UWPS with supinated forearm

Technique Critique
#1

Hi everyone,

I’ve mainly been a DWPS guy this past years as it was my main motion before encountering CtC. I’ve decided to expand to UWPS but I always felt uneasy with it because it required my forearm to go pronated against the body of the guitar for it to work with wrist deviation.

So I’ve tried a bunch of things and my conclusion was that the only way to make UWPS work with a non-pronated forearm was to use wrist flexion and extension. I’m pretty good at DWPS and I’ve tried to keep the same supinated-forearm position for the UWPS motion I’ll come up with.

Does any one of you use UWPS with wrist flexion as well ?

Here is a short video of my UWPS after a few weeks of basic practice (mostly single strings, then some little groups of 3 notes across 2s).

Around the 0:49 mark, I use some fretting-hand tapping to make the TaputuTaputuTapuTapu gimmick work.

Cheers, all!
Sylv.

3 Likes
#2

Super interesting! And your flexion version looks really good and usable. How does it feel to transition between DWPS and this new UWPS motion?

I had a similar setup about 10 years ago, supinated but still UWPS i think. This was of course long before I knew anything about pick slanting, but a remember having success and troubles with the same kind of licks as my earlier pronated setup which was clearly UWPS. At least all faster licks were typical UWPS string changes.

I’m not sure though if the motion mechanic was wrist flexion or something else. When I developed it I wanted to mimic Yngwies picking hand and wanted it to be finger motion only, but that developed unintentionally into some kind of wrist movement which had more power.

Here is a video of it but the lighting and quality is so bad that it’s hard to see anything. Is this wrist flexion or deviation or something else?

3 Likes
#3

That’s exactly right, and this is for the most part what I tend to do. You will see it if you browse any number of the uwps clips in the Pickslanting Primer or seminars.

This is also the key to crosspicking - two different motion paths can be done from a single forearm position. The uwps motion path handles the downstrokes, and the dwps motion path handles the upstrokes. That’s one way to think about it, any way!

3 Likes
#4

Okay, thank you for the reply. I’m willing to work on it quite regularly, and hope to get a more “easy” feel with it, even if I feel more resistance edge-picking wise.