Troy's last (?) Reverse Dart Thrower YT video - Circles closing?

Playing Technique
#1

Hello brothers in mechanics :slight_smile:

I just got a link to this superb video by @Troy on my mailbox: https://youtu.be/NWuGkXhj0T8?si=OMY-E4dQY6e_Hoif

BTW, probably there’s even more material here in the website for us MIM adepts, but it’s been a long time since I dedicated myself to technique exploration…

At any rate, I could not avoid percieving a strong link between what Troy has dissected and studied, including trailing edge picking associated with extreme speeds and the RDT motion, and my recall of this article by Tuck Andress, an incredible fingerstyle player, dated some 20 years ago: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a5bd42e8fd4d2aea7b0b426/t/5eddf0091cb53938998f511c/1591603210434/Pick+and+Fingerstyle+technique+6-7-20+version.pdf

Curious to know if you ever read this article, and what your thoughts are about the connections between what’s said in there and what we know thanks to Troy’s and CTC Team’s work.

Michele

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#2

Yes, I’ve read the article and yes, I’ve noticed the connection - I pointed it out somewhere here on the forum perhaps a year ago.

Tuck is an incredibly perceptive man, he just didn’t have access to the resources that Troy does like the magnet and Troy’s knowledge of anatomy.

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#3

Speaking of Tuck’s artistic path, I guess he decided early on he wasn’t overly interested with picking and moved on to a completely different palette of sounds and expressions. He plays like a one-man-band, with impressive technique of both hands :open_mouth:

#4

Yes, I’ve read this before. The part where he’s talking about the wrist motion that goes really fast is likely reverse dart. As @ShadowoftheSun points out we may have discussed this before. Not sure if I was part of that or not.

The article is great and contains bits and pieces of all sorts of things that ended up being important down the line. It’s one of the pieces of pre-Cracking the Code insights that was far better than the usual quackery. Most significantly, he gets part of the way toward escape motion in the section on George Benson. He talks about altering the picking motion so that it approaches the strings from above. I’m paraphrasing, I haven’t read it in a while. It’s not clear if he was implying the general case about string switching, evens, etc. When I read it more closely at the time I remember thinking he was not. He was mainly pointing out that it’s easier to hit a target when coming straight down on it, similar to a foul shot in basketball. Which is also something we’ve discussed in relation to how certain motions, like Gypsy technique, have a more vertical escape and this may be helpful.

However, he gets tons of props for having made these observations, and it’s cool think how this could have played out differently had his interest in picking technique continued. Similar to the EJ “bounce technique” scene from “Total Electric Guitar” — with a slightly different explanation, history could have taken quite a different path.

Had the Benson segment in this article said something like, “George exclusively plays evens when alternate picking, and he has to, because the effect of the diagonal motion means that string changes are only possible when the pick goes up in the air” — man, we’d be potentially living in a different world right now.

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#5

I see it more as a curved escape, not straight line vertical. Like if I was to draw it out in a 3d realm it would be curved, not a line. I am not pulling the pick out of the strings, i am turning it out. Both have a different sensation in the wrist, and arm. At the rest is when the turning the pick to the upstroke to get out of the strings occurs. I could do the vertical path after the rest which would feel more dt/rdt motion this has much less turning sensation. Some gypsy jazz players do this, some turn.

Unfortunately the turning one in gypsy jazz is the more beneficial one as you will be using that kind of motion more in the strumming sections and rhythm parts. Which sucks cause it is probably the harder of the two to gain the motor mechanics on.

#6

Man I like your style :smiley:
I think really the thing that Andress spotted is that there’s a best wrist movement for max speed, which is along the axis of the RDT motion, and that this can potentially lead, if you really want to push it to the limits, to a grip change and to picking with the trailing edge instead of the classic “flat”.
I left his approach after trying and realising I don’t like the attack of the pick in that instance. I very much prefer the “flat” type of sound.

#7

He spotted one of the two best wrist motions for max speed! The original dart-thrower motion (i.e. non-reverse) is what John Taylor is doing around 8:55 in the lesson, and it’s the fastest motion we’ve filmed by a wide margin. That clip is from our upcoming metal rhythm seminar with him, where he very casually does this well over 300 bpm sixteenths.

