How I Increased My Picado Speed or 3-finger Versus 2-finger Picado Story

This subject line sounds a bit like "How I lost 100 pounds in 2 months," doesn't it?

:-) I even have before and after pictures, so keep reading…

In my previous blogpost I told you about how I started to practise flamenco (The Panaderos Story). Here is what happened after that.

So, the next step for me was to play machine gun picado. All I needed was practice right? I had this picado exercise that I made up in 1990, which then was only an apoyando scale drill for classical guitar. Anyhow, I got back to it. Also, to put things in perspective, I only had about an hour to practise per day. I was doing an MFA in film production and teaching at the university. So, guitar was pretty much a hobby.

Just to focus on speed, I used my hourly practice time solely for this picado exercise. I kept practising. Usually I would start at 100 BPM and raise the tempo slowly. The end result was a failure. My technique got better but speed eluded me. I  reached a plateau at around 132 BPM. Some days I'd go a bit faster than that but that's about it.

So, here is the BEFORE picture for you. I posted this video 3 years ago. Skip to the very end to see my fastest performance at the time.

Picado Agility Exercise - 1 

What did I do wrong? My practice was very focused. I raised the tempo incrementally.
Played without mistakes with a very good tone, etc.  Proper picado seemed out of reach.

Therefore, one of my core beliefs was finally confirmed: you don't acquire picado speed, you need to have been born with it. In other words, you can either play fast or not and no amount of practice will change that. I guess Paco simply had fast fingers.

That's when I started looking into the 3-finger picado venue.

In the following video you can see how this technique works.

3-finger Picado Exercise

It basically uses the natural speed burst of a m i fingers doing tremolo action. So, you play 3 notes per string using a m i and when you need to play 2 notes on one string you use m i.

Victor Monge (Serranito) uses this technique quite successfully. He is able to play super fast scales with his three fingers. And I love Serranito's music.

I started getting results with the 3-finger picado technique. I was able to play some of the fast scales from Paco de Lucia's falsetas.

Check this out:

3-Finger Picado - from Solea by Paco de Lucia

Achieving some success, I delved deeper into the technique and published a series of exercises (playlist):

3-finger Picado Exercises

However, I was not happy. Because:

1. To use 3-finger picado, you need to pre-design the scale you wish to play. Meaning, you cannot really improvise with it. For the 3-finger picado to function properly, you need to know exactly what finger goes where otherwise your fingers will simply do an  ami triplet a for each string ending up with an ugly mess
2. It is really hard to achieve the punchy flamenco tone with 3-finger picado. Remember my picado speed video. You press your fingers toward the soundboard to get the sound to project properly. But when you do a 3-finger picado run, your concern is to get the right sequence of fingers and you cannot push into the strings, especially with the ring finger.

So, back to the drawing board.

What was the secret?

I looked again at how Paco played picado and thought maybe it's the hand position and shape?

So, I tried that.

Here's me trying out the Paco right hand:

Picado Agility Exercises (Revisited - 160 bpm)

Didn't really work and it gave me a terrible ache in my right hand.

But I'm glad I tried this because it made me realize a few things:

1. The shape/position of your right hand has got nothing to do with picado tone or speed.
2. Paco de Lucia DOES NOT play picado only with the tips if his fingers. He plays from the knuckle like everyone else. The efficiency of his technique makes it look like he is only using his fingertips. Also the staccato technique keeps his fingertips always close to the string, and that's why they look motionless when he speeds up.
3. For picado speed you need to look at the way your fingers MOVE, not the way they look.
4. Fast picado is NOT the sped up version of slow picado. It is governed by a different set of rules.

This was a BREAKTHROUGH for me. I revised my practice routine. From that point on my process of learning picado was mainly a thought process rather than mindless practice (which I tried before).

I did come up with some principles which seem to work for me at least.

How to Develop Picado Speed

Here are the two picado agility exercises played at 170BPM with my newly acquired right hand technique (this would be the AFTER picture):

Picado Agility Exercises 1 & 2 (Revisited - 170bpm)

and that Paco de Lucia solea run played with 2 fingers:

Picado Exercise - Solea by Paco de Lucia

Once the technical aspects of picado speed were sorted out, I went on to create exercises specifically designed to improve picado tone and agility.

All of that is here:
http://atrafana.com/store.html#picadospeed