Trying to get my wrist working, eblow getting in the mix? video inside

Technique Critique
#1

I’ve been trying to drill my wrist and build up a reliable picking technique. It feels like I’m using my wrist, and I’ve been trying to roll up my sleeve to plant my arm onto the guitar body, but after taking some video and slowing it down, it looks like I can’t help but add some elbow when I’m speeding up, unless that’s just forearm rotation or somewhat normal?

I’ve been trying to drill it for weeks… Trying to pick softly the faster I go, letting myself dig in, etc. I just mainly try to minimize tension, but it’s slow gains on building endurance and speed. I would say on a good day I could maybe do 16th notes at 170 - 180 bpm constantly for about a minute tops. I’ve been chilling out and taking a break if I try to open up too fast and let the tension build.

Anyways, I’m definitely looking for thoughts/feedback, just a quick and dirty video I took for myself to try to see what’s going on:

#2

You’re definitely picking from the elbow from what I can see.

#3

…does it matter if it it’s your wrist or elbow, so long as it’s working?

#4

It does from an aesthetic perspective imo.

#5

Definitely using the elbow, I think it might be a mix of wrist and elbow

If it was working reliably for me I would say that it does not matter. I’m trying to build up endurance and reliability to just improve the technique overall

For whatever reason it’s pretty difficult to isolate my wrist and get any speed with it

#6

No, it doesn’t. At all.

#7

I think the issue is that it can fool beginning players and laypeople into thinking spamming elbow technique is actually good.

Not to say that’s what OP is doing, just saying that I tend to look down on people who lazily adopt elbow picking as the primary driver of their motion without properly practicing wrist/forearm picking.

#8

Who cares, provided they can play the lines?

#9

I’m specifically trying to solve my wrist picking, that’s why I created the topic!

To reiterate, it seems that whenever I speed up, my elbow gets involved. Technically I should be able to isolate my wrist without too much practice and just pick 16th notes at 130-170+ bpm even if it’s not rhythmically locked in, right? It’s somewhere around the beginning of that range where the elbow makes an appearance for me.

It feels like I could drill my wrist in that BPM range for weeks trying to pay close attention to not letting the elbow get involved, and still not make gains.

#10

This may sound primitive as fuck and is by no means pedagogy, lmao, but when I was working on isolating wrist movement (as a former horrible elbow picker) I would literally hold my arm right behind the wrist (with the right hand in the picking position on the guitar) and move my wrist in an isolated fashion to get used to how it distinctly felt.

Another thing that really helped me suss things out with my wrist vs elbow distinction was speed bursting. Just setting the metronome and doing separated quintuplets on a single string really helped for some reason. I think it’s because at the start of every short burst seems to be a “reset” for the brain and hands versus doing much longer sequences of notes to the metronome where your brain clouds over and goes on auto-pilot.