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I have issues with right hand technique and would like to improve it. I have seen that Dan Wilson has some courses related to topic, but not sure how helpful they are. For example Building Stronger Right Hand Picking Technique | Dan Wilson. I am definitely not a beginner and can play decently, know theory quiet much and many standard, so would rather skip some basic or intermediary stuffs
Anyone had experience with these courses?
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02-23-2023 05:45 PM
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Yes I have actually, tried it for a bit but didn't feel much progress. Maybe i didn't go through all the steps but wasn't worth the money for me. There better bang for your buck on my music masterclass in my opinion!
Mike Moreno - Jazz Guitar Lessons 1,2,3 & PDF - Masterclass Bundle
Thats a good one by Mike moreno that talks about picking. Also really liked this one about harmony by Daan Kleijn:
Daan Kleijn (Expanding Your Chord Vocabulary) - Jazz Guitar Lesson Bundle
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just saw dan last week...unbelievable guitarist, and a totally cool dude.
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If you're looking to strictly focus on RH picking maybe try Tory Grady's site, Cracking the Code. Really goes in depth on RH picking mechanics and despells some common myths. Circling back to Dan's course afterword with the knowledge gained from CtC would be even better maybe.
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Troy’s site is an amazing treasure trove on the mechanics of the right hand. He goes into depth on how picking works, the different solutions to the biomechanics of picking fast and clean, and the conscious and unconscious strategies of the greats.
What he studiously refuses to do is give any tips, lessons, or practice routines to actually improve your own picking. It’s actually kind of weird in a world where everyone else is promising this one trick to make you shred in one day.
I admit I found the “Pickslanting Primer” to be fascinating and informative. It totally demystified some of my habits. But once I understood my favorite grip, hand position, and “escape pattern” I could find nowhere to go to find appropriate exercises to improve my speed and accuracy in real world playing.
To be fair, I haven’t been to his site in a while. Perhaps it has added lessons or exercises.
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I think once you've identified your preferred motion mechanic, something that at least produces speeds of 160 to 180 bpm 16ths on one string, you play musical phrases or adapt what you already know to your escape style. On the CtC forum they mention practicing with pet licks from Yngwie Malmsteen that use upstoke escapes or some other metal guy that use downstroke escapes or andy wood crosspicking. Might as well just use some jazz lines or a transcription or head you know. The main thing is to avoid what they call string hopping which is harder to naturally do with one way escape pick strokes. If you're able to avoid stinkhopping then it's more about just learning the notes.
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That being said, I do think that Troy doesn't quite grasp the fact that he had been practicing metal for 20 years before he stumbled upon the CtC stuff. He had already sort of 'primed his system' for fast efficient movements so he doesn't teach relaxation = speed or something like that.
The table top stuff they have on the site now does allow someone to prove to themselves that they can make very fast picking like motions with everyday motions. So raw speed is typically not the thing holding people back.
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I subscribed to Troy's website a few years ago. There's loads of content there but I'm not sure how useful it all is because in order to 'defeat' string hopping the advice just boiled down to: go fast. So what I do now is practice something at a variety of tempos, mostly switching between fast and a slightly lower tempo. Oh, and if you're using a single-escape mechanic you can use a rest-stroke (for this reason a double-escape motion seems to be more difficult). That's basically it. So all the other stuff might interest guitar-mechanics nerds but I'm not sure how much practical use it is.
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What I do know is that rest stroke picking is eminently teachable; but you have to prepared to go back to basics.
I learned gypsy jazz picking but benson picking is not very different.
you have to spend some time feeling a bit awkward until the new movement becomes second nature. This can take a while, but pay attention to form and it will come.
Another thing I think that is teachable is two way economy picking
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Nb Dan’s a classic rest stroke picker - you can see by the little downward swipes he does
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Do you mean swipes as in economy picking or pickstrokes that go through a string and don't make it sound due to LH muting?
