Guitar Picking

legato, alternate, & economy

Run, but you cannot hide: the dunning-kruger effect comes for everyone. Built on overestimations of one's own skills or competence, this pesky cognitive bias is comprised of several stages. First, the effected rides a wave of false confidence up to the summit of the aptly described "Mt. Stupid". At the peak, confronted (quite suddenly) with jarring scope of the unknown, they tumble into the "valley of despair". What follows - the upward "slope of enlightenment" and a rewarding "plateau of sustainability" - are great news, however, if we're being honest, they're just the logical progression of self-improvement. Teachers have misinformed generations of students with practice-makes-perfect pronouncements and self-sustaining study plans, referring, in fact, to these 3rd and 4th stages, in which a student finds themselves on course. Nobody talks about the harrowing journey to that track, which Dunning-Kruger intellectualizes away from the rather simple explanation: in order to level up in life, you have to get your ass handed to you. Handed to you by yourself.

Picking efficiency is boring. Picking efficiency is overlooked. Picking efficiency is all-but required to scale those icy slopes between intermediate and advanced. Until I invested time in the development of my right (picking) hand, I oscillated between doubting my ability to reach the ideas I heard, and imagining (hallucinating, if not for voice-memos) my incomplete technical skillset was actually getting me there.

To review (if not define, for the layman): Legato picking involves plucking a minimal amount of notes, usually one on a string where 3-4 notes are subsequently played. Alternate picking utilizes a perpetual wave of up and down strokes to pluck all fretted notes. Economy picking (the white whale of my demoralizing odyssey as a Dunning-Kruger effectee) also plucks everything, but actively monitors for opportunities to sweep between strings, reducing the physical work, minimizing pick travel distance, and eliminating taxing redirections between string plucks.

Seated, with the fretboard in view, play the above exercise without any rhythm/tempo (no backing track, no metronome, don’t even tap your foot) with the goal of coherence: generate all the pitches, and ensure they do not overlap. Patrol your lead playing for unwanted polyphony - holding one note into another should always be intentional. The riffs enabled by techniques like economy picking include 4ths and other intervals, physically parallel to each other on adjacent strings, easy to overlap by accident, especially when prioritizing speed over clarity.

Let the picking hand proceed unforced, doing what it wants to. The goal is to probe the territory you plan to eventually cover with detail – explore the undeveloped land of the exercise. Listen to the wrist, the forearm, of the pick. Listen to the fingers of the fretting hand, and perhaps more importantly, the use of the entire finger (even the palm) to bar or mute portions of the riff. Attempt the note sequence with pure alternate picking, and then pure legato. Advanced legato is a another challenge, but one can develop legato vocabulary alongside economy and alternate picking via proper attention to the duties of the fretting hand. For example, try to accent different selections of notes using only pressure differences in the hammering-on and pulling-off of the fretting hand – if the riff calls for 2 or 3 notes on the same string, use the fretting hand to accent alternating notes.

Flip the economy switch on for the picking hand. Proceed slowly. Ask why upstrokes and downstrokes are assigned to their given notes. Sweep - notice the weight of the picking hand, try to use it to "fall" into the correct notes. Tripping is to be expected. Embrace the slop. Embrace the dead notes. Without concern for tempo or dynamics, the focus is economy picking the riff in front of you.

Worth noting that the focus is not development of a specific historical guitar technique - or imitating a known player - so much as conditioning an awareness of any/all elements that can affect the dynamics of playing. My studies with stringed instruments no doubt took inspiration from my exploration of synthesizers, which permit dynamics control generously (if not confusingly, at first) through a variety of knobs protruding from their surfaces. To be able to significantly alter the dynamics of/between guitar notes using just the fretting, or picking, hand is a huge part of controlling tone enough to sustain a tonal character over a portion of one’s playing, retire it momentarily, and reintroduce it at will.

The metronome is never wrong. It is a merciless drill sergeant. It will break you down to such levels of frustration and self-loathing you may hurl your guitar across the room (hopefully, toward/onto a cushioned surface...). There are certainly players who do not need a click, nor a backing track, probably because they sit happily on the porches of their lives in blissful musical solitude, plucking away completely off grid, not a care in the world. The truth: practicing an instrument is different from preparing for collaboration - or recording - as a player of that instrument. In order to graft one's ideas over an independently generated rhythm - one needs to train oneself to think inside, or rather on top of, the rhythmic monorail you find yourself on as a player. On a bad day, when you turn to your instrument for comfort and reassurance, the metronome doesn't care. One way to accept its cruelty: it has big plans for you, if you play by its rules.

Switching to an upstroke at the high octave can slingshot playing back down...

or back up...

...creating a loop to be ironed out over a click. Ironing out += actively listening. If you ignore slop, you won't purge it, you'll become proficient at it.

All of the micromovements of both hands, the synchronicity between them separated by the gazillions of neurons extending out from the brain - you must learn to conform to a beat. I urge you NOT to incorporate the click until you feel comfortable with the step one approach to any given riff. Once your ego delights in the false fluency of playing sans-tempo, fantasizing a click-based practice routine as unecessary, that is the best time to switch on the click. Sometimes your ego might be right - grafting your phrase onto a beat may be easy. Frequently, the click will expose an embarrasing discrepency between the left and right hands. You may feel like the space between some notes is traversed too quickly, while others require sprinting between them to stay on beat. That is normal. Start slow, and increase in increments of +10bpm, until you collapse into slop, and be honest: slop happens at a slower tempo than you think. Recording yourself is not recommended until later on, but to encourage honesty, take a voice memo from time to time, and ensure each and every note is ringing true.

You will lose sleep over all of this. It will eat away at you. You will walk by an idle guitar in your living space during this period of self-doubt and hear yourself ask - do I even know how to use this thing? You might not. But you will: Power through.