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Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
There are three things I want to look at in pick playing. They are tone, technique, and effort. You want to decide how to hold the pick to give you the tone and attack you want from the strings. First, decide what you want your typical sound to be and find a way to make it consistently without sacrificing your body. This will be the baseline from which you create what other tone qualities you want, whether a sweeter or more metallic sound at times.
The more perpendicular to the strings the pick is, the quicker and cleaner it clears the string. Also, you have to decide how thick or rigid a pick you want to use and how much of the pick should extend beyond the grip of the thumb and first finger, to give you the sound you want and the quickest response from the strings.
How much effort are you using to hold the pick? This is crucial, because if you are squeezing the pick to keep from losing it, you will create compression in all of the joints of your hand, wrist, elbow, and probably your shoulder. Simply, if you use too much muscle in your technique, you will cause problems throughout your body.
I want you to play something and place all of your awareness on how much effort you’re making to hold the pick. Really experience what your hand feels like, your wrist feels like, and your shoulder feels like. Now, I want you to imagine the pick is super-glued to your thumb and finger, that you couldn’t drop it even if you wanted to. You don’t need to squeeze the pick, since it is “super-glued” to you. Play. What did you notice? I’m betting for the first time you felt what it was like to make no effort to hold onto the pick.
It probably felt like the pick was holding you, and you didn’t have to use any of your fingers, hand, or forearm muscles to hold the pick. This is very important to the speed of how fast you move the pick. (I’ll explain in a moment.) The first place I used this idea of super-gluing was with a violinist. I had her play as if her bow was super-glued to her right thumb and fingers. After she played, she said it felt amazing, as if she was doing nothing to hold the bow.
Make this way of experiencing the pick, glued to your thumb and fingers, as part of your technique. A very Alexandrian way to do this to play for a week with all of your attention on experiencing the pick glued to your thumb and finger, until the pick becomes an effortless extension of your hand and arm. Again, in Alexander Technique terms this is staying with the means over the ends, until the new means is a natural part of how you play.
There are two ways to move the pick across the string. You can move the hand side-to- side, or you can rotate the forearm. I’d like to look at both. I’d also like to look at the arm moving the hand and pick across more than one string. My sense is that each mandolin player chooses one or the other as his or her usual way of playing – rotation or side to side (laterally).
