The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    So I recently heard JB say in a video that for him, picking is simply:

    When moving to a higher string use a downstroke, and when moving to a lower string use an upstroke. Same string gets alternate.

    That seems simple enough I thought to myself -I can do that. Exploring economy/speed picking had been on my to do list for years. Well easier said than done of course. I'm trying to force myself to do it, using lines I know pretty well, and the result is, lines that I had sounding pretty good are now sounding like I just started playing last month.

    It seems like a monumental task to unlearn what I've been doing, which I guess is alternate most all the time. Any opinions on how possible this is to convert, and how long it takes?

    Also, I must say I'm unclear on what the benefits are. I'm trying to do it on bop style eighths in 4/4. Certainly I see the economy of motion that is occasionally added, but the lines have a rhythm. It doesn't allow me to speed up where alternate is still required, and speeding up only where it comes in changes the rhythmic feel of the line. So I'm not clear what the point is.

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  3. #2

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    I'm an economy picker and the only advantages it offers over alternate are consistent and smoother string transitions. Bottom line though is that almost any technique will work, depending on what you want to do of course.

  4. #3

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    Quote Originally Posted by P4guitar
    I'm an economy picker and the only advantages it offers over alternate are consistent and smoother string transitions. Bottom line though is that almost any technique will work, depending on what you want to do of course.
    Hmm.. I do already sweep arps where it makes sense to sweep. That plus alternate is what I've always done.
    I guess I'm trying to get a feel for the investment/reward ratio here.

  5. #4

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    Troy Grady had Bruno on as a guest in his Masters of Mechanics series, where they put a camera on his right hand. As I remember it, it was one of the more boring vids they have. I remember tho that footage revealed that not all he said he was doing was true.

    But if you can afford a months subscribtion to the the masters of mechanics site it is definately worth it. More than that is probably a waste of money.

  6. #5

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    My opinion is that economy's real advantage is string transitions, by this I mean more than arps. A lot of lines cross to adjacent strings or skip over strings, etc. - economy provides a consistent and fluid way to do this. That said, if you're already happy with your picking technique, why change? I wasn't and I tried everything with alternate being my mainstay...till I discovered economy.

    As for difficulty, I transitioned in a very short time, less than a month maybe. Consistency was the key. Contrary to your experience, the rhythm of my lines and comping actually improved. Another benefit for me was that I lost the spastic aspect of my picking - economy actually steadied my right hand and made alternate easier.

    I see a lot of great players with lousy techniques, but they make it work. Music is an art, not an athletic event.

    So to NOT answer your question, only you can determine ROI.

  7. #6

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    I do mostly alternate picking, and I don't plan to change. I have too much time invested in the way I do it now, and too little time left to make it worth the effort to try to relearn, for an arguably tiny benefit. i'm not a young kid trying to get a rep for speed, I'm old and tired and don't expect to ever make any more money or get any reputation at all. The upside/downside ratio is all down for me, so I can't begin to tell you how long it might take you.

  8. #7

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    Been thinking a bit since posting above and the JB thing you describe need for you to change pickslant at times if you want it to work.

    Say you play a with a downwards pickslant and you alternately pick two notes on a string before having to play the string above it. There is no way you can get in an upstroke as your hand will move away from the string. A downstroke will on the other hand be the natural thing to do.

    I see no reason to why that downsstroke should be a bad thing.

    If you insist on the JB thing then you can't play to notes on a string and economy pick with the upstroke on the string above it unless you have an upwards pickslant. Jimmy is a two way pickslanter. If you're not a two way pickslanter, then you can't do what he does. But that is just a choice.

  9. #8

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    If somebody has figured something out that he or she feels comfortable with, I do not see a reason to change. There are so many different things that work in the hands of the great. Watch Metheny pick or Benson or Wes or Knopfler or Eddi Van Halen or or ... all totally unconventional and super successful in expressing themselves.

    For me it was/is different. I am by nature almost a lefty who got trained to do everything right handed. Hence, my right hand was/is much weaker than my left hand. I also did not understand for the longest time that right hand technique is the heart of guitar technique. The consequence was that I always felt strongly constrained by my right hand in guitar playing. Hence, some technique needed to be found that works for me and allows me to play the things I want to play.

