Chapter 8 of Antigravity

Playing Technique
#1

Greetings all!

I am a newer member working my way slowly through this material.

I have a question regarding the two-way pick slanting demonstrated by the excellent @Troy

One of the examples is a 3nps descending b minor scale starting on G on the high E and descends F - E and D, C, B on the B string.

I believe I got some of the message of the lesson correct - play down, up, down on E, and up, down, up on B starting with downwards pick slanting on the E string and rotating to upwards pick slanting when starting on the B string.

I am confused about the rotation part - I can either rotate after I have played the third note on each string (if I wanted to carry on the scale) or I can rotate WHILE I am playing the third note on each string.

As of current, I am able to play this example half decently when rotating after playing the third note of each string but I’m not sure if I am getting this technique correct.

Thank you for any assistance!

#2

I’m sure you’ll get a better answer from Troy, but a couple things I can pass on that I’ve seen him say in similar situations:

For any new members, the best way to understand the whole system is to go through the Pickslanting Primer in order. It exposes concepts in a way where they build on top of each other.

The “seminar’s” are advanced will assume you’ve already gone through the Primer.

The “AntiGravity” seminar, while awesome to watch, contains some concepts that are now better understood and presented in a different fashion. I think the whole down up down (rotate!!) scenario is one of them. Mixed escape isn’t taught this way anymore. It’s better to make sure you have a full grasp on what your best single escape motion is and understand how to recruit a helper motion for the notes that don’t conform to this. This is really important because an elbow player would approach mixed escape differently than a wrist player, who would also approach this differently than someone who has a wrist forearm blend. It’s not one-size fits all.

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#3

Generally, yes. The only thing I’d add to this is that two-way pickslanting as presented in Antigravity is definitely something that people do, and that we see all over the place in the techniques of players out there in the real-world. Because of this, we’ll probably end up summarizing what it is and how it works, somewhere early on the Primer itself. The trick is doing so in a way that isn’t super technical or distracting. More like, here’s a thing you will see, and it’s similar to this other thing you will also see.

As Joe points out, it’s really best to start with the Pickslanting Primer as the older seminars like Antigravity don’t really discuss the different joint motions that players use to actually do these things. The Primer excels at this, presenting a (very large) universe of different types of joint motion in about as compact way as probably can be done. If you return to Antigravity afterward, it will be more obvious what motions I’m talking about there and whether or not you, specifically, should even be doing them!

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#4

I actually almost posted that and figured I’d mess it up. You’ve clearly demo’d it and it seems effective/efficient looking. Pretty sure I’ve seen Tommo post some awesome clips where he was intentionally going for this, with the same effect.

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#5

It’s not that two-way pickslanting is good or bad, or worth doing or not doing. It’s that people do it, and “it” is actually a few different things which in Antigravity are all lumped together and called “two-way pickslanting”.

For example, what Michael Angelo Batio does (“helper motion”) is not really the same thing that I do in Antigravity (continuous alternate picking with slightly different-appearing overall forms) but we call them both “two-way pickslanting”. Ditto for what players like Frank Gambale do for two-way sweeping which certainly involves an appearance of two-way pickslanting but could be argued is yet a slightly different thing.

I’ve decided this is all fine, since the thing that’s common to all this is the pick appearing to move around in certain visually identifiable ways, all of which are related to getting from one string to another. This is a real phenomenon that actually happens, and even newbies can learn to spot it visually and seem find it useful for understanding the world, so I think that’s enough.

We’ll boil this down to one or two videos in the “escape motion” section. The most recent round of updates already prepped for this. We have a video called “odd groupings with double escape”. We’ll probably have another video called “odd groupings with two-way pickslanting” or something like that. that should be enough to at least have the concepts addressed in a simple way.

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