I believe this may be a major key in getting to the next level of speed and fluidity for me.
Any ideas?
Take something and play it really really hard, and then gradually less so.
See what the least amount of force you can put into/through a string and still have it sound is, at various speeds.
Set up an amp uncomfortably searingly loud so you can only play if you’re very gentle.
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Do you mean hitting the string with a less forceful motion, or hitting the string with less of the pick (shallower depth of pickstroke)?
Less force, as it seems when I am pushing my speed limits now I seem to tense up.
I guess one of the textbook pieces of advice is that when you notice yourself tensing up more than you want to (assuming for the moment that the amount of tension really is excessive, which might be an open question), stop and do something else. If you continue to practice while the tension is happening, you are reinforcing the neural pathways associated with the “tense” motion.
One concrete piece of physical advice you might try, depending on exactly what you’re experiencing, is to try making an effort to use the muscles around your shoulder to pull your shoulder down toward the floor while you’re picking. I don’t have a good explanation, but I found for some wrist/forearm stuff I’ve worked on, the motion started to work more smoothly when I did that with my shoulder. Again, I have no explanation for why that might help, but it seemed to help me.
Or, if you can, continue playing exactly as you are, focus on the unwanted tension and see if you can let it go it while continuing to do everything else.
Another option, which I realise might be controversial, is to use thinner/bendier picks, which require less force to play the string, keeping all other parameters the same.
There has been a lot of superstition over the years around the need for stiff picks, yet I can reach my max picking speed even with a 0.5 gator (however for me the sweet spot is more towards 0.73)
I’ve been using 3mm stubby’s and it doesn’t seem to be hindering me. I just tried a .73 nylon, which I haven’t touched in a year, and it was all flub and sounded weird. I believe the 3mm will help me get lighter as it has a wide, sharp point and seems to be able to glide over the strings better.
Yeah, I realise this has a lot to do with personal preferences as well. My technique doesn’t work very well with thick picks (above 1.5 or so)
it starts when you pick the guitar up. Get into the habit of warming up slowly and very deliberately with a nice light touch. Find that place and ability to play your best stuff without going overboard on tension
Make it habitual.
Then just be more aware of it and when you feel it creeping up you just back off and reset etc
Obviously picking depth is a related subject and if you can have more consistent pick depth then you can control your tension more.
Personally im definitely working on smaller movements lately and its paying great dividends. Im playing my best when it feels like the pick never actually loses contact with the string when alt picking.
full disclosure, I use tortex .73 exclusively though I just bought a few thicker picks to play with
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This works for me. The pick i use here is a Dunlop Big Stubby 2.0
My experience is quite the opposite.
A thinner pick needs more force to get through the string because it bends before it releases the string and makes the actual sound.
A thicker pick you can hold very loose and with a licht touch stil gives you a good fat sound.
Also a thick pick has more dynamic range.
Just my opinion.
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What is “a light picking touch”? Does that mean that you’re talking about dynamic range (quiet/loud), that you want a relaxed grip on your pick where you barely hold it, or what?
It seems to me that picking quickly is basically the ability to change the hand’s direction quite rapidly (13.33… times/second), and while Troy has not yet dug into the details (perhaps via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromyography, I don’t know), it might come down to being able to turn muscle groups on/off very quickly and not having one group fight another. So I’m not sure that this means that the hand/arm is relaxed, but I suspect it means that “half” of it is, and that half switches quite quickly. I’m sure that Troy will get there, nothing can stop his science.
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In my opinion to achieve a light picking touch you have to combine a loose grip with loose muscle movements. Also the amount of pick in combination with the angle is important, using only very tip with some edge will achieve a softer sound.
When i look at slowmo vids of players of which i also like the sound they always have a loose pick grip, you can see it move between theire fingers.
I always struggle with that. I want to have that loose grip but can’t always do it.
My skin to have a certain temperature (and a certain humidity that goes with that to) be able to hold it as loose as i want, otherwise it will slip.
I want my pick to flutter lightly across the strings using the least amount of pressure to get the notes to sound. I find myself tensing up when I speed up and using too much pressure to do what actually requires very little pressure. It’s too much hard work for something that doesn’t actually require hard work.
If you expose only a modest amount of the pick, angle it where an edge strikes the string, and have a reasonably curving profile [Dunlop Tortex, etc.], it should be mechanically impossible for you to dump too much energy into the string or otherwise get hung up on it. But I don’t think that this is the key to speed.
I was going to do this experiment on myself, but have not done it yet: I’ll take a BIC pen, a piece of paper, and a metronome, and see how fast I can make “16th notes.” My bet is that I’ll have the same speed on the paper as I will a guitar, and I’m guessing that it might be interesting to practice with the metronome on paper, as it’s less distracting than a guitar. (This experiment came to mind today.)
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