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So recently i.e. last Thursday (after having returned for the last time to classical guitar a year prior) I returned once and for all to plectrum-based jazz guitar. What's weird is that even though I had played plectrum-based jazz guitar before going to classical, last Thursday I discovered quite quickly that I could more or less do everything right-hand-wise that I could do before - almost like I never had any chops with the plectrum before anyway!
Anyway, now I have resolutely returned to plectrum-using jazz, I could do with some advice and perhaps people can share how they got their right hand working. I'm not sure how many people are familiar with Troy Grady's work but right now, having realised that I was what he terms 'string hopping' which is an inefficient right-hand technique, I am working on getting my tremolo up to a good tempo - which is the way he proposes to solve the problem of string-hopping.
To do this, I find I have to engage the elbow, although part of the movement comes from the wrist and I would like to learn how to get the main motion from the wrist, if possible. Anyway, although it's early days still, I wonder if anyone has also had a problem of excising inefficient plectrum technique from their playing, because although it disappears past a certain tempo, it still reappears at slower ones.
So, while I am open to economy picking at the moment I am working on getting good at alternate picking (I am a big John McLaughlin fan). I am thinking about writing down all my scales in terms of how to alternate-pick them with two-way pick-slanting. This plectrum technique is quite complicated business...
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03-02-2022 08:46 AM
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Two-way pick slanting is tough. I never felt like it would become second nature for me. Bad enough for alternate picking. Then there's two-way economy. Either that requires the two-way slanting, or the Gambale thing, playing only odd or even number of notes per string, depending on if you continue string changes in the same direction or reverse. I refuse to adopt any picking strategy that puts such limitations on my left hand.
So I settled on one-way economy, downwards, similar to Gypsy. Economy picking when ascending. Descending, I usually alternate pick, but sometimes do the more gypsy-like double down string changes, for "better definition", as Joe Pass would say. Probably because the downward rest stroke-oriented pick slant makes the up strokes weaker.
It has vastly simplified both the mental logic and the mechanics for me. Mostly just lateral wrist motion. Generally no string hopping, with the notable "trapped" situation (going from downstroke/higher string, to lower string) where I use a "helper motion".
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Originally Posted by James W
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I don’t know if anyone has played as relentlessly and cleanly with solid tempo and forward motion drive than Pat Martino. I watch this video and both his left and right hand technique look terribly “inefficient”. Maybe there’s more to it than efficiency.
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Thanks for the replies!
I don't know about inefficient... looks smooth and relaxed to me, like he could do it all day. Originally Posted by maxsmith
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I have started doing a lot more alternate picking recently - and I’m finding that it’s a real physical thing. You can easily see if you are really alternate picking because, as you can see in Mike Stern videos, the hand just goes up and down like it does when strumming. Downstroke on the beat, upstroke on the upbeat. Originally Posted by James W
You can video yourself and see if that’s what your hand is doing; or be vigilant about it when you practice.
now like Mike I’m what Troy calls an upward escape picker and I have to use compound motions from the wrist and fingers; Gypsy picking is mechanically simpler but you simply can’t alternate pick everything that way - you just can’t physically do it with just the arm/wrist motion and downward pick slanting inherent in that technique.
So anyway, I’m not sure if that helps but Troy’s videos have been instructive.
The main thing is avoid string hopping; thya comes from psychology - you want to avoid playing the wrong string. Rest stroke picking and maybe economy is really good for getting you out of that, but you have to ready to recognise when you are doing it and develop strategies for getting over the string that are efficient - for me this comes from changing the pick slant with movement from the hand.
Bear in mind the aim is not to become rusty cooley but be able to execute a wide variety of musical ideas at high-moderate speeds. This is a different problem from shredder rock guitar.
hope that helps, not sure if it’s the clearest.
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yeah - efficiency on this case doesn’t necessarily mean small movements it means the right movements Originally Posted by James W
Thanks for the replies!
I don't know about inefficient... looks smooth and relaxed to me, like he could do it all day.
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I believe that "circle picking" referred to moving the pick, apparently, mostly with the thumb joint. I think Chuck Wayne did it that way.
Warren Nunes picked from the wrist.
I find my maximum speed requires some movement from the elbow.
