The forearm is one of the big three joints used in picking technique next to elbow and wrist, but outside of Eddie Van Halen’s famous tremolo technique, it rarely acts alone. Most often, it’s used in combination with the wrist to create a variety of super common and super useful motions. In this broadcast, we’re going to look at the ways the wrist and forearm work together to make the kind of “fully escaped” pickstrokes used in crosspicking. Along the way, we’ll look at players who utilize motions like this, including Andy Wood, Ardeshir Farah, and Jimmy Herring.

More importantly, combinations of arm and wrist exist in many picking motions, including those used in pickslanting. So the concepts we’ll be discussing will make it easier for you to both recognize motions you may already be making, and to harness their power to play an even wider array of things.