Update With 3 Finger Grip

Technique Critique
#37

Hey there Troy! Sorry to all if I come off like a douche. Sometimes I get really frustrated when I think I’ve figured something out and put it under the magnifying glass of slowmo technology just to find out it ain’t right. Yes I can do the basic single escape stuff. I think I may have figured a few things out over the past few days after a few legit mental break downs lol.

I believe if we look at all the reference material I’ve posted over the last 1-2 years here it looks like I was having some forearm rotation and thumb joint involvement in my picking motions. I’m trying to get more strict wrist motions because I desperately want crosspicking to be second nature.

I spent this week watching the primer material over and over again. Trying to get back to fundamentals and working on both forms of wrist single escape. DSX and USX. I often had struggled with DSX cause having had focused on mostly metal early in my career, I had developed the aforementioned rotational mechanic as a by product of downpicking and gallops/chugs. Oddly this also presented an issue with USX as well and I often find myself having to watch to make sure I’m deviating at the wrist and not rotating with the forearm.

I THINK I have a better grasp of the single escape motions. Now I’m trying to figure out how to get the DSX motion happening with a slightly more supinated forearm so I can A) get both escapes happening and B) so I can get closer to crosspicking with a trigger style grip.

Here’s DSX on a simple scale. After really studying and following all directions and watching the Al Di Meola wrist motion video here’s what I have. Still kinda new even tho it’s similar to my original motion. Looks like Al/John/Paul as well.

Slowmo DSX:

Here’s me trying to not use forearm rotation for USX:

Slowmo USX:

After watching this I think I need to actually supinate less.

Tumeni at 80% with Morse Grip and the Ring Finger Tucked:

Slowmo A minor from Tumeni:

Sorry about the graininess.

6 string Morse muted with all fingers tucked:

Sorry about the hand getting cut out.

Slowmo:

Hopefully this gives a better perspective. My goal is still to have a right hand that can pick anything but I want to learn how to do it all from the wrist like Andy but not pronated like David cause I want muting for the Technical Death Metal stuff. That’s another challenge. Lets say I finally figure out how to cross pick from the wrist while supinated, than I have to learn how to mute. I find it like impossible to mute in the Al Di Meola setup.

Thanks to everyone who’s trying to help! Hopefully I didn’t forget anything important here.

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#38

Sorry quick digression:

IMO, if you have to resort to slomo video analysis to reveal a “mistake”, but the thing sounds and feels good at full speed, then it’s not really a mistake worth worrying about.

We of course all have different values and objectives, but over-obsessing over tiny details could be counterproductive in the bigger picture.

I’m pretty sure we would find some swipes in Steve Morse’s “Tumeni Notes” recording if we really went all out forensic on it. But in the bigger picture it sounds awesome. And I would be willing to bet that this is because Steve Morse’s main focus was the overall sound, phrasing, rhythm etc., not so much the worry of getting every note 100% clean.

YMMV obviously :slight_smile:

PS: I think this recent example is great!

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#39

I remember when transcribing this in high school that I noticed some “slop” when I slowed down the recording (very relatively speaking here) and my guitar teacher was a die hard Morser and very offended at the notion, hah. Your comment made me curious, so I went here at 1/4 speed: Steve Morse - Tumeni Notes REH - YouTube

Right you are: at slow speed, we hear plenty of straight up errors, at tempo it sounds great. I didn’t put in the time to assess how many of the errors were righty vs left - majority of them actually seem lefty, but I think the point is still a good one to emphasize.

Sorry Robert - I know that’s probably not helpful to your specific scenario, but I think a useful thing to have ‘on file’ for anybody reading along.

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#40

This may be me-specific but I’ve always considered Morse just a little sloppy compared to his contemporaries (Eric Johnson et al etc). I’ve also always really liked this about his playing though. There’s something very ‘human’ about it. He’s still relatively clean compared to the general public but those little nuances I always enjoyed. Like a way more technical but ‘less sloppy Jimmy Page’.

@JakeEstner I really think the point you bring up can and should apply to all of us. Yes, we should try to be as clean as possible but many of the monsters we’re emulating, when put under a microscope, aren’t as perfect as we thought. It’s like we’re holding ourselves to a higher standard than they hold themselves lol!

I think it actually could be a pretty helpful though. @RobertFlores has mentioned feeling bummed about some swipes. I understand them to be a part of Morse’s playing. There was some other thread on here where someone was asking for examples of players who employ ‘swiping’ and I threw out the usual names, but also mentioned Morse because I’d heard Troy mention Morse swipes. Troy replied and added a clarification that Morse swiping is not the same as Paul Gilbert swiping. He’s not doing it as a string changing mechanic, they are just ‘little mistakes’

Accepting this, emphasizing muting control and rolling with it may be a good recipe for some progress.

