Cool idea! Just a tip for anyone doing this: it’s probably worth it to disable mouse acceleration in the OS. On Windows it’s “Enchance pointer precision” in mouse settings.
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Yes. That’s much better. Thanks!
@Shredd @induction Thanks for the feedback. I just updated.
Let’s call the border between the blue and the red ‘the string’. The app averages your bpm over the last 16 string crossings, and it updates every 8 string crossings.
Constraining the mouse is a cool idea but I don’t think it’s possible. It did expose a bug with the way I was counting crossings, though, which I think is fixed now.
Fakery alert! He’s playing “pointy guitar riffs”, but his guitar is clearly not pointy. Busted! 
Fantastic tool thank you so much for building this! I also noticed an overnight improvement!
I would say that this test is a nice complement to those in the primer. Depending on how you hold the mouse and generate the motion, it may measure the speed of different joints / combinations thereof.
I agree. Much better now. Works even better for me with a touchpad because it’s easier to try different wrist angles, and mechanics. Forearm is difficult with a mouse, but much easier with a touchpad.
Thanks again.
Thanks for checking it out. Glad you liked it.
Troy, I actually really love that you’re managing some very high speed play with the one-o-clock motion because it brings me back to the first person I saw online trying to scientifically analyse picking technique, Tuck Andress. He didn’t have anywhere near the understanding at the time that you have (upstroke escape is all he discussed), but he referred to a motion as “oscillation” which was the flextension motion and favoured it as a picking mechanic.
" Oscillation: Lay your wrist down again, but with the bone nearest the little finger resting on the surface, and the bone nearest the thumb up in the air. Your wrist should be rotated 90 degrees from where it was before, rolled away from your body. Restrain it. You’ll have to hold the pen differently, but now if you rotate you will just make dots. The solution is oscillation, the same kind of motion used in knocking on a door or playing piano from the wrist. It is what most people use when writing, also, although usually with more like a 45 degree wrist offset. Now the pen makes long arcs again."
…and later…
“(1) It can be speeded up almost without limit (20 notes per second) without tension. As in translation, at the fastest speeds there will be a gradual transition into spasmodic, vibratory motion, but it is far more controllable and sounds much better because the hand is equally relaxed at all speeds.”
I love that this has sort of become a full circle for me in my examining the science of guitar picking.
Huh. I read this years ago but really only paid attention to the USX part. I mostly skipped over all this stuff about the joint motions. I don’t remember this 20 notes per second thing at all, but I probably wouldn’t have noticed since picking speed and how fast people did or didn’t play wasn’t anything I had thought about at that point. It’s amazing how far he got with this little article. Pieces of all kinds of stuff are in there.
What he’s describing as vibrational I don’t experience — it sounds more like what hyperpicking elbow players describe. It’s possible that there’s a faster mode of this I haven’t actually done. Does he mention pick grip at all with respect to the flextension motion? Because with your arm at nearly 90 degrees obviously a typical index grip isn’t going to work. Or is he talking about doing this with a pen, not a guitar pick?
Tuck was and is very much a George Benson fan and so he suggested holding the pick like Benson did - he had a whole analysis of various “pick grip” styles in the article.
If you’d like to read it it’s over here on the internet wayback machine. http://archive.is/5Hrj8
Here’s an update on the “fast tapping motions” experimentation. I’ve been tooling around with getting the motion to happen from a Gypsy-style flexed wrist orientation:
As far as I can tell, this is basically the same — or very similar — motion from the earlier trailing edge clip, just performed from a different arm orientation.
I’m just winging it here to see if I can get any kind of multi-string action going, accuracy be damned. I thought this was DSX, so I’m intentionally playing a DSX phrase. However as you can see in slow motion, the motion is actually USX and I’m just powering through the string changes. I couldn’t really tell as I was doing this. This is just a testament to how far good hand synchronization will get you, even if you don’t pay any attention at all to escape. That’s the lesson — don’t overthink things! Go fast and be synchronized.
This is “only” 240, which is a crazy thing to say, but there’s definitely more in the tank here. This still feels kind of weird and tensiony / awkward. This form in particular, I’ve actually used quite a bit for things like strumming. I never would have guessed it actually went this fast were it not for the table-tapping tests. Sometimes these things are just hiding in plain sight.
I now suspect that a lot of very fast picking techniques are some version of these more vertical type wrist motions, closer to flexion-extension, requiring these “alternative” arm positions and pick grips.
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Well, you are off topic because the topic here is “tremolo”, but you are playing one note per pickstroke!
Do you have an understanding of why the “more vertical” wrist motions are faster? Or is it just an experimental observation at this stage?
I haven’t carefully analysed the numbers of the various forummers that reported the “speed tests” results - but indeed I vaguely recall most people getting to very high speeds with the knocking (12-6 ish) motion.
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Have you had any more progress, Troy? I’m very excited to see how this more flexion-extension based picking style matures.
I need to try this for wrist based downstrokes. I can do it fast using the trigger style grip with lightly supinated arm, however that is not how I play normally. I use angle pad, or a version of it, with a medium-ish supinated arm. So this makes the wrist motion slightly different and my brain can’t get it going at the moment. I get brief periods where it’s like “That’s it!”, then it’s gone and I don’t know what I did to get it going
Maybe it has to do with the larger radius that the pick is moving on. Larger radius means that the pick travels farther with the same angular displacement, so the displacement can be smaller to effect the same pick travel distance. Picking speed will be determined by how fast you move from one angle to the other and back to the first, so smaller angular displacement = faster, and since you don’t have to change the angle as much, the means less momentum and faster potential reaction time.
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There’s not a different radius to different wrist motions — the pick is just as far away from the fulcrum going up and down as it is going side to side. If I’m understanding you correctly.
I think the difference is neuro-muscular of some sort. The muscles involved in doing flexion-extension are just stupid fast. Ran across this example today. But if you’ve ever done fretboard tapping with a pick using your wrist, you’ve probably already experienced how crazy fast it is:
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I’m not explaining myself correctly 
so I’ll try again – and my thoughts may be off. To demonstrate the “radius” idea, holding a pick, hold your hand inline with your wrist, and rotate your forearm. The pick doesn’t travel much. Then, bend your wrist 90 degrees, and do the same rotation. The pick travels a lot, describing a much wider arc. This doesn’t matter if the motion is translational, but I’m sure you have some rotation in there too. Maybe. Who knows?
A “fulcrum” is used when describing a lever – I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Do you mean the “origin point” of the motion, i.e., that point that doesn’t move? Terminology is tough.
I had actually thought that this had more to do with the pick being much more rigid than finger flesh, so the fretting can be accomplished far more quickly – but I agree the wrist does it better.
Cheers! z
Aha. I get it, but that’s not wrist joint motion, that’s forearm joint motion. What we’re taking about here is wrist motion. The arm does not rotate, but stays fixed. Only the hand moves.
However to use your example, even in the case of forearm motion, the speed of the joint itself is unchanged regardless of how you bend the wrist while you do it. The joint motion itself is the two bones rotating around each other, and does not become any faster when the wrist is flexed. There is a maximum frequency you can change direction rapidly, and that’s it.
Right, I was thinking that the rotation wasn’t already maxed out, for some reason, but that’s almost definitely not the case.
Have you made any further progress with this?