What has been your biggest challenge learning from Cracking the Code?

Playing Technique
#1

For whatever reason, developing an efficient motion mechanic, whether in downward or upward pickslanting, has been my biggest challenge developing great technique. I realized that at a certain tempo (somewhere a little past sextuplets at 100bpm) my technique starts to go haywire when downward pickslanting. The smooth combination of wrist deviation and rotation turns into a janky, erratic mess. My hand also gets very tense. At this point the challenge seems to be to slowly increase the speed where I can maintain a consistent motion without tensing my wrist up. Unfortunately, the start slow, and build up speed thing has probably helped ingrain a lot of tension and bad habits in my right hand that I’ve had to unlearn.

The physical motion of the right hand is both fascinating and frustrating for me. I’m sure it comes very naturally to a lot of players, but it has always been a slow road for me. What has been your biggest challenge learning pickslanting/crosspicking/code stuff?

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#2

You are not alone my friend… To me it´s very difficult to be able to play sextuplets at 100 bpm with DWPS. I tense up a lot… and to be honest I also tense up with UWPS but at 110 bpm instead of 100 bpm… I´m trying to reeducate myself and It´s hard but I´m getting better results practicing at slow tempos with exagerated movements that emphasiise the advantages of the DPSW big wrist deviations then going up with the metronome but slowly… the deviations get smaller naturally and I get to break the muscular memory that tenses me up… I also I´m focusing much more in accurancy… Playing with clean sound… And trying to play without mistakes and with security before worrying about speed… It´s a great way of focusing on speed but without letting the anxiaty make you rush things. I discovered that as I get more accurate at tempos Im confortable I can go to faster ones without building a lot of tension… It´s fun to make up excersices to test my accuracy

Sorry about my grammar… English it´s not my mother language

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#3

My biggest challenge was and still is learning DWPS. It was a recent development but now that I have been seen some progress I started to practice 2WPS and noticed motor interference is going to be my new challenge specially because I think my UWPS and DWPS movements come from different hand motions (deviation vs rotation) so switching back and for feels just imposible at high speeds. Lately I stopped practicing for speed when I seriously decided to learn DWPS because my top speed was sixteenth notes at 100 bpm and as soon as I tried to increase it I would started switching back to UWPS making the string changes impossible.

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#4

My biggest challenge was putting the principles into practice. The material here is really good at showing how it works, but I felt like I had to develop my own curriculum to really internalize the mechanics. There were two things, in particular, that helped me.

The first was working through a variety of scale-patterns up and down the neck. I also really wanted to internalize the melodic minor scale so I used that as my base. I’d start with simple four-note patterns across two strings, up and down the neck, across each pair of adjacent strings. Then work up to five, six, seven, etc note patterns. All were just simple up and down patterns. After grooving that I’d just start making patterns up and apply the same up-and-down and across-the-neck geometry. Not only did it really help with fretboard visualization but it was a great playground for grooving that alternate-picking feel across a variety of string combinations.

The second thing that helped me was working through Pat Martino’s “Linear Expressions” book using strict alternate-picking. The patterns in that book present some tricky picking challenges, some almost like bluegrass cross-picking. Nine months of steadily working through those has really helped up my alternate-picking game.

I wouldn’t say that I’m fastest gun when it comes to alternate-picking, but my tone and confidence at medium tempos has dramatically improved. Like @grusso83 my focus was primarily on tone, accuracy and grooving the right motion. The speed started coming later and was much more controlled and reliable.

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#5

good to know that I’m not the only one. DWPS feels so unnatural for me. I thought it was going to be an instant success but no so. So instead, I’ve been working on sweeping and that’s been working much better for me.

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#6

Downward pickslanting should be a no brainer, but it’s no bueno for me. When I go dead slow I can force myself into it but as soon as I try to gain any measure of speed it becomes this big stupid “scooping” motion and it just sucks. The closest I’ve been able to get is this dumb, flat motion where the pick travels parallel to the guitar body with very little power.

I keep trying but I’m starting to think that a future of pure UWPS (or perhaps crosspicking if I can stop whining long enough to really attack it) is in my reality. Even if I never get the hang of DWPS, knowing what it is and knowing why certain phrases are difficult for me has been extremely helpful for my playing.

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#7

DWPS was hard to grasp for me for a combination of factors: motion mechanics, anchoring and string tracking particularly when ascending. E.g. a pentatonic scale played straight up (in pitch) would be one of the hardest things. I also found it difficult to control my timing in the occasional sweeps. Now things are finally improving but my DWPS technique is still behind my upwards and even two-way techniques!

Things that helped:

  • LOADS of double picking exercises (just play any lick repeating each note twice)
  • finding the right way to anchor the right hand while allowing for string tracking. In the end the best for me seems to be to copy troy with middle and ring finger sliding about the guitar body, while the pinky is sometimes floating free
  • rely on rest strokes whenever possible (they really help your hands to take a rest :slight_smile: )
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#8

Having been a strict, small movement, alternate picker for several decades, the introduction of the “rest-stroke” concept from my classical roots accelerated my DWPS assimilation and afforded comfortability with sweep picking for the first time.

Can’t wait to see where these forums evolve to in years ahead!

#9

DWPS for sure! For me it feels very unnatural. However, I’ve decided to stick with UWPS and use DWPS on certain licks or when a situation calls for two way pickslanting.

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