Thanks @Troy !!I I love hearing any feedback from you, especially positive. Let’s me know I’m on the right track. Thanks guys. This journey to improving lead guitar playing really is so rewarding and enjoyable.
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If what you’re asking here is when is it appropriate to teach technique versus not teaching it, that’s a more complicated question. If someone sounds great, feels smooth and relaxed, and is not inhibited creatively, by all means, don’t fix what ain’t broke. You are dealing with a lucky/talented person.
But I was not that person. Before the first of the various pickslanting discoveries, I could move my hands much faster than I could play cleanly. There was no “working up to that tempo”. I had the tempo. I think most people who try to go fast from day one, will have the hand speed very quickly. But I couldn’t play anything with picking that felt good or smooth, at any speed, even if I got all the notes right, even slowly. And again, there was no “working up” to that feeling of smoothness, since it never happened.
So no, I don’t think 120bpm is any kind of specific benchmark. It’s smoothness of motion/feel, at any tempo. And Judging from the number of threads we have seen on here with titles like “Am I Stringhopping”, the average learner seems to have a hard time determining what smooth really feels like, and whether or not they are actually achieving it.
hmm, I have a hunch I’m still not communicating my question/point clearly, which may have to do with time constraints and an effort to not be overly wordy, but I appreciate you taking the time, as always. I may try to warm up my typing fingers and come back and try to clarify, because this is a big part about how I think of student’s picking challenges. But I’ll state now that I’m not asking about whether to teach or not teach, more just commenting literally (As best as I can) on habits and limitations of most folks when they are not aware of issues of slants, escapes, motion mechanics, etc.
for sure - was just commenting on the ceiling that a lot of folks seem to run into when they just try alternate picking everything without attention to many of the things we talk about in CTC (slants, escapes, motion mechanics, etc.)
For whatever it’s worth, part of the origin of the 120 figure in my mind is because of years of jazz guitar message boards, where folks would start picking threads and often cite a tempo figure around there as a sticking point. in this context players were often playing music that was not written for guitar so had string changes that were not patterned like some (emphasis on ‘some!’) guitar-based fast music is. So we’d all talk about being able to play ‘anything’ and some more specifics of looking at notes per string and things like that were usually frowned upon.
edited: to add - and I think it’s extremely significant that most of those posting about these issues were players that had been at it for a long time, saying again something about limitations. Controlled, peer reviewed study…no. But I think there’s something to it.
Anyway, I’ll try to not rush my replies next time, but always appreciate these discussions.
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I think I get what you are saying. I am a bit sceptical about the current “X-Pick everything, am i really X-Picking?” hype that seems to be going around. I think of X-Picking as more of a high-risk technique, because it can be tough to get the feel for it. You might be thinking you’re doing it right, and waste a lot of time on movements that are just a tiny bit off without realizing it. And then you max out at 120 bpm… which is not really fast enough to qualify as either 2-Way Escaping or X-Picking. @RyanMW I don’t mean to bring you down about your playing, the video sounds great! But if you can’t go faster than 120 bpm, there might be something not quite right yet. Hm, that is usually @Troy 's line 
Economy picking seems a much “safer” way, especially for a beginner, to practice these kinds of phrases - it is pretty straight forward and you have more obvious means of self-control. Why not try both? You learned to run, but you can still walk, right?
As to quotes such as this:
(sorry hamsterman, don’t mean to pick on you personally! I just picked your comment, because it represents something that I read in a lot of comments lately)
When have we actually ever seen this? Even an absolutely amazing Cross-Picker like Andy Wood doesn’t play his fastest scale runs this way, he pick-slants when he enters shred-land. Also his touch gets very light when he crosspicks fast. On Mandolin, he often seems to hit just one string when crosspicking fast. He talks about this in the first interview. He says about his hybrid picking, that he uses it mostly because he can’t get certain notes to pop in phrases he would have to crosspick. The same goes for Carl Miner or even Martin Miller, when they play at their fastest speeds, they pickslant too. To me at least this signals that there is a certain speed limit to x-picking.
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It’s worth remembering that you actually do sometimes need to play at less than 120 bpm.
Well, just a couple of things I look at differently:
I don’t think there’s anything magical about 120 bpm - only that if somebody has been practicing one technique and been stuck the 120 bpm wall for a long time, then it might be time for re-strategizing. At the same time, same could be said of any tempo; if you’re practicing and then get stuck at a tempo of X and can’t seem to move past it, well, it’s likely time for a new strategy.