How many other choices about different aspects of picking are there?
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I’ve been playing Bach a lot hybrid style and you kind of have to pick from the fingers like that. Picking from wrist or elbow puts your whole hand out of position so you can’t reliably use your right hand fingers at the same time. At least that’s what I’ve found. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Pasquale Grasso uses this technique.
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Yes, that's helpful, thank you. Often, usually early on in warming-up, my right-hand still wants to string-hop, but of course I can identify it now and am working with getting a smoother motion while keeping a loose wrist and aiming to do a rest stroke. I like to think of picking single notes as like a mini-strum, so my wrist is loose. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Yeah, I'm not after shred-type of speeds (although I wouldn't say no to be able to do that either). At the moment I'm working on learning John McLaughlin's 'Marbles' which is mostly semiquavers at 134 BPM - I'd be very happy if I could pick at that tempo comfortably. Also I'm reacquainting myself with a few bop heads i.e. Donna Lee, Dexterity...
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Emily Remler also seemed to pick from the fingers. You raise a good point - there are a fair few different ways of using a plectrum! Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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I’m not sure if Chucks technique is circle picking btw - he used finger based economy/directional picking. IIRC Kenny Burrell used circle picking (at least how Tuck Andress described it.) Circle picking is more an alternate type of thing. But I might be dead wrong….
That said maybe there’s not that much difference. It certainly feels like you are doing little circle movements.
I often forget that Kenny had amazing picking chops! He was just also Mr Taste.
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If I was young enough to consider re-building my right hand technique I'd have a close hard look at what Grasso and Lage do. I admire their very unified right hand posture: they can do anything from full shred to tasty multi-note stuff all from basically the same position. They intermingle both types of playing with ease.
I think they both use that finger movement thing for fast single notes. Sometimes a bit of wrist. Not much in the elbow. McLaughlin I think is similar?
They're not strict alternate pickers, but hell yes they can do it. Lage is a masterful string hopper :-) Check out his etude #1 on the his old L5. His bluegrass playing ain't half bad either.
There's economy and sweep type picking there too. (at least I think there is...it's not that long ago that I first heard of these things...)
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You're not kidding. Man, that's amazing. Originally Posted by ccroft
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For some reason when you said 'Lage' earlier I thought you meant Lage Lund! Lol... Originally Posted by ccroft
Yes, but that is not 'string hopping' which is an inefficient bouncing motion many people do instead of proper alternate picking. I think it's difficult to describe the difference between string hopping and cross picking or some other double-escape motion, other than that the former does not feel good or smooth and can only be done for a short amount of time before building up too much tension (I should know, lol).
In Julian Lage's first etude I'm pretty sure he's doing what's called 'directional picking' - down-down-up IIRC.
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I agree that Lage is a great model for technique, not just for the right and left hands (I think even calling it “right-hand technique” is a limiting perspective), but the arms, shoulders, head and whole posture. I am assuming this stems from his years of work becoming certified as an Alexander Technique teacher.
For the past eight months I have played acoustic guitar exclusively, after more than four decades of playing primarily electric. I noticed that I was putting too much effort and tension into my picking hand, probably to force more volume from the instrument. One of the challenges of playing acoustic guitar is that the true volume and tone of the instrument is difficult for the player to hear, because he is behind where the sound of the instrument is going. Imagine having a conversation with someone, but they are completely turned around, speaking away from you. You could understand them, but it would sound much different. That might be why many of us tend to lean our heads out over the front of the guitar - another source of unnecessary tension and potential injury.
This over-effort in my picking also limited my upward dynamic range, because I was already picking as forcefully as the guitar could handle without clamping down and producing a strangled tone. So I decided to make an effort to bring my default volume down - my “mezzo-forte” - so that I had somewhere to go in both directions of volume.
I found this article in Premier Guitar by Lage. Besides the interesting perspective on engaging the string with the pick, he also addresses using too much force in fretting the strings. It’s worth reading:
Digging Deeper, the Diving Board Effect
I think his album “World’s Fair” is a modern classic of plectrum acoustic guitar. Here’s a live version of “Peru” from that album:
Lage also put out a recent video for Acoustic Guitar magazine about warming up and playing softer on acoustic guitar:
I found all these helpful for my acoustic playing, my guess is they would be useful on electric, too, especially for adding dynamic range, which the guitar sadly has little of as it is.