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#41

I would agree with this. But it’s only because Steve Morse basically opts to alternate pick nearly everything, and there are plenty of ways to arrange notes on the fretboard that are not at all conducive to relaxed alternate picking. In other words, you can use alternate picking in areas where it’s basically… A terrible idea… to use it. Like taking a hammer as the only tool in your toolkit and viewing every problem as a nail.

Can’t argue with the musical results, though. The only thing to argue with is that Steve Morse is basically crippled in his hands. Topical painkillers and all that. I’ll pass on his setup.

@RobertFlores Have you thought of trying to learn a bluegrass standard or something? Something where there is an actual score and you have no choice but to play the notes. I don’t think it’s wise to continue smashing your face into a wall with these small exercises. I will say that you sound better than you think.

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#42

Thanks for filming these. I only watched the DSX stuff because that’s all I asked about. :slight_smile:

The ascending Gilberts sound great. One of the things I was looking for is, not only can you do the motion, but does the attack actually sound nice and smooth? Because these things are connected. When it comes to high gain especially, if the pick is hitting the string in an ugly or scratchy way, that may be due to some aspect of your form or motion not being totally sorted yet. Can you do a recording of that while close-miking the amp, or plugged into an interface via a plugin amp, so you get a sense of what the attack really sounds like minus the room noise?

I understand we’re not your teachers in a traditional sense here. But if we were, and you were coming to us every week, we’d want to see you doing actual musical stuff with your current technique as it stands at the moment. Because it’s hard to go that last mile and make sure everything is really smooth and sounding good until you start actually using the technique in the real world. This is the final step of getting really good at stuff, because it introduces you to a much wider variety of fretboard shapes, picking patterns, rhythm/lead switching, tapping to picking switching, and so on — much more than you would encounter by playing a small number of exercises or “wish list” phrases repeatedly. And that very wide variety of real-world musical phrases is valuable motor learning. It’s how the “long tail” is accomplished where the skill is polished. And that becomes valuable information for learning new skills because it becomes second nature to know what things feel like when they are really working.

More generally, I don’t know what your musical end-goals are, but does it involve writing songs or playing in a band? If so, have you been coming up with ideas that fit the techniques you have right now? Or have you been putting off the creative side of things until you have XYZ technique? Even if only for the technical motor learning reasons I mentioned above, I don’t think it’s a good idea to postpone the creative aspect. Of course, for creative reasons, I also don’t think it’s a good idea to postpone that process. As probably everyone has realized at some point, obstacles make for good creative inspiration. I can’t play that line, so I have to rearrange it, or add unpicked notes, or ditch it altogether — and now I came up with an even cooler line as a result. That kind of thing.

Anyway, if you want to record a few DSX test phrases plugged in or miked up as a “full dress rehearsal”, that will give us/you a better idea of how things are really sounding. When you do this, incorporating some riffage and some lead lines as a kind of mini song or etude will make it an even better real-world test.

Also, if you go this route, when you’re doing the fast lead stuff, just be sure to include lines where you are only switching strings during downstrokes. The two-string sixes pattern you are playing in some of these clips is not DSX because there are upstroke string changes in there. The fact that it actually sounds good most of the time is evidence enough that you’re not just swiping every string change indiscriminately, and that you can actually do some mixed escape stuff. But I would still set that aside for the moment, and make believe it doesn’t exist. Record some DSX-only riffage and lead lines and see how good you can get it to sound the way it is, Andy James-style.

That’s where I’d go next if it were me. Correction: that’s where I did go next. I could only do USX for 10 years and didn’t know that other picking styles even existed. I didn’t watch Speed Kills until I was 30 and Intense Rock until a year or something after that. Imagine that!

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#43

I’m adding this to an ever growing text document that contains “interesting facts about Troy Grady” :slight_smile:

Seriously though, hearing that you’ve conquered quite a bit of this stuff well into your adult years is pretty inspiring! There is hope indeed, for the rest of us!

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#44

Dude I’ll be * 50 * next year. I learned the fast 250bpm downstrokes thing (well, upstrokes in my case) by accident, during the pandemic, as a result of the table tapping tests we were doing.

Guitar is not like running the 100m in the Olympics where you’re great for about five to ten years and that’s it. None of this guitar stuff pushes the limits of physical ability to where you need to be 18 and in prime physical condition. Yes, there are probably Olympian level people who have better/faster reflexes. But that doesn’t really matter if we’re talking about playing a forward roll at 150bpm. It’s mostly just a matter of none of the techniques being well understood and no instructions / bad instructions being provided.

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#45

and even fast reflexes is mostly a myth.

Roger Federer has the same reflexes as the rest of us. His software is different, not his hardware.

David Epstein’s The Sports Gene is a good read on the subject.

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#46

Must be a trip man. I am struggling with the fact I’ll be 40 in 5 years, I’m like… wtf…
Time really does fly.

