Pickslanting or “escape”? Why did we “change” the terminology?!
This question comes up on a regular basis. “I like the older jargon.” “I like the newer jargon.” I get it! But we didn’t really change the terms - we just added the escape stuff to solve a really practical problem that we see all the time in Technique Critique.
The Joe Pass lesson actually has a nice section on this, where I try to explain the difference in the simplest possible way. Here is just that section, formatted as a short:
If you have a moment, please take a look and let me know if this helps clarify the difference.
But don’t worry, if it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying to explain this until I’m 90!
I like how you defined what “downward” means, “imagine the pick attached to the string like a hinge…”
I also like how you paint them as orthogonal, but, in reality, if you have one, don’t you have the other? Isn’t there a natural pairing,
USX + DWPS
DSX + UWPS
Now when the pick is very close to neutral and the motions are small it almost seems to be the case that one can ignore DWPS and UWPS in their entirety and focus on USX and DSX? Indeed, I usually think of the pick as being normal to the arc of the tip, so the slant is a consequence of the motion.
The reason we needed the two sets of terms is because it is possible to do one without the other, as I’m showing in the clip. In the most extreme mismatch, you can pick in one direction, but not the other, so you can’t alternate pick at all.
But there are many less extreme mismatches, where the pick looks pickslanted, and the motion is simply trapped. So it gets through the string, and the player thinks “I’m doing it”, but they are really just doing a pickslant with no actual benefit.
And finally, there are techniques where the pick can be orthogonal but the motion can still be diagonal. In other words, there is a slight mismatch but it doesn’t matter. This is how Andy Wood’s technique works. He is a DSX player with a diagonal motion path, but a vertical pick. Andy is in fact the whole reason we developed the “escape” terminology – it was the cleanest way to show “what his pick looks like” and “how his pick moves”.
You can have what looks like an “obviously” pickslanted form, with non-small motions, but the motion can still be trapped and not actually doing the escape you think it should “automatically” do. This is just due to the weird geometry of picks, whether you use edge picking, etc. We see this in Technique Critique all the time. It’s a real failure mode that is hard to detect for the person doing it, because the pick still gets through the string.
Let me know if I’m explaining this clearly, or if I’ve missed the point of the question!
Ah, you are right: you can describe any case, no matter how extreme, and I keep on focusing on what I happen to consider “reasonable,” merely a tiny subset of what you can describe. Generality is necessary.
Have you ever observed USX with a vertical pick? Or are there any players who you theorize might be doing this? Or does this require trailing edge, or maybe edge picking plus negative pick point to function? I am just curious why the mismatch isn’t of much consequence for DSX.
