Very loose wrist picking

@Troy, Due to all the great footage and interviews etc…you provided us with, i started working on my picking from scratch.
Today was a breakthrough for me, as i found a way to make a very loose wrist motion at high speed. Here a few shirt vids of what i mean.
I have to work on keeping it as loose as i go over more strings as i can do on one string but i will manage that with some more practice.

Thnx a lot Troy!


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Of course all that matters is that it works, but one observation is that it looks like forearm rotation is a major factor in what you’re doing in these clips. Gotta love the feeling of “breakthrough” moments in any case. :smiley:

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It is indeed a combination of wrist and forearm. It feels like everything is very loose with very small motion; like shaking water of your hand with minimal motion. The breakthrough is not perse the motion, that i already knowed and use, but the looseness of it never felt like this before.
Now i got practice to keep that looseness when playing lines over more strings.

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Trying to cop Wilko’s style helped me with this.

That is basically the motion.
The thing is, to get this motion up to the fast speed on single note picking (as i did in the vids) normaly i would have to tens up my muscles. And if i could keep them more loose it was rhythmically inconsistent.
Now i found the way to keep it super loose and consistent.

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After analyzing it more now, it is more a thumb/wrist motion with a little forearm
I try to feel the ultra fine movements in my thumb, the joint at the palm.

This is what it looks and feels to me.

For me, the challenge of motions that feel “loose” in the wrist is that I sometimes didn’t feel like I had full control over how hard or soft I was going to pick. For me, maximum relaxation in the wrist correlates to softer pick attack (at least at high speeds), which is another reason I gravitated toward pointy picks, to increase the amount of loudness I can generate with a softer attack.

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