Hi Geoff! Good clips, and nice playing.
I use the term “motion mechanic” to mean the source of the picking movement itself. It’s important that everyone be able to determine what this. In your case, you probably already know that there is wrist movement happening. If you roll up your sleeve, you’ll see whether or not there is also a forearm component to what you’re doing. There is not likely an elbow component, from what I can tell.
Re: crosspicking, “neutral” has nothing to do with it, but the path of the picking motion has everything to do with it. In pickslanting, the pick buries itself in the strings on one pickstroke, and escapes the strings on the opposite pickstroke. When you use dwps, the downstrokes get stuck between the strings and the upstrokes escape.
In crosspicking, the pick starts and ends above the strings on every pickstroke. In other words, it is always escaped, except at the moment of pick/string contact, at the midpoint (approximately) of the pickstroke. When done correctly, there is not necessarily anything wrong with this - it simply enables flexibility in string changes.
In your case, there is a tendency toward both types of string changes in your playing. If you film yourself from a slightly more Code-friendly “down the strings” angle, you’ll be able to see these two motion paths happening in your playing. You can do this with a tripod, just point the headstock a little more toward the camera when you play. If you have a slow motion mode on the phone, use it. It will produce more detail in the video, even when played at normal speed.
If you do this, what I think you will notice is that the moments in these licks which feel faster / smoother to you follow a pickslanted path, where the downstroke buries itself in the strings. This happens as you’ve pointed out more frequently on the ascending side of these licks, and especially on the higher strings.
By contrast when you are playing more slowly, you may notice the pick attempts to lift away from the strings at both the beginning and end of the pickstroke. Again, this isn’t a bad thing when done correctly. However it’s a bad thing if you don’t know you’re doing it, can’t control it, and can’t stop from flip-flopping between the two approaches in the middle of a phrase. Having both approaches at your disposal is great, but it may take some time to parse out which is which.
In the mean time, if you want to encourage the pickslanted approach, so you can identify what it feels like, there is a simply way to do this, especially for downward pickslanting: the rest stroke. I won’t recap that here, but please check out other threads in this section of the forum, like those from @aliendough and @Hanky_Pooh to see some of those discussions.
If you do film a slightly more “down the strings” attempt, we’d love to see it.
So, rest stroke: that’s your mission should you choose to accept it!