A forum question lead to an Instagram post, which lead to a more detailed blog post. Short story, I love this interview for many reasons and I’m grateful we got a chance to film one of the stone-cold classic techniques in picking. It’s also a great example of how you can look directly at something and have no idea what you’re seeing, hand-waving away obvious things out of ignorance because they don’t fit your knowledge or worldview.
Specifically, when we filmed this, I just said, oh yeah, “downward pickslanting”, because some of his phrases looked that way, even though others very much did not. The ones that didn’t look that way may as well have been invisible to me. For example, improvisations like the amazing “Country Boy Bridge Improv Tk1” are almost entirely double escape:
By contrast Albert’s does indeed have an upstroke escape mode with a more vertical, appoximately 30-degree escape trajectory, and a downward pickslant. You can see that very clearly in the first couple bars of the “Country Boy Finale Tk1” clip:
This is really interesting because the single-escape “dwps” type players tend to stick to that, especially when playing at anything beyond medium speeds. They may incoporate bits of double escape here and there, but they don’t seem to have an entire double-escape technique which they can click into and play whole phrases that way. Albert really can cruise along with either motion, at pretty fast speeds, depending on the phrase he’s playing. And he can mix and match them inside of phrases, as he does in the Finale clip. Amazing stuff.
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