tremolo motion produces motions that look giant to me, well over 200bpm. And I think of that as very fast. The whole motion “size” thing has very little practical relevance to me as something to think about since it’s so arbitrary, and something that results from a range of choices rather than something I can really control directly anyway.
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I’ve become reasonably good with the Van Halen tremolo, with the plectrum held at the top and with the middle finger, and it is easier to get that first contact on the string played that way, even though you’d think not.
Ok, that’s a different motion. But regarding just one specific motion, with increasing frequency either the acceleration has to rise, meaning more force (or in case of VHs tremolo technique torque) or the amplitude needs to be lower (smaller motion). That’s just physics. And as force is limited, along with increasing frequency there needs to be a decline in amplitude (motion width) at some point.
A different aspect in my opinion with larger movements is, that the pick hits the string with greater velocity, so the duration of contact is smaller which should produce a cleaner pick attack.
Meaning a small pick travel distance at speeds far from maximum is probably disadvantageous.
Tom
Yes, totally. I think these things just get taken way out of context to where the entire conversation always gets reduced to small is faster, and “doing small” is the way to be faster. After all, just because Eddie’s motion “looks” large doesn’t mean the range of motion at the forearm joint is actually large — his wrist is flexed, after all. If it were straight, he’d get a much smaller radius pick travel with the same exact joint motion.
From what I’ve seen so far, hyperpicking just seems to generate that kind of ratio of frequency to force, i.e. resulting in a smaller motion. Why? I don’t know. But players who can do it describe it differently than other picking motions, variously as a “spasm” or “vibration”, or if you’re @milehighshred, a “jiggle”. No picking motion that I personally know how to do looks or feels anything like that. Even when I do elbow motion, which hyperpicking nominally seems to be, I don’t get a hyperpicking-style feel or motion:
That’s about as fast as I can pick, and thinking “small” doesn’t make the motion any smaller or any faster. To get to that speed, I have to apply power, and this is just what it ends up looking like. It’s clear to me that what I’m doing here is not mechanically the same as hyperpicking, even though there’s motion at the elbow joint. If that’s true, I actually think that’s pretty cool. Are there are different muscle chains you can use to move the elbow? Who knew.
So basically I think that these motions may each work somewhat differently at a neuro / muscular / mechanical level, and that doing them well might require thinking about and focusing on a different feel for each of them to get the best results.
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Yes, the middle finger grip isn’t nearly as weird as you’d think. And the EVH technique is a fun way to try it out without worrying about any heavy commitment to doing anything else with it! It’s like learning the moonwalk.
How much force or torque are we talking about, though? Your statement is correct in the abstract, but the mass in question is small. If we aren’t anywhere near our force limit, then increasing the force required to switch directions doesn’t limit our speed.
The bottleneck for speed in alternate picking doesn’t appear to be force. In my personal experience, it seems to be switching speed. Small movements in my picking aren’t any faster than big ones.
Interesting point.
The mass in question is not just the pick, but milehighshreds forearm plus hand. And to me it looks like a lot of mass. There definitely is a force limit to speed as the clipping of the activationsensors also indicate. If there is another limit at a lower speed is unknown.
No, but at some point there has to be a fast movements are smaller than slow ones but we don’t know the transition speed.
The maximum Switching frequency is a valid point. And I guess “neuron firing frequency” might be something that can be improved by practice, but I don’t know to what extent.
Maybe that is what differentiates hyperpicking form “regular” picking. It might not be pick-pick-pick-pick-… or even ChunkOfPicks-ChunkOfPicks-ChunkOfPicks-… but just “shake arm”.
Very interesting, but I think also very irrelevant to actual music-making
Thomas
I’m not sure I follow the part about clipping the sensors or the lower speed limit.
Obviously there is a limit on how much force you can apply. The question is how close we are to that limit when we pick as fast as we can with a more-or-less empty hand. We can disagree on what constitutes a lot of mass, but if I approach my force limit, I would expect fatigue, muscle burn, etc. I experience none of those things. I can pick at my upper limit pretty much infinitely without getting tired or sore. Meanwhile, my maximum tremolo speed does not seem to depend on my amplitude, at least up to a few inches. I conclude that the amount of force required to do this is not especially high compared to my limit, and not likely to be the limiting factor in my picking speed.
But this is all probably mechanic-dependent, and may not hold true for everyone. I also don’t pick as fast as milehighshred, so there’s that.
Edit: Having thought about it overnight, I think I understand what you mean about the lower speed limit now. This post is my argument in its favor.
I have currently convinced myself that (1) hyperpicking is some kind of resonant effect and it is magical and beyond my current comprehension, and (2) regular picking is limited by neurological factors, where speed comes from simple motions and not having needless antagonistic muscular conflict. “Flip time” is likely the rate-limiting concern.
I am convinced that the “small motion” camp is well intentioned but missing the important factors.
I use small motions and I can pick 16th note patterns across 2 - 3 strings at 160 -170 bpm and move them about, in a musical sense.
I thought about being economical while learning ( i’m still learning ) but didn’t put any specific limits to it.
I do find technique becomes more forgiving when you get the motions correct, and you get better at it - same as anything else.