BUT, in this situation Ryan didn’t give any info about how long he’s been maxed out around this tempo, and I think that’s the difference. It’s only if someone gets ‘stuck’ somewhere that I think a change of strategy is needed, at least that’s the way I see it.
Economy picking seems a much “safer” way, especially for a beginner, to practice these kinds of phrases - it is pretty straight forward and you have more obvious means of self-control. Why not try both? You learned to run, but you can still walk, right?
I’d disagree it’s safer - in the case of this particular lick you’ll have plenty of physical challenges whether it’s strictly alternate or if it’s economy picking. For example, plenty of non-adjacent string jumps and those aren’t really made any more economical with economy picking.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a case for or against the economy picking style. It’s more so that there are just a greater number of variables at play, especially in this particular passage. For example, the EJ way I referenced in an earlier post isn’t economy picking technically, it’s a mix of some alternate and some economy, all very congruent with the easiest/fastest string changes to do with downward slanting.
When have we actually ever seen this? Even an absolutely amazing Cross-Picker like Andy Wood doesn’t play his fastest scale runs this way, he pick-slants when he enters shred-land. Also his touch gets very light when he crosspicks fast. On Mandolin, he often seems to hit just one string when crosspicking fast. He talks about this in the first interview. He says about his hybrid picking, that he uses it mostly because he can’t get certain notes to pop in phrases he would have to crosspick. The same goes for Carl Miner or even Martin Miller, when they play at their fastest speeds, they pickslant too. To me at least this signals that there is a certain speed limit to x-picking.
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I thought this might be true up until recently but @Troy proved it pretty wrong right here:
one note per string, alternate picking, 16ths at 190 bpm (as I clocked it, at least)
You lost me. Like, for a charity walk or something?
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lol, I should have clarified in my original post, so as to avoid unnecessary civil discourse. 120 BPM is my current “play it clean” barrier just at the exact moment this video was taken. I’d wager I’m probably past that BPM now. I’ve focused so much on this exact type of pentatonic passage that it’s actually easier for me than a lot of 3NPS stuff.
Just out of curiosity related to the discussion, and admittedly likely of no help to you (hah,) how long have you been working on these types of passages for?
A couple of years, to varying degrees. I first heard Joe Bonamassa and became interested in the EJ esque pentatonic fives around 2 years ago. I found CTC a little after that. I’m not the most disciplined player, though. I tend to have laser focus for a short period of time and then I’ll completely forget about technique for a while to focus on songwriting, recording, etc. Then I’ll realize my technique needs work, and rinse and repeat.
So, not 2 years of playing this lick diligently, but 2 years of knowing that I want to incorporate it into my playing, and maybe 1 1/2 years of understanding that my actual picking mechanic is even a thing that necessitates close examination and work.
I wasn’t aware @Troy was up to 190 bpm now. That’s impressive… and that’s after about 3ish years I think.
One thing to remember… is that we are just scratching the surface of all this. I’m sure someone here will break the 200 bpm mark pretty soon.
But for me, its less about X-picking vs. 2wps, and more about X-picking vs. sweeping. I think 2wps is still a great method for the guitarist that have mastered it… and I wouldn’t suggest ‘un-learning’ it. Listen to @tommo 's form. It’s freaken amazing sounding.
But I am a huge advocate of using X-picking instead of sweeping. Sometimes sweeping can sound good, like with straight 1nps ascending/descending, or if a player is skillfully mixing in legato to fill in the awkward gaps. But to me, sweeping has really diminishing returns, and the more advanced the phrase, the more awful it sounds.
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ok, I guess ‘blazingly fast’ might be a misleading phrase, since I didnt mean speeds like >200bpm 16th. Yes, that is beyond anything I have seen demonstrated here, (but you never know).
But I was thinking of speeds well beyond 120 bpm… .like Eric Johnson speed… so I guess that would be around 170ish.
Holy Crap! What an amazing player! Sorry btw for kind of hijacking your response with my “anti X-Pick” rant. We do agree, that 120 bpm is just a number that means plateau, right? It could be 123,5678 bpm.
Ok, I am with you on that! I was really thinking about “shred”, in my mind that is 16th upwards of 180 bpm.
I have to say, after 2 Years for that phrase, 120 bpm does seem to me like something is not working right. Do you have other stuff that you can play faster?
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I’m in agreement regarding sweeping. I’ve never been much of a fan and almost none of my favorite players incorporate sweeps. One of my goal pieces since I was really young is “Eugene’s Trick Bag” from the movie Crossroads starring Britney Spears. I’ve always thought that piece sounds much better using alt picking than it does using sweeping. Also, great movie. It really shows how underrated of a guitarist Britney is.