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#47

I’m sure you’re right. I guess I didn’t specifically mean “reflexes”, that was sloppy, sorry! I just meant to acknowledge that there are probably certain in-built aspects of physical ability from person to person — musculoskeletal, neurological, whatever they may be — that we can’t change. It’s certainly true in more purely physical athletics like running.

But in guitar or music in general I think we just got lucky because most of the common “hard” stuff in instrument technique that people come to us wanting to learn are only hard because there’s some kind of trick to it that relatively few people know, not because the techniques demand physical abilities that are super rare in the general populace.

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#48

I was not happy with 40! I got over it pretty quickly though, for what it’s worth.

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#49

I’ll be hitting 40 shortly… I made a promise to myself to have certain aspects of playing figured out by then. I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me!

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#50

I don’t think the pick is hitting the string incorrectly or making any ugly scratchy sounds. I usually don’t have a problem with making notes sound good. I just can’t seem to figure out how to pick from the wrist exclusively well and I believe it’s hindering my ability to crosspick which is really necessary for the music I plan on making. Half the stuff I write i can’t play right now. If you refer to the other videos I posted here you’ll see I can do the crosspicking thing with a Morse grip. The problem right now is figuring out how to do it with a traditional grip so my picking hand remains versatile for hybrid picking stuff. I also find sweeps to be much more difficult with the Morse grip. I keep rewatching every video you have. I think the issue is DSX with a downward pickslant. I need to achieve that so that I can simply deviate for the USX stuff. Problem is any USX stuff my forearm automatically wants to get involved. I understand what needs to be happening for wrist motion DBX, I just can’t seem to get my body to do it.

Here’s a link to a recording of the correct sixes lick. My bad about the other one. It’s sloppy but I don’t think the pick attack itself is an issue, but maybe your ears will hear something mine aren’t. Let me know if it doesn’t work. Also the first 2 are DSX the second 2 are USX for comparison. I don’t think my issue is single escape stuff tho. Everything I like and want to play requires mixed escape/DBX.

#51

What about practicing the “switch” between different grips? You could probably think of it as something similar to switching between picking and tapping, or something like that.

Of course it may be difficult to do it in the middle of a 13-notes-per-second lick with no breaks, but usually the different styles of playing are separated enough to give you time to do the switch.

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#52

I am also having trouble with sweeps with the middle finger. I really like middle finger for downward pickslanting and some alternate picking. But it’s very weak in an upward pickslanting position. I think this is why EVH almost never did sweeps, as it’s not a strong sweeping grip. You can sweep down, but going up is a bitch. I really like both grips, and it’s a confusing juggle, but if I want to sweep well I have to use index.

One thing that does help sweeping with middle finger is holding the pick with the tip or relatively around the tip of the thumb, that lets you manipulate the pick without losing to much grip force. I notice you have quite a similar thumb construction to me @RobertFlores I made a topic awhile ago about my thumb grip, maybe it’ll give you some ideas?

In my efforts I have to accept that index just works for almost everything, no matter how cool and free Middle sometimes feels. Index does the job. Though I still struggle with that juggle, I use both as one day middle feels best, and the other index. But I just can’t sweep effectively with middle, so I have to try and accept that fact.

The thing I love about the three finger grip is three points of force to hold the pick, it really FEELS more free. Though I can’t sweep with it consistently, so it’s a pain in the ass. The index has a greater range for upward pickslanting with a good grip, but middle finger/3, for me is really weak.

#53

I just want to point out that “upward pickslanting” and “downstroke escape” aren’t always the same thing. Middle- / three-finger players often appear to become DSX when they speed up and transition to single escape mode, even if there isn’t an obvious pickslant involved. Steve Morse looks this way in many of the faster scale clips we filmed.

And so does James Seliga who we just interviewed. Here’s a clip of what his motions look like at various speeds:

When James gets to “shred” level mandolin speeds, he switches to a diagonal motion where downstrokes go up in the air, i.e. DSX. There is not an obvious upward pickslant, which is true of many wrist players like him, Steve, Molly Tuttle, Andy Wood, etc.

Anyway long story short if you mean “DSX”, I think three-finger is perfectly fine for that and is not weak in any way that I’ve noticed. If instead you specifically mean when you use a form that makes the pick appear upwardly slanted, that could be due to lots of other factors like pick grip and arm position. It’s possible those form changes could potentially work less well with a three-finger grip. But we’d have to take a look at that specifically.

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#54

Thanks for the update!

Re: smoothness and attack, these are just things that I evaluate because often they are connected. For example, in the very first video at the top of this thread, the high gain one where you’re doing 1nps stuff, the attack sounds very aggressive to me. And I can see that there’s variation in the motion — there is more forearm at some times than others. This makes me think there is something going on with the motion, the pick attack, or both, that might be making things less smooth than they could be. Attempting to play those phrases with the most even attack you can get, with the gain on, might lead to figuring out something about your form or the motion that improves it.

