I have been watching Pebber's videos for years and have purchased the 3 DVDs on picking. The thing with scalpel picking is that Pebber makes it look so easy. After about 6 months of working on this, I am starting to see the light. At some point, it has started to become easier for me to do this and I feel like the pick is gliding over the very top of the string with great ease and speed. This is not a plucking feeling but more like a feeling of gracefully causing the string to vibrate. It takes very little effort and as the speed increases, the motions become smaller and tend to morph into what I imagine is sarod picking. Does this sound familiar to you all? Also, the feeling of playing on the very top of the string makes topics pick-slanting, angling the pick, inside picking, outside picking, etc. seem unnecessary. I'd appreciate any thoughts.

Yes i find that with scalpel, pulling the thumb and finger in naturally turned the wrist, which becomes sarod picking.

My only problem has always been trailing finger hitting unwanted strings, i need to pull those fingers in tighter, or adjust the pick position.

Never thought about pick slanting until i watched troy grady on youtube, but found that i clearly have a tendency toward downward slanting, which makes upward picking difficult.

But at the end of the day you can pick anyway you want, if you put some serious hours into it you will get good. Some guitarist have horrible looking picking action (methany, moore,michael angelo batio) But they can shred with the best.

Wow Adam...

"Based on my personal progress, the best way to learn and/or refine your Scalpel Picking technique is to practice on any strings except the low or high "E" strings. This will force you to keep your movements tighter."

THIS is HUGE advice for me! Thanks!

The low E string seems especially wacky to me, now that I'm paying more attention to technical work. With quicker playing, I have to anticipate hitting that big ol' stubborn rubber band, or it's a trip-wire to my pick, and I lose the pentatonic "run" or whatnot.

I don't know if this will help you, but from what I know (and I might be wrong on this one), the D string is the one that have the most tension on the neck.

Because of that I tend to practice my picking exercises on it. Sometimes I even play closer to the bridge so I have to work a bit harder. Usually, this trick makes me improve a bit faster, but maybe this is just me.

I've never heard anyone trying this before. So, if you test this, please send a message so I can see how it goes. Here in Brazil we have some weird techniques that sometimes works like a charm. Just to point an example, in the 80's some guys used to play with elastic hair ties (I think this is what you guys call it?) on their left hand fingers to have some kind of resistance to work the muscles on the hand.

It worked greatly for them, I've never tried myself though. But the word of caution is: don't strain or put some "heavy" resistance or you will develop some kind of pain or tendonitis.

Maybe some other time I can show you guys this weird stuff. Don't know if in USA you guys have something similar.