Inside picking

[gnoll]

I'm curious how you guys feel about inside picking.

So something like:

-7---7---7-
---5---5----

and so on with d-u-d-u-d-......

I'm especially talking about consecutive notes like this but also things like:

-7-------7--------7----7-
----5-5----5-5-----5----

where the last 3 notes are inside picked (again strict alt picking d-u-).

I hope these janky tabs show up alright.

Anyway for me this feels like some of the most difficult picking when the speed picks up. What about you? Are you okay with it? Avoid it?

 

[MetalDestroyer]

This is all I do. I’m comfy at basically any speed but things get a little weird when you’re skipping 2+ strings

 

[gnoll]

This is all I do. I’m comfy at basically any speed but things get a little weird when you’re skipping 2+ strings

Really? You find it easier than outside picking?

Skipping strings I can't even imagine. Sounds impossible.

 

[MetalDestroyer]

Really? You find it easier than outside picking?

Skipping strings I can't even imagine. Sounds impossible.

It's how I learned to play this stuff when I was ~14 and I've solidified the habit for over 13 years. Practice anything for that long and you’ll get pretty good at it

 

[Mboogie7]

This is something I struggle with currently. I wrote a quick, quirky fun 4 count sweep for one of my songs and the final8 or so notes involve inside picking. I’ve maybe played it clean once. I’ve thought about using chicken picking for it but that’s foreign as hell for the passage I wrote.

 

[vark]

This video has some good exercises to address that motion, helped me

 

[SalsaWood]

Economy picking is typically the way to go in practice, but there's some preference to how you do it regarding up/down stroke inflections and what you might personally find easiest to play in regard to continuity. Inside picking while string skipping is pretty easy, or at least not much harder than regular. It feels kind of lazy once you get the hang of it tbh, but grants a lot more freedom to your playing style. You can still use chicken pickin any way you go about it really, and again once you get the hang of it, using it feels kind of lazy and you will want to explore stylistic changes to your picking patterns. You don't want to get stuck only economy/inside/chicken/down because those habits individually can be really hard to break.

 

[jaxadam]

You don't want to get stuck only economy/inside/chicken/down because those habits individually can be really hard to break.

Very true, economy has messed up my strict alt picking and I have to do very specific alt picking exercises. I’m pretty sure I could get away with economy picking for most of the stuff I do but there is an aggressive attack that alt picking has that can’t really be reproduced with economy.

 

[lost_horizon]

John Petrucci - Rock Discipline has some great exercises for this. Nice etude at the same time!!

 

[gnoll]

Cool to see this thread turn up again.

I don't really do economy picking, like, ever. Alt picking seems to work better for my way of playing, and I tend to modify lines so that I can alt pick them. I think it's because of having played so much riffy rhythm stuff. Economy picking feels like I lose a lot of control and ability to accent notes. But yeah, sometimes I run into some problems.

 

[RevDrucifer]

John Petrucci - Rock Discipline has some great exercises for this. Nice etude at the same time!!

When I was 15 and got this on VHS I jumped for joy during this section. For some reason, when I started playing I started picking everything with an upstroke. My uncle gave me shit or it and said it would hinder me in the future but I’ve only seen the opposite come to fruition.

Petrucci says something about “Some players don’t have a problem with this…….and we’ll just have to kill them” and that’s what made me jump for joy, couldn’t play a single fuckin’ thing on that VHS but I could play inside the strings!

Economy picking came “naturally” to me so that when I went to learn “economy picking” I thought it was a different technique I wasn’t already using and required a bunch of speed to pull off when it’s more about efficiency of motion.

This is why I love 3-note-per string stuff so much, I have no problem going from string to string because everything is U-D-U and leaves the pick ready to go in either direction.

 

[lost_horizon]

When I was 15 and got this on VHS I jumped for joy during this section. For some reason, when I started playing I started picking everything with an upstroke. My uncle gave me shit or it and said it would hinder me in the future but I’ve only seen the opposite come to fruition.

Petrucci says something about “Some players don’t have a problem with this…….and we’ll just have to kill them” and that’s what made me jump for joy, couldn’t play a single fuckin’ thing on that VHS but I could play inside the strings!

Economy picking came “naturally” to me so that when I went to learn “economy picking” I thought it was a different technique I wasn’t already using and required a bunch of speed to pull off when it’s more about efficiency of motion.

This is why I love 3-note-per string stuff so much, I have no problem going from string to string because everything is U-D-U and leaves the pick ready to go in either direction.

Besides being a big Petrucci fan I was a Steve Morse fan so i liked their different approaches, Steve just felt like he was picking everything whereas Petrucci felt like he constructed them in a way like you do gym exercises. Designed to break bad habits.