I’m making good progress with 2WPS - on a good day I can get 16ths to around 170bpm. However, I have just started playing a pentatonic warm-up without paying any attention to my pick slanting. I then tried to play it with no (or very little) pickslant and it seems that there is a curve in the pick movement. Is it a crosspicking movement that I can develop? Or is it string hopping? Or slight pick slanting?
Any advice would be great!
Looks like straight up cross-picking to me. String-hopping (as far as I understand it) is more of an up and down thing, where you’re diving in and out of the strings. As you mentioned, you’re doing the U-shaped motion of cross-picking which gets you away from the strings after each stroke so that you can move to the next note effortlessly, regardless of what string its on.
I see you pick with the wrist using the rotational thing, like turning a doorknob. I notice because I do the exact same thing 
. I think it’s a very underrated movement, and more precise/comfortable than the more common side to side movement.
Thanks for the post!
Thats encouraging!
Have you managed to develop this into clean arpeggio playing at speed? Tumeni notes, glass prison and the like? After seeing Martin Miller smash them with his MP joint malarkey, I thought I’d have to stick to pure 2WPS and brute force it.
As long as they’re alternate picked I’m ok. Or mini-sweeps/economy picking like the Down-Up-Down-Down sort of thing. I’m not very good at large sweeping movements yet (i.e. Yngwie 5/6 string arpeggios).
I’m thinking that looks like pure crosspicking to me. Nice smooth curved strokes and I’m not seeing any type of hoppy, jabbing movements.
Echoing what the others have said: this looks great!
Yes this is a crosspicking movement. It is not “rotational” in the sense of forearm rotation / doorknob turning. It is mostly wrist, a combination of both axes, deviation and flexion/extension, from a supinated arm position. In plain English you might call this Andy Wood style crosspicking, as is most apparent in his mandolin technique, if you caught any of last week’s broadcasts.
What’s cool is this looks fully formed, as in, nothing to fix here. Have you been working on this or did this just appear?
Over the last few weeks, I have been hitting the 2WPS hard, but have never ctc crosspicking. A few weeks ago I rewatched most of the seminar and interviews and was totally freaked out with Miller’s crosspicking and stupidly tried to emulate the MP joint thing. That failed and I didn’t want to continue as I thought it was confusing me and taking away from practicing 2WPS. However, tonight (i’m in UK it’s 1:55am) I started playing pentatonic warm ups for my left hand, without consideration for what my right was doing - I looked down and saw the curve. It was either there prior to CTC, but I didn’t recognise it or it is a result of working on 2wps. I think it is the latter as 2WPS has given my hand so much more freedom to move. I don’t remember it being like it before, but like I said I may have not recognised it prior to CTC.
So, do I woodshed it along with 2wps? Or wait until I am closer to my 2wps goals?. I assumed that crosspicking was something of an unfamiliar compound beast, best left until later as I didn’t stabd a chance in my mind.
There’s not much to woodshed! It looks great. Since you have it, seemingly for “free” in a sense, I would take the hint and try and make it habitual. What matters is that you can activate it, even if you’re not totally sure what is going on. That doesn’t matter. So long as you can turn it on and perform the movement reliably, I would try and use it on as wide a range of phrases as possible to make it permanent. Musical lines are great so you get some vocabulary out of it at the same time.
Nice work!
Thanks @Troy, @TheDivineSage and @Gtrjunior for your posts. I can now go to bed happy and dreaming of Tumeni notes!
Interesting. I definitely defer to your wisdom in this department since you’ve studied this so extensively. Since my hand/arm looks exactly like EVH’s when I tremolo I just assumed it was the rotational thing. It’s just more subtle when I’m picking at slower speeds. From the angle in his vid, it looked like @PickingApprentice was using the same motion I do, but I guess not. I learn something new everyday around here!
Good luck on your journey! Keep the vids coming!
In this thread I’m referring only to what we can see in @PickingApprentice’s clip. When the forearm turns, the pick turns. His pick is not turning, it is maintaining its orientation in space, but tracing a curved path.
You, on the other hand, may very well be doing the EVH movement! I don’t know. However just because your arm is bent a particular way doesn’t mean it’s actually moving. When in doubt, don’t look at the arm, look at how the pick is moving. The path it travels will tell you what joints can possibly produce that movement.
Definitely good to know! In the next few days I’m going to be purchasing the parts for my own Magnet with my tax return, so I’m excited to look at what I’m actually doing under the microscope, so to speak.
I’m trying the above with a rolling 3 string arpeggio and combining it with a 2WPS scalar lick going back and forth between them. With the crosspicking arpeggio, I noticed that I tend to still use 2WPS (as in the actual pick slant- not just the movement) despite it not being strictly necessary
(as the curve mechanic takes care of it anyway). So I experimented with maintaining both downward and upward static slants. All are a bit haphazard at times with the odd air pick etc. (which I expect as it is in early stages).
So keeping in mind that the long term goal is to be able to seamlessly switch between them as Miller does (even if it is without thinking), my question is:
Or do I throw the chips fall where they may?
I would post a video, but I’m at hospital waiting for my daughter to come via c-section. Haha 
The ‘slant’ of the pick is irrelevant, it’s just a function of grip. Pickslanting is really a type of picking motion that goes into and out of the strings in a linear fashion. It is different than the curved movement you are doing here. So I would try not to think about ‘pickslanting’ as being a thing you can do while doing this, since by definition they are different movements.
However wrist crosspicking requires a tilted forearm with respect to the strings, either pronated or supinated. And the movement will actually be different based on this. If your forearm is parallel to the strings with no tilt, then wrist crosspicking is not possible, only stringhopping or wrist-forearm blends.
In your case you are using the supinated deviation wrist crosspicking movement. And you are doing it correctly so there is no need to change anything. If you play around with the grip you could make the pick look ‘slanted’. But that won’t change the movement unless you… change the arm orientation and/or deliberately change the movement. And then you might not be doing the same thing any more.
Again looks great do exactly what you are doing in this clip no changes and make it habitual.
Congrats on the baby!!!