Here’s what the motion looks like slowed down:

When you ask John to mimic the motion in the air, which he can do while still actually performing it, the “dart” aspect couldn’t be clearer:

I mention this because his form allows a typical index grip with leading edge attack, which may be more to your liking. If you prefer the leading edge sound, maybe something like this would be worth some trial and error time. The payoff would be big.

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#8

Ahem… what??!!? When?!? I must have this!!

I also, and I’ll apologize in advanced, will heavily critique it!! I’m a huge metal snob (no longer an elitist. I’m in rehab for it and I’d probably be kicked off the site if not, hahaha) and have played shows or toured with a ton of the better bands from the late 90’s and early 2k’s. I obviously won’t critique the lessons, just the bands and quality of the bands mentioned. I’m more of a “deep cutter” in regards to my favorites, but I also know what some of the lesser knowns brought to the table. I guess it also depends on what constitutes “METAL!!” for the seminar, lol

#9

Thanks! I’ll try both, although I think I already pick fastest with the Dream Th… Er… Dart Thrower motion. I wasn’t aware that this gave the fastest implementation so far captured by the magnet, I was actually thinking that RDT would be more efficient. The lady studying wrist motion you interview in your video indeed says that direct DT is evolutively the most “optimized” as it is used for so many motions so that would be a strong hint…
I’m curious to benchmark my picking right now, I don’t think I ever crossed 140 bpm in sextuplets tremolo, which would be 210 bpm sixteenth notes, but this is only for short bursts and certainly getting into the “frozen arm jerking” mode :grin:
When mimicking the motion in the air, however, it looks to me like the angle between forearm and hand is next to 90, while I would probably normally keep the hand much flatter, nearly fully aligned with the forearm axis.
Maybe that’s an aspect to explore further :thinking:

Let’s see if I can find some time to devote to this… Thanks for the tips, it’s really a fascinating subject!

#10

Ha. It’s all extreme metal: thrash, death, and black. It’s almost metal for dummies. John goes through the stylistic components of each genre so someone who is not a metal expert can learn to recognize them. And he wrote three demo songs, one in each style. Then in the lessons, he plays all the different rhythm patterns at super easy newbie tempos like 250!

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#11

I think that’s what science assumes, yes. But notably they haven’t looked at speed as an indicator of this, as far as I am aware. They are mostly interested in range of motion and strength, and what the motion does to the wrist bones. People who get corrective surgeries lose mobility in the wrist bones. So they want to find motions these people can do in rehab that don’t tug on them in certain ways, and the DT motion is good for that.

Also, science doesn’t appear to have studied reverse dart at all, except tangentially. There are studies that measure how far the wrist can move in all these directions, and the dart thrower motion usually wins. By comparison, the reverse dart axis actually fares poorly, but I think that’s because they’re trying to go very sideways. The guitar motions are more vertical.

Are you referring to mimicking the motion from the current lesson? Yes, that’s supposed to be pretty vertical. If that’s not what you’re doing on the guitar, then you’re not likely to get the benefit. The simplest way to start is to try tapping on your guitar body with the pick. When done right this should go very fast and feel easy. Test that with a click and see if it is faster than your usual picking motion. If so, you have “free” performance awaiting you.

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#12

Looking forward to the John Taylor material, that first slow mo clip is quite illuminating. Understandably, when a lot of people looked at his previous CTC excerpts, you’d just assume elbow. Based on that clip however, there appears to be a clear (almost opposing) thing going on between the upper arm and wrist movement.

#13

Yes, we thought it was elbow. And they did in the lab too, because they measured activity in the elbow muscles. It may be that he has different versions of this. For example this clip still looks elbow-y to me:

Now, maybe there is wrist and elbow happening simultaneously. But this still looks different than the GIF I posted I above where the hand appears to move more obviously.

#14

Yes, this looks more like ‘standard’ elbow for want of a better term to me. The other clip has almost a sympathetic and complimentary thing going on.

#15

Black metal is good choice for what he specializes in. Never got into it myself but the picking in that is just balls out with no stopping!! Can’t wait for this!!

One player that’s an interesting study for picking is Ben Weinman from The Dillinger Escape Plan. He had a picking style early on that made me tilt my head like I did when I first saw Marty Friedman’s. It cleaned up considerably over their career. I never asked him but I’m pretty sure he wrote riffs and then figured out how to play them. He was sloooooopy in the beginning and eventually his chops caught up. But it didn’t matter early on though. Their shows were so chaotic and intense that it didn’t matter that it sounded like dogshit lol