    It wasn’t happening by itself and hence I started to really research it and think it through. The Troy Grady treatment was quite helpful in that respect despite all the distracting gimmicky stuff and the focus on 80s shredders. His analysis is sound, I think. I start to feel comfortable with gypsy picking on acoustic and something between alternate and economy on electric. Archtops work both ways and I start to be able to play things that were out of reach before. But it is a process that has been going on for at least 3 or 4 years and most of the time I felt worse than with my old, bad and limiting technique. I talked to many people who have gypsy picking down and they pretty much all say that there were years in between were they played and felt worse than before when they learned the technique. Once mastered it is incredibly powerful.

    But honestly, I wish there would be something that came natural to me and just feels like me rather than something that I have intelectualized to the ‘t’.

  10. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lobomov
    If you insist on the JB thing then you can't play to notes on a string and economy pick with the upstroke on the string above it unless you have an upwards pickslant. Jimmy is a two way pickslanter. If you're not a two way pickslanter, then you can't do what he does. But that is just a choice.
    I don't know what Bruno does but I can do the above just fine and my pick angle remains constant, I never/rarely change it. My "pickslant" is slightly downward I think.

  11. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by P4guitar
    I don't know what Bruno does but I can do the above just fine and my pick angle remains constant, I never/rarely change it. My "pickslant" is slightly downward I think.
    With a downwards pickslant the first downstroke will "bury" it self between the strings ... most vivid example of this is the gypsy reststroke. The upstoke will lift clear of the strings making it very easy for you to hit the string above with a new downstroke.

    If you want to go downstroke upstroke upstroke, then you either start in an upwards pickslant or move your wrist, so the pickslant changes during the first upstroke.


    If you play without any pickslant then stringhopping is difficult.

    I just picked a random Troy Grady vid to illustrate downwards pickslanting mechaning. Troy always uses 20 to say things that could be said in 5 min, but annimation starts around 11:20.




    None of this is particulary important if what you want to do just works for you, but I found a few years back that being unaware of pickslanting mechanics was what hindered me in many situations ... and after a while I stopped thinking Again and just do ...

  12. #11

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lobomov
    With a downwards pickslant the first downstroke will "bury" it self between the strings ... most vivid example of this is the gypsy reststroke. The upstoke will lift clear of the strings making it very easy for you to hit the string above with a new downstroke.
    Okay, apparently I didn't understand what you meant by pick slant. I interpreted that as the angle between the plane of the pick and the axis of the string. You seem mean the angle/tilt of the pick relative to the surface of the guitar.

    We were talking in different dimensions

    Quote Originally Posted by Lobomov
    If you want to go downstroke upstroke upstroke, then you either start in an upwards pickslant or move your wrist, so the pickslant changes during the first upstroke.

    If you play without any pickslant then stringhopping is difficult.
    Regardless of directionality, my pick slant never changes for either definition. I use a floating arm technique with no palm or fingers resting on the guitar body. It works just fine and I can play far faster than I can think which is not a good thing.

    Several years ago I posted some instructional videos of how to add harmony to one's playing for either group or solo situations. One of the techniques I demonstrated was the use of spread triads (back then I called it some made up name as I didn't know the terminology). In the video the spread triads were arranged as every other string so it was nothing but string hopping. I employed standard economy picking with no pick slant, as I think you mean it. It works for me.

    Start at the 7:46 mark.

  13. #12

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    I used to do all alternate, now I have a pretty wide toolkit of alternate, sweep/economy, hybrid, and of course slurring in the appropriate spots. I've spent a lot of time with each approach.

    I believe strongly in this: If you aren't able to play lines you want (pre-written, not improvised) at the tempo you want to play them, and you've already been practicing 'technique' for many years, the solution is not to just keep practicing and move the metronome up a few bpms at a time. This is especially true if your tempo ceiling is somewhere around 8ths at 200-250 bpm or so.

    If you're stuck around there, then there are a lot of considerations that can move you past it, mainly specific use of slants, strokes, and quite possibly left hand fingerings too.

    If you're way past that point, or you have no desire to be past that point, then it ain't broke!

    If you're way below that point, it's possible that there are some practice strategies with your current technique that can improve your 'tempo ceiling' but at the same time, getting in depth on the slant/stroke/fingering challenges will help a lot.

