Moving your wrist or elbow?

murillo

I noticed that there seems to be two different ways of gypsy picking, one where you produce the sound from wrist movement (downstrokes) and one where the wrist don’t move. I watched Romano and he doesn’t seem to move his wrist at all I also watched Diknu Scheenberger he doesn’t either seem to move his wrist on downstrokes. Both of these guys are great players how I admire, but could anyone explain the difference between the two ways of playing or is it so that there is only one way and I haven´t correctly observed gypsy picking.

video of Diknu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw3cEmbtqQM

Best regards

kevingcox

Are you sure you posted the right video, because the guy on the left has a pretty supple wrist.

murillo

Yes it’s the correct video. If you look somewhere 1.36 and forward in to the video it looks like the sound is produced from his arm movement, his wrist is not moving so much. It is clearer when he´s playing triads about 1.55 in the video. As I said earlier, maybe I got this wrong but to me it looks like he is moving his elbow to produce the sound rather than his wrist.

Best regards

kevingcox

Hmm, I wonder how many frames-per-second that camera is catching when he plays so fast? At those speeds the movement is going to be very subtle indeed, since his wrist can't be flopping around like it is at say 1:32 for those beautiful chord shots and still make it back to the strings in time. I know sometimes watching Bireli It doesn't seem like his hand is moving AT ALL yet these beautiful sounds are coming from his guitar so he must be doing something

I will say that in some of the chordal sweeps he is doing it seems like his forearm is fairly locked, but I would guess that is probably so that he can get similar pick attack on each string.

There are far more knowledgeable people hanging around here than myself, though, so I will leave any further interpretation to them. Thanks for the great video!

-Kevin