I just thought that it would be interesting to check how long would it take for an expert player like you who also has all the knowledge about the motions and tons of experience in learning them through experimentation to learn to play a single note tremolo with the fretting hand.
Iāve actually tried that recently. We talked about that in another thread, I forget where. I could do wrist motion right away. Which is interesting because I had to ālearnā wrist motion with my picking hand. But with the left hand, itās the only motion I could do. In fact I couldnāt do any kind of forearm motion at all, even deliberately.
Linking up the hands was super weird. Trying to fret anything with my right hand causes the picking motion to just freeze. Which isnāt that unusual in the early stages of learning new motions, and weāve seen this in clips here on the forum.
I like the left-handed test because it reminds me of what beginner-ness feel like, and what challenges completely new players will possibly encounter. I donāt know if Iāll continue with lefty playing, there are only so many hours in a day. But itās cool to mess around with.
Hi all - I made a little web thing to test your table tap speed. Itās barely functional, but itās functional. Desktop only for now, so letās get those mouses wiggling!
If itās actually useful to people, Iād be happy to fix it up a bit.
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Pretty interesting. It seems to read pretty instantaneously, like it reports for every two crossings. Might be good to average over a larger number of crossings to get more stable results.
For example:
I was even getting in the upper 400s at some points. But not for very long.
On the other hand, I sometimes found my mouse migrating to one side or the other and not registering strokes at all, so averaging over too many crossings might be problematic. I ended up making the window as thin as possible and moving it all the way the left side of my screen so that the motion was constrained by the edge. That helped some. Thereās probably a software solution as well. Some way to keep the cursor constrained to the blue and red section while testing or something?
A very nice MVP, though. I can see it being very useful.
I find that I end up doing a rotator cuff movement when I try to go as fast as possible. I wonder if this is what accounts for @Troyās āstupid-fastā speeds? I think I recall that rotator cuff involvement is suspected in the Zakk Wylde āmystery mechanicā, but otherwise Iām not sure how to incorporate that into a picking movement. It seems like this might point to a possible difference between tabletop speeds and usable picking motions.
When I constrained myself to wrist only, I was getting ~250 pretty regularly. I canāt usually go much faster than 180 when I test on a guitar with a metronome.
Very cool. Thanks for building this.
I donāt think so. When you look at what the pick is doing, itās not moving along a path that the rotator cuff would be able to create. Itās moving mainly along a wrist path. Hereās an update:
I can now do this on a string, in a more typical playing position. And I can switch between upstrokes and alternate. Obviously this is all still a little wild. Sometimes I hit more than one string, or miss the string. Sometimes I do alternate when I mean to do upstroke, and vice versa. But it appears that this is not some kind of fluke, i.e. it really is wrist motion going at stupid fast speeds.
Obviously, these pickstrokes are yuuuuge. Iām not trying to ādoā that. This is just a byproduct of trying to go fast with maximum comfort. Other muscles still tense up causing me to stop, like shoulder or traps. Totally weird muscles that shouldnāt be involved here. Maybe thatās the rotator cuff thing youāre describing. But the occurrence of that is decreasing as the motions become more memorized and I learn to start and stop them, and switch between them. Certain attempts at this feel completely light, where there is no elbow involvement and only the wrist (i.e. hand) moves. On those attempts I can hit 260. I havenāt filmed them but I would guess the motion is less wild there as well.
Iāve never worked on this kind of playing in terms of thrash rhythms. Itās a bit like ordering something on Amazon a long time ago and forgetting it was out of stock. Then one day it just arrives. Oh look!
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Cool idea! Just a tip for anyone doing this: itās probably worth it to disable mouse acceleration in the OS. On Windows itās āEnchance pointer precisionā in mouse settings.
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Yes. Thatās much better. Thanks!
@Shredd @induction Thanks for the feedback. I just updated.
Letās call the border between the blue and the red āthe stringā. 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 donāt think itās possible. It did expose a bug with the way I was counting crossings, though, which I think is fixed now.
Fakery alert! Heās playing āpointy guitar riffsā, 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 itās 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 youāre 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 didnāt have anywhere near the understanding at the time that you have (upstroke escape is all he discussed), but he referred to a motion as āoscillationā 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. Youāll 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."
ā¦and laterā¦
ā(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.ā
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 donāt remember this 20 notes per second thing at all, but I probably wouldnāt have noticed since picking speed and how fast people did or didnāt play wasnāt anything I had thought about at that point. Itās amazing how far he got with this little article. Pieces of all kinds of stuff are in there.
What heās describing as vibrational I donāt experience ā it sounds more like what hyperpicking elbow players describe. Itās possible that thereās a faster mode of this I havenāt 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 isnāt 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 āpick gripā styles in the article.
If youād like to read it itās over here on the internet wayback machine. http://archive.is/5Hrj8
Hereās an update on the āfast tapping motionsā experimentation. Iāve 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 ā or very similar ā motion from the earlier trailing edge clip, just performed from a different arm orientation.
Iām 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 Iām intentionally playing a DSX phrase. However as you can see in slow motion, the motion is actually USX and Iām just powering through the string changes. I couldnāt really tell as I was doing this. This is just a testament to how far good hand synchronization will get you, even if you donāt pay any attention at all to escape. Thatās the lesson ā donāt overthink things! Go fast and be synchronized.
This is āonlyā 240, which is a crazy thing to say, but thereās definitely more in the tank here. This still feels kind of weird and tensiony / awkward. This form in particular, Iāve 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 āalternativeā arm positions and pick grips.
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Well, you are off topic because the topic here is ātremoloā, but you are playing one note per pickstroke!
Do you have an understanding of why the āmore verticalā wrist motions are faster? Or is it just an experimental observation at this stage?
I havenāt carefully analysed the numbers of the various forummers that reported the āspeed testsā 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? Iām 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 canāt get it going at the moment. I get brief periods where itās like āThatās it!ā, then itās gone and I donāt 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 donāt have to change the angle as much, the means less momentum and faster potential reaction time.
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