This is something I’ve been thinking about in the past few days.
If you look at the internet for guitar technique advice, the vast majority of YouTube videos and other sources of internet wisdom seem to largely push wrist-deviation based playing. The common adages of “elbow bad,” “that looks weird/stiff so it must be bad,” “small movement is always better,” etc. abound.
Most of these sources don’t actually get into the technical elements of picking motions, but they instead tend to focus heavily on a handful of things that I think are pretty unimportant (“anchoring”, open/closed hand, exact pick grip etc).
It makes me wonder - if somebody like MAB or Shawn Lane were to start playing guitar today, would they ever have developed the signature techniques that took them so far?
I don’t think so. I think they’d post a video of their early playing on Reddit or TikTok, asking if their technique looked good, and they’d get torn to shreds. They’d then get pointed to one of the many, many videos explaining “proper” playing technique, pushing them towards a very standard wrist deviation motion.
Or, to use another example: trailing edge picking. I know we see a few modern players using it (Tosin Abasi, Archspire), but I haven’t seen a single source of info (other than CtC obviously) that mentions it as a viable technique.
I know this isn’t universal. There are always going to be players who ignore the conventional wisdom, or just develop their technique in relative isolation, but do you think this is going to be less common going forward?
Thoughts?