When it comes to holding a guitar pick, the method you choose depends to some extent on the type of picking technique you’re using, and the overall form that technique requires.

As with everything in picking technique, this multiplicity of correctness is actually the greatest challenge. With so many combinations of contact points and orientations that actually work, it can be hard to know which one to choose.

In this section, we’ll give you a quick overview of three of the most common grips in popular use, as well as a few pointers about less common grips used by famous players. Which one you use may change as you experiment with different techniques, but understanding how these common grips work is a great starting point.

Martin Miller’s spectacular alternate picking technique is one of the most-discussed playing techniques we’ve filmed. And it was initially also one of the stealthiest.

Before we interviewed Martin the first time, we had seen a few clips of him playing impossible things, like Steve Morse’s famous “Tumeni Notes” arpeggios. But it was anyone’s guess what was happening under the hood to make it possible. That all changed when we met up. Within minutes of walking through the door of his Leipzig apartment, the unique motion of his index and thumb was suddenly strikingly obvious in a way it had not been on video. Now we had a different problem: how do you learn it?

In this hands-on, workshop-style conversation conducted two years after our original meeting, we take a close-up look at Martin’s super-powered alternate picking motion with the goal of figuring out how it works. If you’ve seen our first two interviews with Martin, or spent any time trying to develop the motion he uses, then this conversation is a perfect complement to those efforts.

And as always when we sit down with Martin, his thoughts are wide-ranging, wise beyond the topic at hand, and a privilege to listen to.

Wrist motion is typically thought of as operating in two axes. Motion in a semicircle from the thumb to the pinky is called wrist deviation:

The names for the two directions of the deviation movement are derived from the bones in the forearm, the radius and the ulna. Movement toward the radius is radial deviation, and movement toward the ulna is ulnar deviation. For this reason, wrist deviation is sometimes referred to as radial-ulnar deviation, or simply RUD.

Perpendicular to the deviation axis is the flexion-extension axis:

Movement in the direction of the palm is wrist flexion, and movement in the direction of the knuckles is wrist extension. Together, this axis of movement is referred to as wrist flexion-extension, or abbreviated as FE.

By combining these two planes of motion, the wrist can move parallel to the strings, perpendicular to the strings, or anywhere in between. In actual practice, because of the tilted forearm position required to switch strings efficiently, the most common wrist motions used in picking technique are in fact the “in-between” ones that require some amount of each motion working together.

The amazing Teemu Mäntysaari stopped by the Cracking The Code Studio after the final show of Wintersun’s North American tour to share his trademark tastefully blazing playing and thoughtful insights on everything from gear to teaching.

In fact, because Teemu maintains an active teaching schedule even when the band is on the road, a slate of lucky students got to visit him backstage at New York’s storied Irving Plaza on the day of the show for a guitar lesson. How cool is that?

Teemu was also game to try out a motion capture sensor which had fortuitously arrived the same day Teemu did. We managed to get it up and running for a very cool demonstration his famously fluid forearm-driven lead and rhythm techniques, visualized in 3D on our iPad.