G’day all, new member 
Just wondering if anyone has done an analysis on Buckethead’s technique with regards to upwards or downwards pick slanting?
He studied with Paul Gilbert so it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s both.
Anyway I only discovered pick slanting yesterday, and already it’s been a revelation. Did a search on Buckethead and nothing came up, so hopefully we could get a bit of a discussion going here.
Cheers
This is a great topic. He’s a really amazing player and I think if there’s any player he is similar to it’s Paul Gilbert. Honestly, their picking hands are so alike that if I didn’t know better I would think it was actually Paul himself. It’s likely a healthy mix of both UWPS and DWPS.
Theres a good closeup here at 5:15
Can anyone decipher what’s going on here?
I’ll try and find more
Bucket mentioned in his recent interview that when he was taking lessons from Paul, he would play in front of the mirror and try to get his fingers to look like Paul’s.
In the close up shot when he goes into warp speed, it looks like mostly uwps to me.
I know the definition of what we call pickslanting has just recently been modified and I apologize, I’m not yet up to speed. I haven’t been active here for a month or so.
But for the most part I see a lot of uwps-ing.
This looks like the kind of moderately supinated forearm, wrist motion technique we’ve been talking about lately. It’s what I think Gilbert, Petrucci, McLaughlin, Oparin, and others all do, with slight variations here and there. But I think this is turning out to be a very common way to play.
I have the impression he’s not picking every note in the fast passages around 5.15. Sounds great though!
Thanks Troy, I’ll look into these techniques.
I’m also noticing a fair amount of thumb joint movement (he does this all the time when alternate picking), not sure what the significance of this is, yet.
I think you’re right. Don’t get me wrong, Buckethead is fast, but there is a lot of legato in there also.
Just leaving this here for future reference as the camera angle is perfect for inspecting the right hand.
Great shots. These are all super useful for us, of course. But I still think it’s a little strange that someone goes to a concert and stands the the whole time filming the entire thing so the internet can watch it for free. And I hate being the guy standing next to the guy filming - so annoying. My inner “old man yells at cloud” is trying to get out, help!!
Anyway I don’t think there’s much mystery as to what BH himself is doing, specifically. The arm position is clear, the wrist movement is clear. There’s a touch of forearm in there but only a touch, doesn’t really change the picture. If you want to cop some of this, the “Crosspicking With The Wrist” lesson is our best current introduction to how you can get upstroke escapes and downstroke escapes from the same arm position.
Any mysteries here are more unresolved questions about this method of playing in general, i.e. why is it that players who seem to have things dialed in with this “wrist motion with somewhat supinated arm” approach still don’t often play Morse-type lines? Is it just musical taste? Or is there some subtlety we’re missing about the form that means you can get to a in-between point, where the fast scale things are doable but certain patterns involving repeated string changes are not?
That’s a good question. Of course I don’t have the beginning of an answer for this, except the obvious-yet-unsatisfaying suggestion that it might be a question of what is practiced, musical approach, use of sweeping (much easier) for simple 1nps stuffs etc …
But I do believe that there is some unexplored (or better said not much explored) guitar playing there. Recently (and since I did some very good progress on crosspicking lately) I was toying with some Wayne-Krantzy sounding stuffs involving that technique and there are really cool things to do, lots of possibilities that I’m not sure many guitar players ever did or do. Now I wish I was a better, younger musician with more time to dedicate to that somewhat uncharted territory.
My personal suspicion, and this is literally no more than a suspicion based on nothing concrete, is that because pulling off some of that one note a string style Morse stuff takes a fairly highly evolved and extremely fast and efficient picking technique, and for the most part that didn’t exist in the early days of rock and roll and the first generation of “guitar gods,” that lines like that never really became part of the rock guitar cannon. The string-tracking aspect is probably something that Morse can do more effortlessly than, say, Petrucci, but that’s probably lack of practicing those specific movements more than any specific ability, I’d think.
Though, it’s tough to tell for sure under all the delay, but it sounds like there’s some pretty speedy one-note-per-string stuff going on in Buckethead’s playing here, so who knows.
(I LOVE Colma, by the way, such a haunting album).
