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.
Great observation and you are correct. There’s not an obvious way to do this, and you can test this yourself. Hold the pick 90 degrees to the string plane, and try to get it to go smoothly through the string while moving toward the body. The downstroke doesn’t want to go through the string.
Andy’s technique doesn’t move like this – it moves a little toward the bridge. Shouldn’t the same thing be possible with USX? Well, your arm approaches the strings from above, which is inherently asymmetrical. So I think there is basically no rule that says these things are reversible.
As you suggest, trailing edge is close. But that’s only because the pick has a teardrop shape. And even then it still still gets stuck, and works better with a slight downward pickslant.
The other edge case is forearm rotation where the pick orientation isn’t really a single thing, but is constantly rotating. So it may appear “pickslanted” at one end of the pickstroke but not the other. That probably doesn’t even count.
I was wonderiong this while watching this, Troy, and this does seem to be a - at least small! - evolution in your thinking, no?
We’ve moved away from “pickslant” to USX/DSX because you can do the former without the latter and the latter is really why a pickstroke “works,” but in this video you pretty explicitly tie a slanted pick to the “garage spike” effect and when they’re not working in conjunction they tend to hang up the pick. You note above that there IS some room for a very neutral pick angle and that there’s probably. couple exceptions where you can still make it work, but it does seem like you’re tying the angkle of the pick to the escape stroke more closely than you might have two or three years ago, no?
For what it’s worth I think you’re probably right and this isn’t my trying to argue so much as better understand - I feel like things have been starting to really click for me lately, and when things are really flowing I seem to have settled into a slight upwards slant, or if a downwards slant then one with a LOT of pick angle with my pick not dead perpendicular to the plane of the strings, but a lot closer than if I had an upwards slant. And that’s probably not a coincidence, and I should probably figure out which is actually more efficient and spend some time trying to really bake that in as my default.
