Some Basic Questions About The Picking Hand, Hand positions, moving the pick etc. |
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Some Basic Questions About The Picking Hand, Hand positions, moving the pick etc. |
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Nov 12 2012, 12:56 PM
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Thank you very much for your answers!
One thing that really baffles me is that everytime I look at videos of fast guitar players, it looks as if they only move the pick from side to side. But if you try to emulate this, you´ll end up hitting the next string on the unintended side all the times (let´s say you do an upstroke on the high e string. If you only do the sideways motion you´ll inevitabely hit the b string on the inside, right?) The solution to this problem actually is very simple in theory: The pick has to be moved not only to the side, but up (and then down again) as well, right? I first thought that you achieve this by lifting the ball of the hand up, as I already mentioned. This way the pick is actually angled not to the side but forward, so that it faces to the ground a little bit. One advantage of this move is that the angle is much better to do upstrokes because if you do an upstroke, the pick will move in an upward direction, away from the strings. But then I noticed the following: This advantage is nullified when you are doing downstrokes! If the root of the thumb is lifted and you try to do a downstroke without lifting the pick in any way, you´ll end up trapped on the inside of the next lower string! My conclusion is that this can´t be the right way to do it because you want to have a symmetric motion of the pick, so that the upstroke an the downstroke "feel" the same way and you are not wasting more movement on one of each type of strokes. I think I am quite close to the solution now: If I do any kind of stroke, I not only have to do the side to side movement (that would equate to doing sweep picking or economy picking), but I also have to mix in much more of the up and down movement (which does not come from the rotation of the wrist or the lifting of the root of my thumb, but from the up and down motion of the wrist, right?). So when I hit the string, I´ll try to move it up much more than I did before. This guy here has a nice video with a lot of close ups on his right hand, and I think you can actually see a lot of times how he slightly moves the fingers away from the string (lowering/ raising the wrist): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct3uOdBYN6E...feature=related Since this post got rather long (and probably a bit confusing) again I´ll try to put my questions in a more concise form: Why does it always look as if guitar shredders are only moving the pick from side to side, not also up and down? (Is it just because the up and down movement is so small?) To move pick up and down = not raise ball of hand to get pick in different angle, but raise and lower it with the up and down movement of the wrist? Thank you! This problem is combined with another one actually. About the thumb. Up until now I was keeping it flexed all the time. I never noticed this, but now I see almost all guitar players keep it straight. I think this is a big mistake I did all these years because if I keep it straight, the sound is much consistent, especially on licks. But it is not natural for me so far, I have to force it to be straight and this tenses my hand and I attack the strings too hard. If I relax my fingers (for a softer attack) either my thumb flexes and the sound is not that good anymore, either I drop the pick.. Take a look at this video, around 01:50mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpJNUGHxC3M Paul Gilbert actually flexes his thumb too! So I don´t think it´s that much of a problem. The only thing is that it changes the sound of the strokes to that "celloey" sound as he says, which you like or don´t. One thing that irritates me though is that he does it not only to get that certain sound but also that you need it in order to get over the strings quickly. I think you can also get over the strings quickly without flexing the thumb. John Petrucci is an example for this, I think. But then again, since my biggest problem is getting over string, who am I to complain! |
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Nov 12 2012, 01:44 PM |
Thanks a lot guys
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