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Fair enough! There is a lot of info presented but it leaves you with a feeling of, 'that's it?' or 'OK, now what's actionable?'
I do think that going fast and hitting a speed barrier at 130 to 160 16th demonstrates that your picking motion is inefficient. So the old adage of practicing slow and slowly bumping the metronome is not going to help because it likely won't change your motion mechanic (it probably had worked for some that's why it's advocated). So starting with speed helps you break out of that box. FTR Slow practice is good for note learning , tension reduction etc so it's not all fast practice is the only way
The table top drills have you avoiding stinghopping immediately with everyday movements. Learning efficient double escape is another story...
Also this is a feel thing ultimately I think, once you get your motion in the ball park then it's experimentation on the instrument to work out the kinks.
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I should probably say sweeps - the motion he does with his right hand - some alternating, and then raking movements towards the floor - just observing the right hand movement without considering the notes being played.
Originally Posted by bediles
you see the same thing with Django, Wes et al
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String hopping happens because people psychologically want to avoid the next string . It’s perfectly understandable. Originally Posted by bediles
I never had a guitar teacher so I was never told to alternate pick ‘properly’ - I think this was helpful lol
It’s going to feel … wrong, uncontrolled, inaccurate - when you start making the right simply movements, because you are used to doing that little move to avoid hitting the next string.
I would start by simply playing open strings with downstrokes. connect each downstroke with the next string down (physically) using the string as a ‘pick stop’ and going slightly ‘into’ the guitar until you play the top string and let the hand go into your lap.
Use the arm weight to play rakes towards the floor and separate articulated downward rest strokes when coming physically upwards towards the ceiling.
Don’t even worry about upstrokes for now. Just get that movement without any temptation to avoid the next string.
Do it very slow and deliberately until the movement feels natural. Make take a while
EVERYONE forgets to do the rest stroke when they are not concentrating
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Here’s a video on it I did ages ago
this is a gypsy picking tutorial. Thing is though it doesn’t matter how you hold the pick or even if you have a pick at all. Also you can make the picking motion differently from the way I describe. The important thing is the quality of the rest stroke picking movement, which is that it is a simple
movement.Last edited by Christian Miller; 05-06-2023 at 01:11 PM.
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Yeah, I think it was not entirely truthful of Grady to make a video claiming that string-hopping could be 'solved' simply by going fast. The main reason being that, if you're anything like me, inefficient (string-hopping) motion and the efficient fast motion will coexist quite happily. I mean, I was testing myself about an hour ago and I can manage semiquavers at 180 BPM (with a mixture of wrist and forearm rotation, if people are interested) not that many, but I can, and I would say my picking technique has come on quite a lot over the past five months of returning to jazz guitar (with a pick). However, old habits die hard and that tendency to string-hop while improvising is still there, and yes I think Christian's analysis of not wanting to hit the adjacent string is on point; and I think the really laborious part of actually 'solving' string-hopping from an improviser's point of view is to assemble a vocabulary of musical ideas that adhere to your picking motion and be able to vary them, still within that particular picking motion.
A true double-escape motion wouldn't require this though, but the fact that one can't rely on a rest-stroke for that technique and its closeness to string-hopping (which is also a double-escape motion) makes it a hard technique to arrive at, I think.
Anyway, I must still be on the Troy Grady mailing list because yesterday I was sent an email saying there has been lots of new stuff added to the Picking Primer. Might have to take a look...
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If you already have a good upward escape picking motion going then I would suggest playing some Cecil alexander, Benson transcriptions or lines/licks where the language is arranged with economy ascending and cheeky hammers pulls to line up the picking in the fast double time stuff. Eventually this way of playing will incorporate into your improv. If you're trying to do it on the fly there's probably too many things to worry about... note choice, time, touch etc and your natural tendencies will take over. I think there's a really good one on Soundslice already transcribed
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http://https://www.soundslice.com/slices/cjZDc/
The picking is all there.
