This project has enlightened me

Introduce Yourself
#1

Hi there, my name is Gary. I’ve been playing for somewhere around 10 years, but maybe the last 3 have been filled with frustration due to lack of speed and progress from practice. I even stopped playing for a while in there as a result.

I really like very fast metal and rock - like many here, I’m sure, it’s always been my dream to shred through any phrase imaginable, and play as cleanly as possible.

I am self-taught, and obsessed over my picking technique over and over trying to improve. I would watch Paul Gilbert videos, trying to glean what bits I could to make a difference. Ultimately, none of it mattered and I was stuck. We all know how horrible it feels.

After discovering this excellent investigation, I have realized I deliberately kept my pick in a relatively no-slant orientation, and would never have given swiping a chance thinking it was “wrong”. Basically, I imprisoned my pick without even realizing I was doing it. Bummer. I thought I was using perfect technique and it was a matter of time…

The primer hit me like a truck. Pickslanting - what a powerful factor that /must/ be exercised to attain speed in a consistent fashion! It immediately made me more comfortable on phrases I could already play, just by /letting/ myself downslant and then rotate my wrist for downstroke escapes!!! Elation.

However, I think I’ve learned something more useful along the way - and that is to experiment, and take what actually works away. Physical motions are notoriously hard to do consciously, let alone describe. The book “the inner game of tennis” explores this at a much less scientific level, but resonates extremely well with this content. Physical motion/technique coaching, in my opinion, is a tricky area that cannot achieve consistent results for every individual without approaches like those taken here.

I was trapped by an idea of what fast playing looked like, and felt like. Turns out, I was as far off as I could be. By closing my mind off, I robbed myself of any ability to free my hands to explore better ways of doing things.

Thank you for creating this content, and enabling me to foster a mentality that can drive real progress, instead of banging my head against a wall hoping for things to magically come together.

The best moments in life are realizing how utterly lost you were before, and how well equipped you are to adapt to situations to come! What a time to be alive.

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#2

Thanks for finding your way to us! I just want to point out that having “no slant” is not the same thing as having a trapped motion. Many picking motions can appear to have “no pickslant” but still be an escape motion. Andy Wood’s DSX motion is a great example of this:

This is clearly a downstroke escape picking motion, where downstrokes go up in the air and upstrokes are trapped, but the pick is mostly vertical. The reason this works is because the pick’s orientation (pickslant, edge picking) controls attack and smoothness, while the picking motion (which way the joint is moving) is what controls escape. Andy isn’t using a pickslant but he is using edge picking, so he’s ok even with the joint moving on a diagonal like this.

All of this is covered in detail in the new “Picking Motion” section of the Primer, here:

But if things are already working I wouldn’t bury yourself in all those details just yet. You can just think of this as a handy reference.

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#3

Thanks for the clarification, great visual example.

After finishing antigravity, I’ve also just discovered the beauty of multi-string swiping to handle what seemed like impossible string skips to me before - I’d just resort to futile hopping at 3/4 or less speed.

I feel like all of my guitar passion has been reignited. Excited to see where things can go.