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He's not string hopping in the sense that Troy Grady means it. Originally Posted by Gladders
He's cross picking really efficiently
String hopping is when the hand comes out of the plane of the strings, which you can see as a hopping motion - you can see Lage's right hand remains in place.
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If anybody wants to see what string hopping is, and how it is detrimental to your efficiency, I have 100's of videos on my YouTube demonstrating it
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I thought string hopping was the same as cross picking. Thanks for clarifying. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Yes, Julian Lage has an enviably great right-hand technique, everything from cross-picking to hybrid picking etc. not to mention his all-round musical greatness...
Right now, I'm still at the stage of experimenting with different right-hand positions and seeing what works and what doesn't. I think I still end up string hopping if I try to get all the movement exclusively from the wrist at this stage - so to get away from that I have to get a bit of movement from the elbow and today I've been experimenting with a broken-wrist gypsy-esque position, and so now some of the movement is coming from the forearm, and it does feel like a mini-strum, as I state above - somewhat similar to this chap, though obviously not yet as streamlined!
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I've spent a lot of time over the years studying plectrum techniques and experimenting with different mechanics. Mostly I've used a wrist-anchored flatpicking style, à la Al Di Meola or John Petrucci. But I'm exclusively an acoustic guitarist now, and since last fall I've been developing a gypsy technique with lots of flexion at the wrist, modelled on Joscho Stephan's godlike right hand. Look at Joscho's effortless precision here for example: .
With this style, it's neither wrist (radial/ulnar deviation) nor elbow (flexion/extension) so much as forearm (supination/pronation). And I think this is what makes it comparatively effortless and low-maintenance. Using gypsy-type movement I can tremolo pick for minutes non-stop, whereas I seize up after thirty seconds of the same using radial/ulnar at the wrist, when everything locks up and the elbow takes over. It's helpful, too, that rhythm and lead mechanics are much more continuous using gypsy picking.
It goes without saying that there are pros/cons to each method. And there are things which I could play using flatpicking that I can't using gypsy picking. But it's proven to be the best style for me overall, greatest advantages, lowest maintenance, etc.
That said, there may be a commitment time of MONTHS to really demo a technique, if it's different enough from what you're used to, such that your body has to adapt to the new mechanics. I'm almost six months into working on Joscho-style picking, and it's only felt fully natural recently. The posture is different too. You pretty much HAVE to be seated. The leg supporting the guitar is often raised. And gypsy players tend to lean forward aggressively at the waist. Joscho's guitar is up almost at his collarbone much of the time.
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This thread has made me look more closely at where my picking action comes from. It seems to be mostly from a flex of the "O" made by my thumb and forefinger, as if I'm holding a tiny spoon and stirring with it.
I'm guessing that's bad...
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One takeaway from seeing all these greats analyzed by Troy's spy cam...be careful who you try to emulate. Many of them discovered their own self-taught form, not by the book; but the great ones can throw away the book.
Back in the day, so many tennis players were trying to copy McEnroe's serve. With that weird doubled over at the waist beginning stance. Supposedly he developed that form due to a bad back.
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I think Grady's approach is the correct one though - descriptive rather than prescriptive. Originally Posted by timmer
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That might be the circle in circular picking, in which case it might be good. I think I do that, along with some wrist. If you search for vids of Julian playing something like Blues Connotation where he's playing almost all single notes you'll see he uses a flexing of the thumb and index a lot. Not much happening with the wrist except changing strings. Originally Posted by Gladders
I'll just say again that the thing that impresses me most about Julian and Pasquale as far as technique is that they can do single note runs with the best of them, and intersperse it with hybrid. From the same position. You'll find lots of other players that are like "now I play some fast single notes, now I completely change my technique to play multi-phonically." I like the idea of a single multipurpose hand position. I can't tell you why. It just seems like a really good idea.
Yeah... string hopping. I knew Julian wasn't doing that in the bad sense. That's why I called it masterful and put the smiley! I've seen a bit of Grady's thing, but I kind of glaze over after a while. Kinda stuck with my thing at this point.
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