Oh yeah, good call on Bill Hall. I was WAY more pronated than this though.
That was my default posture back in the band days. Is USX possible from a setup like this?
This was my setup when I was using thumb muting. I was “taught” this by an online teacher, who really shouldn’t be teaching anyone.
It’s a different mechanic though, trapped economy picking and the thumb never leaves the lower strings than the one you are picking.
To sum up, it sucks, extremely limiting musically and physically. Not your setup, but the thumb muting technique I mean.
You have to differentiate between arm position and pickslant. You can make any wrist motion from any arm position because the wrist can do 360 degrees of motion. So from this arm position, you can definitely do a wrist motion that goes diagonal and makes upstrokes escape. As a test, forget the pick and just make a dart throwing motion at the guitar body. That’s USX.
However if you hold the pick the way you’re holding it here, you’re going to get garage spikes when you try to do the same thing with a pick. You can probably solve that with a three-finger or trailing edge grip if you feel like experimenting. Similar to what I’m doing here but just swivel the pick 45 degrees the other way:
More generally, Bill’s arm position is not that different from this. The pinky side of his hand is definitely not touching the strings. So there is no reason you can’t do whatever he is doing, it’s only minimally different from what you are doing here.
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