    A big epiphany I've had about 'technique' in the past six years or so is that we can't really practice 'technique' or 'picking' - we have to isolate individual problems and figure out exactly what's going on in say, a note-to-note transition, or most likely a string-to-string transition. And for that, I've found Troy Grady's discoveries invaluable, and also inspiring for me to dig in futher and make more observations about what works and what doesn't.

    At this point, which is very, very different than six years ago, I feel comfortable playing quite a lot of passages at the tempo I want to play them, but it's not because I can move my hands faster perse, it's because I know more about the mechanics of picking and can make good decisions about when to alternate, when to sweep, how to finger, etc, to make things playable. Not all ?things...but a lot!

  14. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by P4guitar
    Okay, apparently I didn't understand what you meant by pick slant. I interpreted that as the angle between the plane of the pick and the axis of the string. You seem mean the angle/tilt of the pick relative to the surface of the guitar.

    We were talking in different dimensions



    Regardless of directionality, my pick slant never changes for either definition. I use a floating arm technique with no palm or fingers resting on the guitar body. It works just fine and I can play far faster than I can think which is not a good thing.

    Several years ago I posted some instructional videos of how to add harmony to one's playing for either group or solo situations. One of the techniques I demonstrated was the use of spread triads (back then I called it some made up name as I didn't know the terminology). In the video the spread triads were arranged as every other string so it was nothing but string hopping. I employed standard economy picking with no pick slant, as I think you mean it. It works for me.

    Start at the 7:46 mark.
    Hey P4, the playing at the clip sounds great! However the tempo and density of the passage is pretty low/slow, so I think many different picking approaches would work at that tempo. I think where these issues become important is when we're up against a tempo ceiling. But as I said in my other post, if one has no desire to increase the tempo on a passage, then it ain't broke. But on the other hand, it doesn't give us a lot of data or arguments about which slant/stroke etc is most efficient

  15. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by Frank67
    If somebody has figured something out that he or she feels comfortable with, I do not see a reason to change.
    I think Jimmy Bruno would agree with this. He has said (on his site) that guys who have been playing several years will have a hard time learning to pick as he does. I think he says it takes about six months. If you don't need to, don't (-unless you have six months with nothing better to do, but who among us does?)

    The problem comes when what one is comfortable doing WON'T get the job done. In Jimmy's case, he said he couldn't play some bop things at tempo with alternate picking. It was that simple. What he knew wasn't working, so he had to find something that would. This is what he found.

  16. #15

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    Quote Originally Posted by JakeAcci
    Hey P4, the playing at the clip sounds great! However the tempo and density of the passage is pretty low/slow, so I think many different picking approaches would work at that tempo. I think where these issues become important is when we're up against a tempo ceiling.
    Thank you, but the video wasn't a performance, it was a 2014 demonstration of the use of spread triads and other techniques for adding harmony, so I kept it slow and brief for the viewer.

    The only reason I posted it was to show that string hopping was very doable with zero pick slant.

    For very fast passages of spread triads, I wouldn't flat pick anyway, but hybrid pick, pick and fingers, which I also show in the vid. But again, the vid wasn't about picking - I don't care how people pick.

    Quote Originally Posted by JakeAcci
    But as I said in my other post, if one has no desire to increase the tempo on a passage, then it ain't broke. But on the other hand, it doesn't give us a lot of data or arguments about which slant/stroke etc is most efficient
    I didn't think that was the discussion. Another person was claiming that string hopping would be very difficult to do using zero pick slant - I was responding to that.

    I'm a hybrid, economy stylist, but not a defender of the technique. Each is free to choose their own path, and I encourage everyone to do that. One of my favorite players ever, didn't even use a pick.

    Just to add another dimension to the discussion, people get wrapped around the axle about technique. I view technique important only to the extent that it aids one's expression. Superior technique combined with weak ideas or limited harmonic range is useless in my book.

    The OP was asking about the benefit of economy and my response is that economy was only potentially useful is if his current technique was deficient for his needs, and only he could determine that. As for me, I have zero interest in improving my right hand; it can already do more than I know to ask of it.

  17. #16

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    As and aside , anyone know which technique
    Frank Vignola uses ?

    I'm an ignoramus on picking
    But I like Franks picking style ...

