Hello, the following is a specific question about Troy’s personal picking motion.
At 31 seconds of the Why Trial And Error Is Essential to Guitar Practice video (https://youtu.be/U6rWm12CMm8), your picking motion recruits forearm rotation with supination.
Your picking motion in Chapter 1 - Upstroke Escape uses a side-to-side deviation pathway with less supination. The Upstroke Escape video sort of implies the wrist rotation is not an optimal motion.
Did your picking motion naturally evolve from wrist rotation to more side-to-side deviation with less supination? Or did you consciously change your technique to side-to-side wrist deviation?
Sorry for missing this earlier. My personal picking trechnique hasn’t really “evolved” per se, other than simply learning how more of them work over time and adding them to the things we teach. These two examples you’ve referenced come from lessons on two different picking motions, which is… why they’re different! I still do and use all the techniques we’ve ever looked at, and I don’t have any preference among them beyond whether their capabilities actually work for the phrase you’re trying to play. Personally, whatever I used last is the technique I like best. At some point I will enter my old man phase, where I just keep using whatever that last technique is forever.
The “wrist-only” motion approach has long been one of the most common approaches in use among great players like McLaughlin and Di Meola. And it’s also a bit of a mystery for those who never figured out how to do it. I was one of those players to begin with. Which is why we’ve added it recently and devoted a whole section to it. You won’t see forearm rotation in that section only because that’s just not the subject we’re teaching.
However in that section we do cover different forearm orientations, from lightly supinated to maxi supinated like Steve Morse, because those are all common among famous wrist players and we want to make sure you have simple instructions for how they work. That’s Chapter 2 in that section. And to be clear, as you move through those various forearm positions, you’re no longer doing side-to-side deviation, but various blends of deviation and flexion-extension. As far as I am aware these motions all have equal capabilities, so again, we’re just showing you how they work.
In fact, just today we put up a comparsion on Instagram of what a USX picking motion looks like when done with the wrist, and with a combination of wrist and forearm:
The wrist-forearm technique was the one I used before I knew what I was using. The wrist-only one is newer since I only figured out how to do it after we started doing interviews. If all you’re doing is USX motion they have similar capabilities and again, no real preference so long as the capabilities are the same.
Once you get into trying to do USX and DSX, the use of a wrist-forearm blend for that gets less common. Fewer people seem to have figured that one out. The lesson you found on YouTube is an excerpt from a longer lesson where we discuss how to do that:
