Spaced Out Ace
SS.org Regular
It's probably a terrible habit, but I prefer to reverse alt pick things, because it feels more natural for me. Where as most people go down up down up, I go up down up down.
Trying to perfect my picking. Advice wanted
- Thread starter Furyof
- Start date
I honestly think your right. I never took mind to this, but I wanted a smaller pick now. You have any recommendation? I'm a metal musician if that helps. Going to order some or see if my local music show has any.
Funny you say that. I noticed I did this for alternate picking that skipped strings. Though I'm going to try to break this habit now that I'm retraining myself. In my mind it felt smoother and made sense, but it makes things more confusing for me also.
It depends of your hands a little bit. I started with regular jazz III, found them too small, changed to jazz III xl, a lot better for my huge hands, but maybe too much, so I tried the petrucci jazz III, that meant I finally found my pickups, perfect balance of everything, only flaw they don't last too much, but I bought a couple of 24 units pack I think, and that'll last forever. Between you and me, I almost use it each for half a year, so, it's the only part of guitar playing I don't care anymore. And believe me, even that small part change of your guitar playing approach will change a lot your experience for the better.
Spaced Out Ace
SS.org Regular
I probably won't change it up anytime soon. I apparently whisk the wrong way as well, as everyone I know who's seen me mix something has said I do it "backwards."
If you have an iPhone I highly recommend downloading GarageBand and using it to record yourself while practicing. Just set a loop for a desired number of bars, adjust the metronome and hit record. Doing that revealed things in my playing that I never paid any attention to like cutting notes off early, not emphasising the beat, being too tolerant of little mistakes, letting strings ring and so forth. It can be quite depressing at first when you notice that you can't even play the intro to Simple Man without it sounding like dog poop but practice makes progress!
I'm used to recording, I've made a lot of music. It's just I never sat down and gave it a ridiculous process of practicing. Like I've just been practicing picking perfectly at a 120 BPM, slowly rising it. Though I would let my playing be somewhat off, I'd usually blame that on latency. I'm trying to get away from that though, and blame myself instead. I also don't like to record where you can cut off notes too early. Even if you play ridiculously perfect, You'd end up cutting off pick attack that you might want later. So I usually don't record in the traditional sense of 2 bars of metronome until it starts. I just hit record as the track is playing. It's just how I feel to do things. But I see what you are saying. I use Reaper. I'm a perfectionist tbh, which is why I'm trying to go back into the little indepth things of picking and pick type.
I'm basically relearning guitar atm lol.
Can I say that I believe these two points are debatable? Both of these are things I did for YEARS but until I started doing the reverse I had hit a massive wall in my playing. My take on picking is always utilizing the path of least resistance which means if I need to hit the next string up or down and my pick is already going that way then I'm just going to let it happen without changing direction. Basically the definition of economy picking. Obviously licks and runs don't always follow a pattern that allows this but utilizing it when possible has noticeably sped up my playing. I also think anchoring is another personal preference thing, for me it works and after playing for years using the 'floating' method I prefer using finger anchoring as a point of reference for my picking hand.
ScatteredDimension
Sixstring Regular
Partly, because of this thread I stopped anchoring my pinky and I already feel that it limited my picking massively. I didn't use to anchor the pinky in the traditional way, instead I kept and still keep my fingers in fist, but I just don't keep the "knuckle" of the pinky resting in the bridge/ body anymore and only the palm rests on the bridge. So I guess it's the same style that Mr. Big Noodles mentioned earlier. Only problem seems to be that the lower string strumming/ muting needs the most attention and have to sort of learn that again. Just need to learn to keep the picking motion minimal and I believe that I have finally after 10 years, found the style that fits me perfectly!
