Not so far as I can see. Again, I didn’t watch every second of every video in slow motion. But for example in this clip right here, you are doing what I said you are doing, which is not picking the last note on the upper string. This makes both strings downstroke escape.
I see that you are sometimes making grip adjustments while you do this, even though it isn’t affecting your motion. i.e. In those instances, you are still downstroke escaping even though your pick appears to no longer have its upward pickslant.
So, in other words…
…there you have it. The pickslant and the picking motion are two different things. Where a lot of people get confused is that pickslant and picking motion are both affected by arm position. So it can sometimes appear that doing the one is exactly equivalent to doing the other. However pickslant is also affected by grip, whereas the path of your picking motion isn’t really affected by grip. So it is indeed possible, within limits that grip can control, to have an escape trajectory with a pickslant that you wouldn’t expect. We see this occasionally in Andy Wood and Molly Tuttle’s playing, who can both do downstroke escape lines with what appears to be a downward pickslant. It can also explain why sometimes players complain that the pick feels like it catches on certain pickstrokes and not others: the pickslant (and other grip attributes) need to be aligned with the picking motion for optimal smoothness of attack.
Re: calling you a “downstroke escape” player, it’s a bit of a shorthand. There may very well be moments in your playing where you achieve upstroke escape. Again, I haven’t watched every frame of every one of these videos. But in what I’ve watched, when you click into your “go fast” mode of continuous alternate picking, it’s downstroke escape. This appears to be the motion you know how to make best, and you’re choosing it, at some level, over others.
This is common. Andy Wood for example, does not actually appear to have a continuous upstroke escape picking motion. Or if he does, he doesn’t use it very often. He has downstroke escape, and he has a couple varieties of double escape, which he uses for upstroke string changes. But if you just ask him to play something simple and fast on a single string, which I did in our various interviews as a test, what he does is downstroke escape. And when you ask him to play lines that require continuous upstroke escape, like pentatonics, he reverses the picking to make them downstroke escape lines without realizing he’s doing it. Downstroke escape is his default picking motion.
Ergo, since you’re starting to get the downstroke escape motion down, and you’ve adjusted your grip so that it sounds good and smooth, why not fly with that? I would not bother with the “two way pickslant” stuff right now. Instead, if it were me, I’d try some of the all-downstroke-escape phrases I linked to, and see if you can get them nice and smooth across all six strings with no unintentional legato or momentary spaz-outs. Learning to do any of these motions with smoothness and consistency for longer periods is the next step after just learning to do the motion itself.
In other words, the difference between the beginner and the expert isn’t so much speed as it is smoothness and endurance. A beginner can do a hyperpicking motion on day one by dumb luck, and lose it a second or two later and stop. I’ve seen it and filmed it. But it’s going to take time to get to John Taylor levels of doing it immediatley, on command, and keeping it up for 30 seconds straight with perfect pick attack on every note. So creating longer lines where you know only one, simple picking motion is needed is a great way to start down that road, and allows you to work on hand synchronization at the same time too. That’s what I did when I was first getting all this together.
Again, the downstroke escape motion looks good and you have a solid foundation here. Nice work. I’d jump on what’s working and polish it up nice and shiny.
