When cross picking is the pick parallel to the strings or is it either upward or downward slanted?
I don’t have access to the videos, I’m waiting to see what September’s release is before I reaubscribe.
I think all of these options are in principle possible! If I remember correctly, David Grier has the pick in a slightly upward slanted position most of the time, while Martin Miller’s pick appears downward slanted.
However this may be an oversimplification, and there may well be case in which they temporarily change the pick orientation.
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Alright, so it’s the actual motions to get over the strings that make it crosspicking?
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Exactly. It’s the U shaped, double-escaping, pick path that makes it crosspicking.
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As other’s have stated… the path of the pick determines if it’s X-picking.
Often times… if a picker uses both X-picking and a pick-slanting approach… the x-picking will sorta ‘inherit’ the slant of the DWPS or UWPS approach.
Just as a side-note… I think that using a more perpendicular approach (with no degree of slant) when you hit the string does have a tiny advantage when doing X-picking. It kinda helps make the stroke a bit more symmetrical. For example… I’ve been a DWPS… and when I switched to X-picking… I still kept the downward slant… but I still found myself swiping on the downstroke on occasion… and when I straightened it out a bit… it helped with this. I still do slant a bit, but it’s less than I used to.
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That’s what’s I initially thought, but it seems it doesn’t matter. However, like you say, it does help to make things more symmetrical.
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I think it’s more the reverse. Learning to center the motion so that it is symmetrical is important, and adjusting your arm position and the motion you’re making both relate to this. But it doesn’t specifically relate to what the pick looks like in the air. That’s just the result of all of the above plus your grip.
When your motion path is pretty flat to the strings to begin with, even small alterations in the way you hold the pick can appear to create a “pickslant”, but won’t affect the motion. Molly Tuttle and Andy Wood are good examples of this. They escape equally on upstrokes and downstrokes when necessary, but they can at times appear to have an upward grip slant, downward grip slant, or none. As long as that range is small, a few degrees one way or another, it doesn’t really matter.
For the most consistent pick attack on upstrokes and downstrokes, you want the pick to hit the string at a right angle to its motion path. Vertical motion paths require more pickslant to have smooth attack. Flatter motions paths require less pickslant to create the right attack.
If the motion is curved as in crosspicking, then you want the pick to hit the strings at a right angle to its motion path tangent at the moment it hits the string. Tenth grade math for the win. Ergo if the motion path is truly symmetrical in crosspicking, then no grip slant is necessary, i.e. because the tangent will be the same as the string plane at that point. But again, a few degrees one way or another won’t affect anything, and you might see what looks like a downward gripslant in supinated approaches.
Again, the picking motion and the slant of the pick are two separate things.
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