Cool afro blue quote maybe... some of the slower bits are alternate picked (8th trip) and others are economy DDU. All the 16th notes are with the super efficient one way escape.
BTW neat insight from Christian that the rest stroke technique is easily teachable. In music school I picked a lot of people's brains about picking and most rarely thought about it except for in the obvious musical articulation uses, sound like a horn, feel, swing.
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Not to be overlooked is the ability to pick and fret quickly on a single string. I spent some time with a book called Speed Mechanics For Lead Guitar by Troy Stetina, and he emphasised nailing this before beginning to worry about string crossing. (This predated Troy Grady's analysis.)
For example, I was never really able to move beyond the 16th notes at 125bpm shown here. (In fact, I suspect I'd have to do some practicing before I could achieve that speed now.)
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I think there’s something to be said for not thinking about it. Hearing the phrase and knowing you want it to sound can be a tremendously powerful thing in itself. That’s how Jimmy Raney did it iirc. Originally Posted by bediles
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So instantly looking at this I think - How fast can you tremolo pick? Originally Posted by CliffR
So very even fast tremelo picking is hard, actually. I think part of the secret lies in that the body doesn’t actaully like alternating very much. Muscles don’t like to go back and forth really fast.
What often happens is after a certain speed is that the arm goes into spasm. Fnar fnar etc
One way the GJ approach to picking overcomes this is by engaging different muscle groups for the downstroke and upstroke. In the former case the arm translates downwards, in the second case the arm rotates. This is great for ascending arpeggios and fast ascending scales across the neck, and some combinations of descending lines (2nps) but doesn’t help with single string tremolo.
So that’s a seperate mechanic in GJ and uses wrist rotation. I learned it on chords first actually and then used on single notes. I think it’s similar to the Van Halen tremolo method in that the wrist is bent; helps a lot with rotation.
I don’t think that’s the only way to do it, but it works. Tremolo chords are a traditional part of jazz vocab btw.
After that things becomes about synchronisation.
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I agree, you can miss the forest from the trees with too analytical of an approch.. arn't we playing music here?. But if you feel like you can't hang or want to play something outside your ability level and keep struggling, it's great to have these resources that I feel didn't really exist 10 years ago. Back then it was secret/covert picking classes with big promises that missed the true crux of the situation.
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Oh, I can definitely tremolo pick considerably faster than this (Stetina has an earlier 'gating' exercise of tremolo picking at 160bpm+). So I do think in this case it's a synchronisation issue for me, particularly since I can manage faster small bursts. But what the hell do I know!? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Last edited by CliffR; 05-06-2023 at 01:48 PM.
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Well I know the more I think about playing fast the less I am able to do it. The more I hear the phrase, the more my body supports me in doing what it needs to. Originally Posted by bediles
Somtimes I wonder if concerns about speed is a psychological trap - which is one reason to not do the speeding up the metronome thing. I did that once and never again and I can play pretty fast. You can’t put technique on a linear scale - instead either you’ll have a sudden break through by doing something new, or more likely you’ll hit an insurmountable wall by doing things the same and expecting different results. So I’ve never been a fan of that type of practice. Playing with a metronome, sure, but inching forward 5bpm at a time? No.
What we are looking for is freedom, relaxation, naturalness, repeatability, evenness and a high degree of ‘bombproofing’ in our technique. Jazz lines aren’t that fast on the Paul Gilbert scale, but the level of technique required to play consistent bebop 8th notes even and in the pocket at 240+ is actually quite alien to a lot of first gen rock shredders (less so to the new guys who all seem to come from a more linear or fusioney approach probably influenced by Guthrie.)
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have you tried practicing the exercise to a metronome without picking? Mute the strings with your right hand and just fret the notes. Don’t hammer hard and don’t pull off - it’s not legato - but if you are fretting accurately you should hear the notes faintly. I would start slow and relaxed on this… Originally Posted by CliffR
Your left hand needs to be as rhythmic as your right hand.
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