It’s certainly something that this site has made me want to practice more, though - Morse’s abilities are pretty much superhuman, but the mechanics are certainly learnable, and there’s potentially a lot of uncharted material for that kind of stuff in rock, provided you stay on top of the muting (and, bigger picture, I like a fairly low gain tone for a “shred” type player).
The one note per string stuff is sort of its own animal and maybe the string tracking aspect obscures what I was getting at. To clarify, what I mean is that even when you look at the playing of people who use this “Gilbert-style” forearm setup and wrist motion, there are still a lot of common picking sequences you just don’t see them playing.
Fours against 3nps for example. Almost nobody does this line. Batio is one of the few. But I would bet probably everyone has tried it at one point or another and walked away. How about ascending or descending threes? Lots of people do this against pentatonic shapes, and very few to nobody against 3nps. Vice versa with fours actually - almost nobody does this with pure alternate against 2nps. Sixes too. Tons of people do this against 2nps a la Eric Johnson, but they skip the index finger repetition and go right to the next string, so it becomes a 1wps phrase. Ditto for 3nps sixes. Paul is of course famous for this, but he skips the next two reps on each string and goes right to the next string. Nobody that I can think of does this with pure alternate against every note of the fingering.
And so on. These are all “easy” fretboard fingerings, very closely related to licks that are cliches that lots of people play. But these are suspiciously absent. If the technique for getting this simply required having a Gilbert-style arm position and wrist motion, then you would have to think more people out there would be playing them.
You pointed out that Wayne may use a similar kind of wrist motion. I haven’t looked into it. Have you transcribed any of it and what are you seeing in terms of string changes? If you’re seeing any of these types of sequences, maybe there’s a reason that goes beyond Wayne being a mad scientist outlier - and I’m not denying that he is that!
Oh, gotcha, I did misunderestand what you were referring to there. I’d need to pick up a guitar to be sure, but I think I actually do a lot of descending 4s on 3nps patterns (less so ascending), and I definitely do a lot of pentatonic 3s, ascending and descending but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not very good at it. 
I also, in the case of 3nps 4s, rarely stick to a fixed position, so at some point I’ll start working down along an individual string to change positions, etc. It’s actually kind of a curse, I really got started playing a lot of styles that really value improvised playing, and then got into more technical stuff where generally that’s not the case, but with the mindset of a blues guy, I almost never play anything the same way twice, and I suspect it’s probably holding me back.
No, not really. Actually I know that Wayne does some harmony using intertwined open strings, so I was just toying with that idea, using some crosspicking patterns, with syncopation and inserting some angular runs. But I didn’t get more far than just noodling. Anyway I’m pretty sure there’s some interesting stuff to do here.
But yeah … the older stuffs from Wayne Krantz, that is more in the Metheny/Stern vibe … From the clip with Leni Stern he does look like he’s using some crosspicking technique, but more for a ‘mainstream’ linear kind of playing. I don’t know how he made his own style evolve that way, but his playing now does look very different. But maybe there some sort of logic in the evolution of the technique employed, from where he was in the 90s to where he is now… Don’t know, it’s interesting actually … What he does now seems much simpler picking hand-wise. But I’d say it probably is deceptive. There’s some tricky stuff he comes up with.
What do you mean here ? Licks mixing 4nps and 3nps ?
Sorry! I meant fours applied to 3nps “fingerings”. Ditto for “2nps fingerings” in the other examples.
Yeah, I do see the Gilbert mechanics. I am not 100% sure, but it looks like DWPS. He has good form though, but of course, you can see that he isn’t picking every note for many patterns… but that is very common for 99% of guitarists.
Though, it’s tough to tell for sure under all the delay, but it sounds like there’s some pretty speedy one-note-per-string stuff going on in Buckethead’s playing here, so who knows.
I kind of learned big sur moon 8 years ago, back when I sucked waay more than I do today, The only video evidence I have was shot on my very low fps laptop webcam, so I can’t tell how I played the 1 note per string lines. But I either did it with just downstrokes or a very inefficient string hopping. Eitherway, the delay makes it sound faster than it actually is, and it’s slow enough that a good crosspicking technique isn’t needed.