Tony Rice picking technique

[Thegent]

I wonder if anyone has insights into Tony Rice’s picking technique? At about the 1:00 mark there is at least a focus on his picking hand. I assumed he would be all USX and rest strokes, but he sounds more dynamic than than using one system here…

[Brendan]

Hey! I have no special insights on Tony’s technique but a quick forum search does bring up a couple things that may be of interest: https://forum.troygrady.com/search?q=tony%20rice

Here’s a discussion of his crosspicking rolls (looking at this same video actually!):

Tony rice cross picking double down up!

Hey guys! Been trying to learn church street blues by tony rice. Cant get th double down up rolls to flow at all? Anyone else have this problem? You can see him do it here its those rolls on the G chord and c words notes [church%20street] i mean i can do them but not to those speeds and not with out it feeling mega awkward! any ideas??

And a transcription here:

So I just realized

hey @Troy and @Dissonant_Timbres you might enjoy this transcription I did of Tony Rice where I believe I was able to get a lot of his pick strokes notated: lot of DDU at 114 we’re not in the stratosphere or anything, but these rhythmic groupings are quite wonky and he makes them sound extremely pretty. No thesis or point other than demo’ing an interesting approach to the subject.

And from what Troy mentioned here, sounds like yes, he’s got a mix of several techniques!

[JakeEstner]

I was able to get that church street blues up to tempo at maybe a B grade level with the technique help from here/Troy and Andy Wood. I didn’t think that was going to be possible when I transcribed it!

[Thegent]

Cool, thanks. I didn’t get those hits when I used the search function…this is helpful. After watching the Molly Tuttle interview I started digging into bluesgrass and came across Tony Rice…which is way left field for me

[Brendan]

No problem! Yeah the forum search is its own thing, completely separate from search on the platform (which will turn up videos and other website pages). But at this point we’ve got thousands of topics / posts and a forum search for well-known players or technical terms usually yields at least a couple relevant results!