Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
The amazing @BrandonEllisGtr stopped by on Friday with his beautiful bevy of sea foam guitars and battery of tasty phrases and techniques. It's always a thrill to sit down with players who are willing to share literally decades of learning with us, and it helps answer some important practical questions for the rest of us as we move down the same path. For example, Brandon is an expert wrist-forearm player, very similar to other amazing friends of Cracking the Code like uncle @BenEller and @teemu_mantysaari . What this means is that when playing a tremolo on a single string, this type of picking motion creates a diagonal where upstrokes go up in the air and "escape". When you have this type of wrist-forearm blend as your picking motion, one question you'll eventually have, is what's a good way to actually "do" the motion of economy picking? The way Brandon does this is super smooth and effective. The string changing motions are just the hand going sideways via wrist motion. But you can also see in the closeup shot that the middle note on each string still escapes via wrist-forearm motion even though it doesn't have to, i.e. it's not switching strings. This is the memorized primary motion doing what it has been trained to do. So Brandon's description of what he's doing is exactly correct. Not only that, but from filming sweep pioneer Frank Gambale, we've seen that his motions do the same thing — the middle of the three notes on each string still moves along a diagonal, even though it's "landlocked" in the middle of the string.
The amazing @BrandonEllisGtr stopped by on Friday with his beautiful bevy of sea foam guitars and battery of tasty phrases and techniques. It's always a thrill to sit down with players who are willing to share literally decades of learning with us, and it helps answer some important practical questions for the rest of us as we move down the same path. For example, Brandon is an expert wrist-forearm player, very similar to other amazing friends of Cracking the Code like uncle @BenEller and @teemu_mantysaari . What this means is that when playing a tremolo on a single string, this type of picking motion creates a diagonal where upstrokes go up in the air and "escape". When you have this type of wrist-forearm blend as your picking motion, one question you'll eventually have, is what's a good way to actually "do" the motion of economy picking? The way Brandon does this is super smooth and effective. The string changing motions are just the hand going sideways via wrist motion. But you can also see in the closeup shot that the middle note on each string still escapes via wrist-forearm motion even though it doesn't have to, i.e. it's not switching strings. This is the memorized primary motion doing what it has been trained to do. So Brandon's description of what he's doing is exactly correct. Not only that, but from filming sweep pioneer Frank Gambale, we've seen that his motions do the same thing — the middle of the three notes on each string still moves along a diagonal, even though it's "landlocked" in the middle of the string.
