3 note picking pattern

Toneranger

Hi All,

Exercise 8.2 in the Horowitz book leaves me perplexed.

It's basically 3 consecutive descending notes on high e (could be any pattern) followed by same thing on b string. The right hand picking pattern is D U D and D U D.

My question is: I have no trouble completing the first 3 notes. But then once that last downstroke is completed, from there to the first downstroke on the b string seems like such an unnatural leap/jump. It's sort of the opposite of the standard reststroke, in that once it's completed, the pick is not resting anywhere.

And I had though the arpeggios were the main difficulty... shoo wee!

Any thoughts on how to practice this?

Thanks
TR

kevingcox

Slowly and with a mind to staying relaxed. All unfamiliar things seem hard until they become familiar.

anthon_74

What helps me with the whole 'starting every new string with a down stroke' thing is imagining my pick "bouncing" up and off of the string when doing a down stroke before switching strings to another down stroke.

Anthony

Toneranger

Thanks Anthon, that helps.

I'm thinking maybe not following through all the way when I do the downstroke on the last note on the high e string helps before I do the first downstroke on the b string. But I don't know if the picking/tone police would be happy with that.

Bones

I think that there was a thread sometime ago where they were saying that Stochelo does not follow all the way thru on downstrokes when he is doing repeated downstrokes going back up the strings. I think that he calls them 'normal' strokes rather than 'rest' strokes or something like that.

Toneranger

Bones, that's very helpful! Thanks for pointing that out. If that's the case, then I can see now how it wouldn't feel impossible, I'm seeing improvement from doing that already. It makes a lot of sense not to follow through all the way with the downstroke when one is going from high to lower strings. Otherwise, it just feels inefficient.