For the latest clip, there’s less top end distortion / harmonic content on clean tone so that aspect is harder to judge. However this clip is particularly staccato sounding. If you look in your DAW close up at the waveform, do you notice gaps between the note bellies? That’s something I see for example if I use a lot of edge picking - the waveforms of each picked note are distinctly separated from each other, like a string of pearls. Using a lot of edge picking with a lot of pick can make things sometimes feel more effortful and less smooth. Reducing the edge pick or attack a little can connect those notes together a little more.

As a test, can you do the clean tone clip where you’re picking all the notes but the sound is as “legato” as you can get it? Not necessarily quiet or light, but smooth and connected where there isn’t as much of a gap between them.

The other thing I’ll point out is that there are some hand sync issues in this clip as well. More so on the USX takes than the DSX takes. That’s another thing that might improve by feeding it a wider variety of single-escape stuff where you really focus on chunking, and getting in and out of those phrases on a dime, without having to think about it.

To be clear, you can play any way you want, with whatever level of aggressive attack, in your music. I’m obviously fine with that. Ultimately we want to be able to do all attacks, all edge picks, all dynamics, etc. These suggestions about attack are more for the motor learning experience, as an exercise.

With that in mind, again, I think it’s a good idea to try to write songs and lines for whatever your best techniques are right now. It’s not because I want you to only play single escape forever, or single escape with a little outside picking. It’s because I think there is real motor learning value in taking these techniques the final mile, and polishing them to a level where you can dash off an Andy James-style song and solo with motion smoothness, perfect hand sync, with exactly the attack you want. This does pay dividends as far as learning other techniques. It is real progress, I want to stress that.

Also, consider that even if you are a double escape genius who can “alternate pick anything”, the odds are that are you are still going to write lines that are single escape occasionally. Even if only by total chance. I myself have done this while not paying any attention at all to what “escape” I was using and just coming up with cool patterns. Ignoring even-numbered patterns would would be creatively limiting just as much as the reverse. Forcing yourself to exclusively write lines that have the Paul Gilbert picking pattern in there somewhere is just as arbitrarily restrictive as forcing yourself not to, if you want to think about it that way. What I mean is that the single escape stuff is not some dead end that you want to get past, it is a thing that will always be there, so this is not wasted effort.

Anyway, those are my suggestions. I know you’re looking for the magic bullet that makes you do these particular picking patterns yesterday. But to me, if we can’t have that, but we can have progress elsewhere, that’s just as good. Everything you get better at is a win, filling in the boxes of the crossword you eventually hope to complete.

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#55

How do I even reply honestly without sounding like an ungrateful douchebag? Thank you so much for trying to help.Thank you for taking the time to write such an in depth reply. I really do wish there was a magic bullet. These thread posts are usually me on the verge of really quitting, selling all my gear and just truly letting go of the dream. Unfortunately there isn’t. Just seems like no matter how much effort i put in. No matter how much experimenting with grips, angles, joints, it all ways seems to be incorrect in some way. I don’t think it should take THAT long. I’m pretty patient but it feels like I’ve been chasing this goal for like 1/3 of my musical life and I seem barely any further along than I was in 2015 when I discovered CTC. Sucks to be THAT guy here too.

I totally get where you’re coming from. I think I can destroy single escapes. They’re not really the problem for me.

As for the crosspicking with the morse grip. that’s the smoothest its ever been, closest it’s ever been. Easily doing Tumeni at 80-85% speed and It feels like it will go faster once it’s been drilled a bunch. So I’m not concerned with what it looks like really and I’m probably not gonna mess with it too much. Only problem with the morse grip is NOT crosspicking becomes a mess lol. Ain’t that just bullshit? Like all that effort learning a new grip as it’s often recommended just for it not to work right after 6-7 months lol. That’s my life in a nutshell.

I really am truly grateful for your time Troy and everyone else. I’m honestly embarrassed by how vulnerable I’m allowing myself to be here and I’m sure you’re SICK of it by now because it’s such a drag. Hopefully soon my prayers will be answered than I can begin to save others from this feeling of defeat.

Guess it’s back to the grind for now. See y’all next time.

#56

I mean in a sweeping context. I probably should say this is just my experience too.

For me doing sweeps with middle finger is hard because the grip is not that great for changing the angle of the pick (not the pickslant the rotation), the index grip has a grater range to change pick angle/attack.
I find it fine for everything else.

I was bit drunk when posting that last night and sware I was replying to a comment about sweeping with the middle ? lol I can’t find it now.

Sorry here it is

I thought cus Rob seems to have a similar thumb to me, he may have the same Issue I do with middle finger sweeping

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