Andy’s amazing right hand movements across electric guitar, acoustic guitar and mandolin share a family resemblance in their super fluid use of wrist motion mechanics. These movements adapt in subtle yet important ways to the task at hand, from the big box of the Martin D28 Dreadnought to the tiny violin-sized mandolin — among both the largest and smallest picked instruments most of us are likely to encounter.
While it’s awesome to know that the same basic ingredients can work on such disparate mechanical problems, it’s another to actually make that happen. In this live broadcast we look at the exact arm and hand setups, anchor points, and picking motions Andy uses to generate his famously fluid and accurate sound on both of these important instruments.
Even if you’re not an acoustic or mandolin player, the experience of making your technique work in the smaller format can be an invaluable type of cross-training for learning complicated hand movements on your usual axe.
Come and sit down with the amazing Andy Wood in the Cracking the Code studio as we take an up-close look at his impossibly great electric guitar picking technique.
Andy is a total textbook for wrist “deviation” playing, especially when it comes to upward pickslanting, and what we in Cracking the Code call “primary up” two-way pickslanting. Andy is aware of these movements as a difference in feel that he engages as the phrase requires.
In this broadcast, we try and get to the bottom of these feels in mechanical terms, and understand the arm position and anchoring setup, muting contact points, and choice of string tracking movements Andy uses to make it all work.
