I’ve been working on TWPS and X-picking for a little while now and here is what I have now :
So first the TWPS, it feels kinda smooth when listening to it afterwards but when I play it, sometimes there is a little bit of resistance at some point. I suspect that I might just be that I have not practiced it enough yet, but at the same time I also feel like I’ve been having this problem for quite a while now, maybe few month if we consider that I’ve been working on TWPS for about 6/8 month on a pretty irregular basis.
My second problem with TWPS is that I struggle when reaching lower string and have a softer attack on those. You can see it pretty clearly on this video that I made for the occasion :
My goal with that would be to have a more even attack on every note (which is probably made more difficult with my bad fretting hand technique but that’s another problem), and also to get more comfortable with it. The second goal is to get faster which is probably just a matter of practice. This clip is around 170BPM 16th I would guess, and reaching 180BPM 16th start to be kinda tiring, my absolute max being around 190BPM for a few reps and less accuracy.
Now for the X-picking stuff, I really like the arpeggiated chords so that’s the kind of stuff I’ve been working on. So far X-picking feels kinda good when playing, it’s not too tiring if I don’t go above my comfort speed which is probably around 130/140BPM 16th when properly warmed up. I realized after the X-picking workshop that my movement seemed pretty close to the supinated approach but at the same time it doesn’t look like I’m that supinated. It might be more accurate to say that I’m approaching the X-picking with more of a DWPS trajectory I think. After messing with it a bit, it helped me reduce this slight jumpy feeling that I had. My problem here is mostly the unconsistency of my attack on more complex patterns (I miss a bunch of notes on the roll pattern at the end of the video), and also that as soon as I start using more edge picking it feels less accurate and I feel like I’m loosing control.
My goal with X-picking are to get more precision and more consistency for each pick stroke. The footage here is around 130/140BPM 16th I would guess. I’m also planning on working an more melodic/shred X-picking later, especially the 5th caprice (both vai’s and paganni’s version).
Now for both of those technique I feel like I just need to fine tune it a bit which might just be a matter of practice, so for the time being it will be good to be able to look back at those clips in a few month to see how progress goes.
P.S.: I appoligize for the sketchy quality of those videos and the eventual grammar/vocabulary mistakes.
Thanks for reading