  18. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by pingu
    As an aside , anyone know which technique
    Frank Vignola uses ?
    I've asked Frank about his picking and he describes it as "mostly down." He plays mostly downstrokes. He thinks they sound better, esp for melodies. Some "flourishes" require other approaches but he describes his own picking as "mostly down."

    By the way, Frank doesn't like to offer picking advice. He says he's played with so many great players who do it in different ways...

    I have a lesson coming up with him via True Fire and I am going to ask him if he sees anything in my picking that, however comfortable I may be with it, could be holding me back. (Even if he doesn't want to teach some specific way, I hope he feels comfortable saying, "Okay, that is a problem because it means you're playing with too much tension," or somesuch.


    Here he is with Andres Oberg playing "Limehouse Blues."


  19. #18

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    There seems to be a half-life of any discussion of picking mechanics at which it is realized that the terms being used (pick slant, pick angle, etc...) are not being understood or interpreted the same way by everyone. This causes confusion and the occasional revelation. Slant, angle, and similar terms are like transitive verbs - they need to take an object. They need to be referenced so that saying "up" or "down" indicates the direction of rotation, but this is rarely done. Otherwise, how does one know that "downward pick slant" means that the left side of the pick as you look down at it is the side that is the lower side? These words need a definite orientation reference attached, but doing so makes their use even more complicated.

    I use a convention that might help clarify the static and dynamic picking descriptions... the pick's shape suggests he infield of a baseball diamond - the pointy end is home plate, and you can see where first, second, and third base would be positioned.

    So, for example, I can describe the way I hold the pick using both ways to indicate the same information, like this:

    I use downward pick slanting, which is a rotation around the longitudinal axis of the pick in which "downward" is referring to the rotation direction that makes the left edge of the pick lower. I use downward pick angle, which is a rotation around the lateral axis of the pick where "downward" refers to the main body of the pick being lower than the tip.

    or

    First above Third and Home above Second (Pick as infield)

  20. #19

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    Vignola’s style looks like Gypsy picking to me. Very elegant and fluent.

  21. #20

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    To answer the OP, Bruno said that it took him about 6 months to convert and that he didn't play very well while "converting".

    Described in his "Art of Picking" book.


    Bottom line is that he picked up speed.

  22. #21

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    Quote Originally Posted by wengr
    So I recently heard JB say in a video that for him, picking is simply: when moving to a higher string use a downstroke, and when moving to a lower string use an upstroke. Same string gets alternate.
    It's the way I play but I'm just a beginner. I was wondering if in the future I will have problems to accentuate the notes moving to another string...

  23. #22

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tales
    It's the way I play but I'm just a beginner. I was wondering if in the future I will have problems to accentuate the notes moving to another string...
    I think that the economy approach is generally faster but harder to have rhythmic definition and controlled accents, while the alternate picking is generally the opposite: easier to control rhythm and accents, but slower, all things being equal.

    I've spent a lot of time working on accents and rhythms within economy/sweep. You can get good articulation happening, depends a lot on the individual line.

  24. #23

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    Quote Originally Posted by Frank67
    Vignola’s style looks like Gypsy picking to me. Very elegant and fluent.
    He is a marvelous player, and his tastes range from the Beatles to Beethoven, from Gypsy to Swing to bop to contemporary jazz / pop. But as he says in this educational video, he tries to keep it "simple, bluesy and melodic."

    He's very keen on simple structures and sequences. (Kessel was like that too.) Neither noodled. But for all of Frank's educational material (-Mel Bay, TrueFire, see frankvignola.com for more), he never (AFAIK) talks about picking. He gives technique exercises but doesn't talk about pick grips, wrist motion, rest strokes, any of that. I wish he would but he doesn't.


  25. #24

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    As a big gypsy jazz fan, I'll say those guys are great.

    Not better. Great.

    No matter how clean and fast they are, a lot of the gypsy jazz players lack in dynamics...nobody's perfect.

    Well, maybe Boulou!

  26. #25

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    Jimmy,

    it would be helpful if you could tell us what you do say concerning "being a pro" in that video (for those of us who haven't seen it, like me)-- I know ginger, and he's not trying to make stuff up to start a fire--it's an honest misunderstanding, that I'm wondering if other beginners might have the same misunderstanding.

    My guess is it's more a "throwaway" quote and you didn't intend it to be taken seriously--but you're a very highly regarded player--some folks are gonna take you at your word whether you're completely serious or not!