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Not exactly! At fast speeds, I tend to only use the motions that are necessary for whatever string change I need to make. Meaning, if I’m playing on a single string very fast, I’m generally not using a “crosspicking” motion because it’s not necessary. I think this is what @7th11th is getting at, i.e. not whether or not there is a speed you can’t reach for crosspicking, but why you would need to use that movement for everything when the players who we have filmed don’t do this.
Martin / Andy and so on all tend to transition gracefully to simpler motions when they are playing fast. So yes, I do this, and it’s not specifically intentional. It’s just what happens. And again, based on the interviews we have done, most (all?) of these great players appear to do exactly the same thing. This includes players like Steve Morse, Molly Tuttle and Olli Soikkeli whose base motion has a type of curvature to it.
So to clarify for @RyanMW the reason I said you don’t have to worry about a “speed limit” is because efficient techniques don’t generally have hard speed limits. They either get sloppy or become a different technique, or both.
In your case, your “crosspicking” technique is almost exactly the same as your pickslanting technique. They both include wrist motion. The crosspicking one additionally has a small amount of forearm motion. As you speed up the crosspicking motion, the arm component will gradually disappear and you will be left with your pickslanting technique at your fastest speeds.
I think you’ll get your best results if you think of this as one technique across a spectrum, and if you don’t worry too much about when or where the switchover happens. If you try to play a particular line so fast that certain string changes are a little sloppy, then either you need to work on accuracy or the phrase simply doesn’t go that fast. But it’s not a “limit” per se, as in, some speed where you can’t go any faster. It’s just a range beyond which if you do go faster, things get too sloppy for your musical intent.
That’s it. You have great motions here and I would definitely work on both and learn to integrate them over time.
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As a Born-Again X-picker, I can safely say that In cases where you just want to go as fast as possible, it’s kinda pointless to do the complete articulated ‘over the string’ stroke. In these cases, we almost instinctively save the articulated pick-strokes for the string changes… and underswing for the non-string changes.
As discussed before, when X-pickers do 3NPS, we do an almost identical motion as 1NPS, but we under-swing for two of the three strokes… so it basically becomes what Troy calls 2WPS… or a variation of it. @blueberrypie has discussed this as well.
But back to the speed limits, I was not refering to how fast a X-picker can pick 3NPS, or 2NPS lines. For me, I can go as fast as any almost anyone here. But, the 170 speed limit I am running into is specifically for 1NPS lines, because those do require full-double-escaping. But 170 is pretty damn fast. Still a ways away from Troy’s superhuman 190, but I hope to get there soon.
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This is precisely what I was getting at. I also have to clarify my earlier post in regards to “economy picking”. This is not an economy picking lick. What I really meant was 1WPS. The two concepts kind of blend together in my head.
To further clarify the “safe” thing I was talking about: I think it is a bit risky to think “I am a crosspicker” and try to force a double-escaping motion all the time. At least to me that seems like an invitation to stringhopping. A 1WPS approach, where you always trap one and free the other pickstroke seems “safer” to me in that way, because it requests a certain type of motion-path that is less prone to stringhopping. Maybe @Troy can chime in on that?
Also, I would like to emphasize, that I don’t argue from a standpoint of personal preference. I only dabbled a bit with economy picking and sweeping, mostly to enhance my teaching. I alternate pick most of the time. But I do think that these approaches are in no way inferior to alternate picking, and most of the time yield much faster results in a shorter amount of time.
You can play this particular phrase with UWPS, with an added UP-Escape on just 1 note. This resembles @tommo 's setup when he does his fast ascending 3NPS stuff and the Yngwie sixes. I’ll try to film a take of this if I find the time.
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Great idea! I should have thought of that, in hindsight it’s so obvious 
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As a teacher, it becomes tricky. I’ve seen teachers on both ends of the spectrum, some suggest that a guitarist should economy pick whenever possible, others that shun economy picking.
While I agree that economy picking is easier to learn, than 2WPS or X-picking… I also look back at my own experience, and wish that I hadn’t spent so much time on economy-picking early on. It ended up becoming a rabbit hole for me… where I simply couldn’t achieve the timing and dynamics I wanted.
Yeah, but I can only write it now, after you spend months on writing, practicing and filming for your thread.
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ah ok I understand your points better now @7th11th - thanks for clarifying and apologies for misunderstanding.