What to do when starting with speed isn't working? / Maboroshi's technique

Playing Technique
#41

Thanks for trying! Yes I can see that the start-stop issue is appearing in more or less all your attempts at fast picking.

If I remember correctly, this is however not the case with your left hand. Have you already experimented with picking left-handed? Sure, it’s annoying to start from scratch but if that helps you get rid of the start-stop problem chances are that in 6 months you’ll have better chops that your right-handed self.

EDIT: Miles is an excellent example of a RH player who went lefty and got great results. Not sure what motivated him to do that but I think we can’t argue with the results :slight_smile:

#42

I spent a month trying to switch over once and I’ll do it sometimes to kind of ‘reset’ my right hand during a practice session but I’m not really any better at it than when I started. I’ve never had a problem fretting though. I don’t know how much practice would be considered ‘giving it a fair shot’ for something as big as switching to left handed playing.

#43

Still lurking the forum and working on this. I think I’ve gotten better at the banjo rolls since they’re not stopping outright anymore and the motion looks relatively flat.

I’m not hitting the strings accurately but the upstrokes and downstrokes feel fairly consistent. I’m playing an acoustic with a leg rest in the classical position now since it seems to help a bit with my arm tensing up, though it’s more of a workaround than a solution. I’m still getting a very unhealthy feeling tension throughout my whole arm and into my upper back / trap area. I’m also getting some pain in my elbow that persists after I stop playing, but I’ll wait until that subsides fully before I work on this again.

I’ve seen the concept of ‘background tension’ coming up more and more recently on the forum and I think it might the root of the problem for me, but other than playing from a neutral position where possible I don’t know to fix it. It’s present in all my playing but it’s worse with single escape motions like this:

In these clips my hand is touching the bridge, but it’s not resting on it. It’s being suspended from a very tense feeling elbow which in turn is being held in place by my upper arm tensing up. I’ve tried letting my arm rest at my side then bringing it to the guitar with as little tension as possible, but it still feels like a lot. Even with a much thinner electric guitar, my whole arm is tense just holding the guitar in the playing position.

#44

Nice work! This is a big improvement over the December post. Just a couple points that might help:

Maintaining your basic playing position should not be fatigue-inducing. An audience-perspective video of the way you are set up will help get a look at what you’re doing. However, just off the bat, most wrist styles use a bridge anchor. If I try to do wrist without that I get gassed pretty quickly as I imagine you are. Is there a reason why you’re not resting on the bridge?

USX and roll pattern playing are different animals with different overall forms/motions. They are not really compatible (oversimplification alert) and trying to learn both when you have neither could be confusing. I would choose one battle to fight. The USX clip is more problematic so I’d try to keep the form in the roll clips, which we now call “mixed escape” form.

Your grip is more of a classic downward pickslanting setup and is causing garage spikes on upstrokes in the roll playing. Instead, mixed escape playing in general wants a zero-degree pickslant. A three-finger / middle-finger grip, often pad to pad, is usually what matches with the arm position you’re using, so I’d try that.

I know there have been issues getting basic motion happening even on a single string. But I would still prioritize that. What does that look like currently? Can you get any continuous power output (speed and/or volume) on a single string or is that still intermittent?

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#45

Thanks for taking another look at this!

Just to clarify, you mean ‘Keep the more pronated form from the mixed escape clips, but prioritize getting a working motion on a single string instead of the banjo rolls’?

I’m not even fully sure what it means to ‘rest on the bridge’. My understanding is that it means something like ‘keeping the hand at the bridge with the minimum required tension and pivoting from a set point of contact between the two’. The bridge isn’t under the hand so it doesn’t support it against the pull of gravity other than maybe a little bit of friction between the two, so it’s not really ‘resting’ there.

What I’ve noticed in my own playing is that when I start picking, I tense my whole arm up like a kid would do if he was trying to make his biceps look bigger. My wrist feels like it’s rigidly held up at the bridge, superficially contacting it, but not really interacting with it any meaningful way.

It’s still very much intermittent. Some days it works better than others but there’s been no long-term improvement.

I’m going as fast as I can here and trying to accent the first of every 4 notes. I’m also using the more pronated setup from the roll clips instead of the supinated setup with the side of the hand on the bridge. I can see my elbow is moving but I don’t know how to stop it. I also noticed the accents are almost non-existent. It’s like my brain sends to signal to play the note harder and the hand just doesn’t do it.

#46

First impression is that this is the smoothest and “most continuous “ picking we have heard from you so far.

I think that’s nice progress and you may be onto something:)

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#47

Picking motion itself actually looks pretty good. I would not bother with USX patterns like the double picking stuff in the clip because to do that correctly uses a slightly different form.

More generally, you’ve described an inordinate amount of pain and discomfort in your overall form and that is priority number one and needs to be addressed. I really wouldn’t do any significant amount of playing with this much discomfort happening until you can figure out why.

