Cracking The Code players, we’ve rolled out an awesome update to our picking motion tutorials! Wrist technique is maybe the single most common picking motion in use across all plectrum instruments. But it is also one of the most complicated and misunderstood.
When you survey large numbers of players, as we have in conducting Technique Critiques, you find generally two camps: those who can only do wrist motion, and can’t do other motions, with the exception of a little elbow. And those who can do other motions like forearm, but not wrist. Very often, this second group can’t figure out how the first group manages to move only their hands and seemingly nothing else.
Our latest update to The Pickslanting Primer, our flagship picking motion tutorial, aims to help both camps.
The Deviation Trap
One of the wrist’s greatest strengths is its ability to move with 360 degrees of freedom. This is an advantage for picking technique because it allows the wrist to perform all types of escape motion. However this also makes the wrist tricky because not all these degrees of freedom are created equal.
When used for guitar picking, the wrist appears to move side to side in a motion that we call “deviation”. To achieve this sideways motion, the muscles of the wrist combine forces antagonistically to shunt the hand roughly orthogonally to the direction the muscles themselves are actually pulling.
Wrist deviation is a little like a sailboat tacking against the wind: the fact that it works at all is really cool, but it’s way more work than just moving in a straight line. The result is that deviation players may tire sooner and reach only lower speeds than players using another direction of wrist motion that doesn’t require the antagonistic co-contraction.
Darting Ahead — In Reverse
Our latest Primer update offers a way around the deviation trap. In these lessons, we focus on the “Reverse Dart Thrower” motion, an especially efficient type of wrist motion that allows you to play with less fatigue, and to achieve the kind of very high speeds that we used to think required special genetics. This motion is generally an improvement over common “deviation” motions that many wrist players use, and its general comfort can help non-wrist players learn the technique in the first place.
When you move the wrist along the Reverse Dart Thrower axis, you gain greater efficiency by avoiding the internal competition required by deviation. But also, critically, all the motions that are adjacent to the RDT axis, on either side, become available for efficient motion, allow greater access to different directions of escape motion. This enables classically tricky, mixed escape phrases like the deceptively complicated three-note-per-string scale, and also one-note-per-string arpeggio picking at higher speeds:
Inside The Update
The tips in this update are a direct result of research on efficient wrist motion that we’ve conducted over the last 5+ years, including interviews with experts at the University of North Carolina and the Hospital for Special Surgery here in New York. They’re also an outgrowth of tools we’ve developed for our own testing and teaching, like our battery of table-tap joint motion tests, which are a core diagnostic we use for Technique Critiques.
Topics covered in this update:
- Why some wrist motions are more efficient than others
- Matching your pick grip to your motion
- Selecting a “least-effort” range of motion
- Unlocking 200bpm+ wrist speed
- Troubleshooting fatigue and tension
- Choosing a picking style
- Pickslanting versus mixed escape picking styles
As with all Primer updates, this one is FREE for Primer purchasers, even if you bought it years ago. The more we learn, the more you’ll learn. That’s our mission, and our thanks to all the Cracking the Code players who’ve supported us over the years.
New update to the Primer, relevant to the interests of all the wrist-experimenters on here. Of which I know there are a bunch! If you try any of this, and have feedback, we’d like to hear it. If you would like personalized feedback, feel free to make a Critique on the platform as well.
This series completely replaces the old one, so you will notice there is no mention of Molly Tuttle or dart-thrower motions of the non-reversed variety. We’ll be adding that back, not to worry.
I was (am still) pretty sick when I filmed this — nothing serious, just a head cold. I just barely made it while croaking out the last words of the last lesson. Hopefully it’s not too distracting. There are a few other odds and ends missing from this sequence, but I need to emerge from phlegm-land first.
Thanks so much for this @Troy! I appreciate all of the hard work that must have been put into this.
Apologies if I’m looking into things a little too much here, but I don’t really understand the section on mixed escape picking, and I wonder whether you could clarify. You mentioned that the form shown at that point specifically faces issues when it comes to downstrokes from an escaped position (which get “stuck”), but also pointed out that you can’t switch between the DSX/mixed version and the USX versions of this form in the middle of a phrase. If that’s the case, how do we think about the initial pickstroke in sections that start on downstrokes after an upstroke string change (excuse the word salad; I hope you get what I was going for)? I took a look through some of the Andy Wood clips to try and work out what was going on, and it looks like there’s a tiny bit of forearm rotation on such strokes in this 3NPS example: https://troygrady.com/interviews/andy-wood-workshop/electric-clips/scale-ascending/
Am I naive in assuming the above means there can therefore some small intra-phrase form change? Or is there something else going on there?
Thanks again, and I hope you feel better soon!
Great question.
I wouldn’t worry too much about these motions you’re noticing. This subject is very technical and there is a lot going on if you know what to look for. However the real question is not so much what is happening, it’s what do you do to learn it?
In this case, from a large amount of testing and performing Critiques, we think the best way to learn this stuff is to attain one centralized form and allow the hand to learn, via trial and error, across a large volume of musical material, to make whatever string changes are necessary. You will notice in the tutorial that the more “vertical” ergonomic mouse postures seem faster and easier, in theory because they align more with the ideal RDT axis. So some experimentation is a good idea to make sure you’re really making the best and most comfortable motion you can make.
As you do this, you may notice small or occasional motions of other joints, which is fine. But focusing on maintaining overall consistency of form, comfort of motion, range of motion, and so on, is what you should actually do to produce the best results.
If you want to read more about the bits and bytes level technical description of the motions you are noticing, we’ve got a nice article right here:
There may always be some amount of these “helper” motions at play, especially during larger inside picking gaps, especially when ascending. This is what the footage tells us. However, you shouldn’t try to force this not to happen. The closer to “ergonomic mouse” form you can get, the more freedom the wrist will have to make these different motions happen, and the less relevant these helper motions need to be in terms of your conscious focus.
I was thinking you sounded ill. Wishing you a quick recovery!
Thanks. 'Tis the season for winter illnesses. If you can call 50 degrees Fahrenheit “winter”. So much for four yearly seasons.