Apologies for the confusion! Yes, @tommo is correct, that’s what I was trying to say.
The “angle” of the pick doesn’t cause the motion, so changing it won’t do anything. You could remove the pick from your hand and your motions would still be whatever they currently are. To change the movement, you have to… make a different movement! In other words, move your wrist along a different pathway.
The subtlety here is that, yes, there is a relationship between the picking motion and the pickslant. The pickslant is used to make sure that the attack of upstrokes and downstrokes are equally smooth, and you adjust it based on the type of picking motion you are using. Specifically, upstroke escape motions need a downward pickslant, downstroke escape motions need an upward pickslant, and double escape motions don’t need any pickslant. Not only that, but if you use flatter picking motions which are closer to parallel with the strings, the pickslant becomes equally flatter, and harder to spot from your player perspective. As an example, your motions are pretty flat and that’s why we’re not seeing Gypsy jazz levels of pickslant at any point in your clip.
This relationship is what we failed to explain clearly in the first versions of our instructional stuff, mainly because we didn’t fully understand the interaction! We’re updating the Pickslanting Primer now with better, bite-size explanations which we hope will make this super clear for everyone. So apologies from us!
The point here is that if you try to understand your picking motions by “looking for the slant” it may be hard to see, and in the case of a double-escape motion, there might not even be any. Here’s a quick comparison we filmed recently to illustrate how these things are independent:
As you watch this, take a look at the “pickslant” and see if you can spot which one it is at any given moment. You probably can’t. I can’t. I can’t even really see it as I’m playing. But I can feel tiny adjustments in the arm position, wrist position, and grip which make the attack smoother. By comparison, take a look at the way the pick is moving. That’s a lot clearer. You can see the pick moving down and to the left, down and to the right, straight side to side, or in a curve. Those are your four pickstroke types, and in the case of this example specifically, they are done with four different wrist motions (more or less).
Honestly, the “looking for the slant” approach was always vague and not super helpful in knowing what kind of motion you’re actually making. Mainly because people have your experience here, e.g. “I’m slanting the pick, what am I doing wrong?”. Again, our fault.
The good news is that looking at the motion itself is way clearer. Just go into the YouTube player in your clip above and hit gear icon, and choose 25% speed. Take a look at the pickstrokes and see what they look like to you. Does the pick escape on the upstroke, downstroke, or both? That’s really all you have to ask. I may be off a little in what I’m seeing, but the key takeaway here is that this is how you can evaluate if you’re making the motion you are trying to make.
Traditionally the “Pop Tarts Lick” ™ is an upstroke escape type lick. Every string change happens after an upstroke so the simplest course of action is to just make a motion that does that all the time so the upstrokes always escape. In your case, it doesn’t look like that is happening. As @tommo points out it looks like you’re doing downstroke-escape motions mixed with double-escape motions. Take a look yourself and see what you think. You can also look at this while you’re playing and see what you think.
In general, the motions we’re seeing here are not a bad thing per se. Martin Miller is "Code-famous"™ for making the double-escape motion, or some variation on it, almost all the time, and it works very well for him. What really matters is that your motions feel smooth and fluid, the pick attack feels smooth and sounds good, and you are making the string changes cleanly. Again, going fast and sloppy until you feel smoothness kick in, and filming it to see what is really going on, is the way that I personally work on this.
But again, take a look at your motions and let us know if we’re explaining this clearly. And sorry again for the confusion!
This isn’t something I thought that would happen. I will refilm again tomorrow playing a lick a bit lower down the fretboard.