When I play, I tilt the guitar body a little, so it does rest a little gravitationally. Check out the shots of Yngwie’s Strat on this page, and of course the shots of Wes Montgomery who used a great deal of this type of tilt. When you do that, even a little, you will note bridge contact without having to force it. So you can try some of that:

What’s going on upstairs in the traps and shoulder, are you doing anything with those that they would be tensing?

Many acoustic players will rest the bicep on top of the lower bout. This removes muscular output from the upper body equation, you’re just laying on the guitar. Stubby-armed among us (me) can’t do this, because I can’t reach the strings at that point. But it looks like you can reach. Are you resting on the bout currently or above it? If not try that and see if that feels more relaxed.

Another place I would look is the grip. Hand/finger anatomy can be pretty variable but if I try to suspend the middle finger like in your clip, those muscles get burned out. A gentle curl uses some energy, but less than suspending. Totally slack grazing on the body is the least fatiguing option but not appropriate for all styles because the fingers hit the strings. Are you suspending or slack grazing?

TLDR get rid of anything that’s working that doesn’t need to be.

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#48

I’m not consciously doing anything with the upper arm/shoulder area, but I feel them tense up a bit when I bring the hand the bridge, then tense up a lot when I start picking.

With the guitar on my left leg like it is in the above clip, the upper arm doesn’t reach the guitar, but with it on the right leg (and with the attached stand lifting it up) I can rest my upper arm on it.
While I was playing around with this I noticed something that might be part of the problem though:

(I have the guitar on my right leg with the bicep resting on the upper bout in this clip.)

When I bring my wrist up to the bridge from a relaxed, hanging position, it doesn’t actually want to be on the bridge, my arm is most relaxed with the wrist being held slightly above the bridge (relative to the guitar, not the ground). To bring the wrist onto the bridge, I have to flex at the elbow to bring the forearm in towards the bridge. This also pulls the body of the guitar towards me, away from where it rests naturally, and my whole upper arm / shoulder area has to tense up to hold it there. So all the picking I do is from this position where I’m fighting to even keep the wrist on the bridge.

I switched back to electric to see if it had the same problem, and it did, but for a slightly different reason:

This time it’s the forearm resting on the upper bout, and when I bring the wrist up to the bridge from a resting position it’s even further away than it was with the acoustic. I can press the forearm into the upper bout to bring the body of the guitar towards me and get the wrist on the bridge, but the effect is the same as it was with the acoustic.

I can slightly alleviate the problem by pointing the neck of the guitar more in front of me or tilting the guitar like in the examples in your last post, but it’s not enough to stop the chain of tension through my arm and shoulder. I also tried playing standing up with various strap heights.

As for how to fix this, I have no idea. I’m not even 100% sure it’s the problem as I’ve never seen anyone else talk about it. If I get the chance I’d like to try out one of these nerd guitars since the upper bout is almost non-existent and maybe I wouldn’t have this problem:

Steinberger
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Regarding the grip, I don’t think I’m suspending the middle finger, it just doesn’t reach the guitar when I let it hang loose. I tried curling it in more but it seems very resistant to being flexed like that.

Edit: Another thing making me unsure if this is the problem is that I was also unable to get a working motion with the guitar lying flat on the desk in front of me.

#49

I’ve been working with the instructions in the Primer over the last few months and I still haven’t been able to get a decent tremolo going. Should I keep using this thread for the sake of context or create a Technique Critique? If I make a TC and don’t have a preferred / default motion, which one should I use?

Just as a quick recap, I can do

  • DSX and USX motions with (I think) wrist deviation
  • USX with deviation / rotation
  • DSX elbow

but none of them go fast or feel very comfortable. I can also do what feels like a pure flextension motion that’s DSX and goes very fast, but it’s consistently injured my wrist when I’ve tried to do any serious practice with it so I’m reluctant to mess around with it.

#50

Hello! I’m far from an accomplished player but I thought i’d could add an idea that worked for me when i was younger. Have you tried palm muting while doing tremolo? It might put your hand/arm in a different position and maybe it’ll help for get a feeling of it, or maybe not, but probably worth experimenting with if you haven’t already.

Might not be your cup of tea but a lot of Dragonforce songs (the rhytem guitar) has a lot of 16th notes at 200bpm palm muted that’s pretty easy for the brain to remember (chord progression/note wise). Just a tip of you wanna try to wing it to some song.

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#51

These two statements seem contradictory to me, the only way you can tell you’re doing the motion correctly is by how fast and how comfortable it feels :slight_smile:

I get the feeling you’re probably exerting more force and effort then you need to. The reason it looks effortless for pro level players is because they’ve learnt to play effortlessly. It needs to feel easy from the get-go, that has to be your starting point.

Try using a tiny amount of attack and see if you can get any level of sustained speed and comfortability going. For me that has been a great starting point because as the motion becomes learned you can add attack over time. I’ve found that starting with strong attack can sometimes get in the way of learning a motion as you can easily start to use unnecessary muscle groups that tire you more quickly, that was definitely my case!

#52

Sorry for the delay! You can definitely open a TC and since you are a subscribed you can do it directly on the platform. Feel free to show us all the various motions you tried and we take it from there!