Well thank you, and I'm glad its of use to someone. When the mechanics don't come natural to you, and you decide to stick with the instrument anyway, you eventually learn a lot of ways to get around your problems. I almost feel like I could write a book filled with them. The unfortunate thing, as you can see from what I wrote already, is all the time you can waste being convinced to follow the straight and narrow rules. The rules usually are good starting points but when they don't work, they don't work... and then its time to either think outside the box, or spend all your days in never ending frustration.

One of my more interesting discoveries has to do with customizing the shape of your picks, and then experimenting with the picking angle. When you get the ideal combination for YOU, the pick naturally bounces upward slightly as you cross over strings, thus finally breaking through the maddening problem of string crossings with alt-picking. OK... only a relentless nerdy engineer type like me could delve into figuring this out, but the fact is that those whose hands do this naturally with an off the shelf pick shape never really understood WHY it works for them. Of course they don't need to. But if you're trying to learn from someone like that, they can never really understand why its a problem for you and can't offer any real solution beyond "practice more". It can be maddening! And really, anyone can begin to discover these kinds of things over time, once they decide to take chances and color outside the lines. Sure, there will be some ugly sounding failures along the way. But its better then staying stuck forever in "right ways" to do everything that don't work, right?