What kind of picking am I doing here?

I’ve been working on my picking technique a while now, and filmed it for the first time today to show a friend. I’m pretty shocked at how bizarre my picking hand looks, but notice that I don’t really string hope anymore when playing fast. I’ve always like the DWP Eric Johnson approach but honestly after watching myself I don’t know what I’m doing. LOL See what you think.

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In what way do you think this? It looks pretty normal to me…

Its really hard to hear the notes because it sounds like you have delay and flange on? Could you record another with it dialled back a bit (or off)

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Hi @Regotheamigo,

This looks interesting, but as @PickingApprentice mentioned, the delay, flanger and the phone microphone recording do not help with hearing the notes.

A different camera angle where we can see the contact between the pick and strings would help as well.

Good luck!

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Sorry guys. I recorded that with a little Line 6 pod in my apartment. I’ll try and upload a better version.

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Here’s a better version hopefully. That’s about as loud as I can play in the place I live. It sounds like I’m playing with a rock which I basically am. It’s a 3.0 Jim Dunlop Big Stubby. Maybe I need to pick lighter or get a smaller pick. :thinking:

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My picking hand looks like a squid flopping around the strings. Haha

Anybody have any advice on what I can do to make it better? Thanks

Hey, this seems a good starting point to me, what exactly do you want to improve? Or in other words, is there something that you’d like to play (a lick or phrase) but you can’t do it with your current technique?

Edit: In this video I think you could do “a bit more DWPS” and the string changes should feel easier/cleaner. I am not sure if I’m hearing it correctly but it seems you sometimes hit the lower string on the string change (indicating not enough DWPS). But I am nitpicking :slight_smile:

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Yeah I think you’re right. Looking closely at my pick it looks like I’m downward pick slanting a lot, but maybe I could do more. I’ve really tried to focus on not string hoping and that’s made a world of difference in the smoothness, maybe even more than the actual DWPS technique, but for some weird reason it rarely sounds punchy and articulate like when you hear EJ or Troy doing it? It’s like I’m not getting a positive connection with the strings when picking faster. Or it could be that I’m picking to light or hard, fretting the notes to hard?? These are the little things I’m having trouble with that are getting me to finally get it down on cue.

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If you are already doing “enough” DWPS, maybe my suggestion was wrong. The empirical test is to check that every time you do an upstroke, the pick goes in the air withou hitting the nearby strings. I think at this stage Troy & Brendan would suggest you to re-film the same thing with a more “Cracking the Code” angle (see any of Troy’s videos), so that we can see more clearly the path of the pick!

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Agree with this… A lot of people on the forum have used the ‘rest stroke’ test, where you make the pickstroke longer, checking that the downstrokes (with DWPS) get buried in the strings and the upstroke sails over the adjacent string cleanly. This lets you know that the pick path is a relative straight line in and out of the plaib of the strings.

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