guitars

Alternating Picking. Specifically string skipping stuff. Personally never had too much trouble on a single string, and naturally don't mind going down a string, so long as the last pick was downward. But I'm trying to get a more universal and smooth technique.

At the moment I'm practicing a typical pentatonic box (2 notes per string) and trying to get it smooth and clean. I think I'm at the point where I know what movements will work for my hand, going both up and down the strings, but I've realised that there's a lack of proper coordination between my hand and my arm for moving between strings while my hand maintains a consistent picking action. So I'm just practicing doing that at a slow speed, making sure my arm moves to the next string and my hand maintains a clean picking action. The hard part is focusing on making sure both are done well enough at the slow speeds that I kinda get some muscle memory for the technique ... because at these slow speeds I've just got habits I don't even thing about.

Generally it's been a rewarding process because I don't think I've focused on how my hand actually feels while doing something. Previously I've thought about that kind of movement works well or what I struggle with ... but for this I've had to kinda concentrate on the precise feeling a particular movement has and which precise muscles/tendons are involved. I've generally been pretty bad at doing the whole slow down thing, so it just be me finally taking that seriously.

The other hard part is that I've got a line6 helix and it's always so tempting to just muck about with making a new preset ("what would two stereo memory mans sound like?").