Any strong opinions about where to add the slur to make a phrase single-escape?

Playing Technique
#1

If you’re rejiggering a phrase to make it easier to play and you encounter an odd note (e.g. 3 or 5 nps) segment that you’re not going to refinger, do you have any strong opinions on which note to slur or not? Why?

I’ll start the discussion going:

  1. The last pick stroke has to match the desired escape motion. I could’ve left this one implied, but for the sake of completeness :slight_smile:
  2. If there’s a note in the group that lands on the beat I prefer picking that, because it helps me keep time better.
  3. I prefer use a downstroke for notes that land on the beat.
  4. I want to pick the first note in the group, to avoid hammer-ons from nowhere and keep the sound of the notes a bit more even.

What are your preferences? Are players like YJM consistent about how they do this?

#2

Yngwie almost always uses an upstroke-pulloff descending, and a downstroke sweep ascending to navigate string changes with odd-numbers patterns.

That’s not the only way to do things, but it seems to work very effectively if you have a primary DPS / USX orientation.

#3

I’d probably experiment with this and try adding the hammer ons and pull offs to different notes in a 3nps or 5nps etc pattern. I found by default, I’d almost always do the hammer on or pull off on the last note, but the phrase can sound different if you put it elsewhere.
Now at face melting shred speed I’m not sure it really matters where you put it :sweat_smile: but in medium to medium fast phrases I think it can make a difference.
Experiment and see! (Or hear, to be more accurate!)

#4

from a not-quite-rock-player: personally, 90% of the time if I’m playing something with a lot of notes, it’s jazz or jazz related, and I’m trying to mimic the flow of somebody like Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Lee Morgan, etc.

I did a LOT of re-arranging jazz vocabulary for single escape playing. I would generally try to have slurs be on downbeats so that the upbeats were accented.

it’s funny: for years I was doing all this single escape USX stuff and always doing downstroke on downbeats, but one thing I never liked about it is that the sound of hitting a new string was so often a downbeat and for a jazz feel it just always felt too straight, and at blazing tempos it’s hard to make up for it by accenting the upbeats/upstrokes - but there’s this really great player named Cecil Alexander, I mean he’s really got the uptempo/double time classic jazz vocabulary thing down on guitar, the feel is awesome, and he’s pretty much all USX for the fast stuff, and he told me does upstrokes on downbeats most of the time, and my head exploded. Because after trying it out just a little bit I realized it was so much easier to accent the upbeats, and also to have big interval leaps in the right places, rhythmically.

It’s not something I’ve worked on much since then because it’s not something I really want/need to develop a whole lot further, but it’s a little crazy how little re-orientations can make a huge musical difference.

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#5

I recently transcribed the “Island In The Sun” solo from Yngwie’s early career and it’s got a good few examples of other ways he gets around string changes:

I’d also use Joe Stump’s approach for something like ascending fours as it seems to make the most sense if you want to maintain an USX approach:

#6

Thanks @Jacklr. He seems to consistently do Down-Up-legato, in the transcription you did.

This bar is pretty revealing:

image

Here I might be tempted to arrange things so I get a pickstroke to start off the second group of sixes. Not only would that result in a genre-appropriate accent (unlike the off-beat accents mentioned earlier), but I also feel it would make it easier to keep good time.

I’ll take this as a strong argument in favor picking just one variant and using it consistently.

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