Hey Guys,
I am back after a couple of weeks of trying DWPS. I have tried it with my bebop playing. Here I am trying to do mostly swinging 1/8ths without a lot of sweeping etc… Trying to keep the alternate picking going.
Here is the video. This is Donna Lee and All The Things You Are mish - mashed together.
Monty, that is just amazing. How do you not get lost in the chord changes and turn arounds?
Nice playing mister!!! Reminds me a bit of joe pass. ( non chording solo 
)
This is awesome Monty! Great grooving through those changes.
On the mechanical side, here’s the additional cool part: the lines you’re playing here do not work with downward pickslanting, and there really wouldn’t be any benefit to using it - at least not in the strict sense of the term as in the cases of EJ, Yngwie, Marty Friedman, and so on. Instead, given all the finger movement that is happening, it looks more like you’re using a crosspicking type approach, or maybe a blend of two-way pickslanting and crosspicking. At some point these strategies all meet in the middle and you can call then what you like.
Anyway, if you’re interested, and you get a chance to shoot another take of this with the camera pointing down the strings, that would be cool to check out. Flip the phone into landscape (i.e. not vertical video) mode so you can get a little more mileage out of the screen real estate and just point the headstock a little more toward the camera, but not so much that the fretting hand blocks the picking hand.
Again, great work here.
Thanks for the nice compliment! I know both of these tunes really well. It took a minute to get used to doing both songs together.
Of course I love Joe Pass! Joe Pass Guitar Styles is one of my favorite books. I want to take the lines in that book and work on fingerings that fit pickslanting techniques.
Thanks for taking the time to answer Troy and for your kind words. I have found that at least thinking about downward pickslanting has helped my overcome some speed things I have been trying to do. I think planting the hand and using the pressure of pushing into the guitar a little as a balance has really helped my stability. I’ve always shied away from that hand position because of the birdie finger and worrying about tension. Plus, like what Molly T. said in her interview, I’ve always thought that the floating hand/crosspicking/palm on the low strings style looked cleaner and prettier.
As I was playing this, I was trying to think about 2 and 4 notes groups per string to facilitate the DWPS, but then sometimes I just plowed right through whatever was coming to mind. I think many jazz players players used even a more pronounced upward curve/rotation in the right hand to facilitate DWPS even more, like George Benson, Sheryl Bailey, Rodney Jones, Barry Green etc…Anyway I’ll keep working on it. 240 BPM felt pretty good, it got sloppier at 250 to 260. Thanks so much for all the inspiration!
Great playing Monty!
Interesting comment. I’m primarily a jazz player and when I began working on using DWPS I went through the melodies to a couple of Charlie Parker heads - Anthropology and Donna Lee - and mapped out every pick attack and where I might benefit most from DWPS, using hammer-ons, and pull-offs strategically to maintain the same pickslant, and when I would be forced to change for string-hopping. I feel like I benefited from this a great deal and have continued this process with uptempo jazz-oriented licks. Ideally I think I’d want to be using two-way pickslanting with an emphasis on DWPS for this. Do you feel this is taking the wrong approach, @Troy ?
It’s hard to say without a camera angle looking down the strings, but it’s not clear to me that this is actually what you’re doing, i.e. using downward pickslanting with an occasional stringhopping movement. Typically, when you see wiggly (that’s a technical term!) finger movements like the ones in the clip you’ve posted, they turn out to be crosspicking movements.
If what you’re doing is working, by all means keep doing it! I’m more concerned about the players who are doing things that aren’t working. What I’m learning from the forum, in its few short months of life, is that we’ve created a bit of a monster with the terminology here that has the potential to confuse some people more than it helps. Being clear on what certain movements are and are not, and can do and not do, may help clear some of that up. But that’s on us, to produce better / clearer instructional material, and not on you, who are completely free to continue to think about your technique in whatever way produces results.
Again, great playing here.
This is fine! You can arrange any piece for any technique. I was just pointing out that Monty’s clip is not arranged for downward pickslanting - which is fine since he doesn’t appear to be using a traditional downward pickslanting movement anyway. This is more a point of clarification for those who are still learning and reading through these posts, and may not realize that these picking systems don’t just auto-magically work with any fretboard shape. It sounds like you may already know that, in which case, carry on!
Since the All The Donna Lee’s You Know video didn’t show my right hand enough, and there were questions about my right hand if it was DWPS or not, here are a couple of short videos on Mr. PC at the same tempo as the last time, BPM = 220. After looking at it under the microscope, I am not sure what to think! I tried to emphasis a lot of two string patters (more in take 3) but sometimes I just go for it and plow through. I get a really weird pick wiggle on the B string for what reason I don’t know!
Just a reminder, this is about my third or fourth week or so on this, as from my first video, I play mostly crosspicking and some cheap UWPS licks from time to time as main meat and potatoes technique. I have gotten this up to around BPM = 250 without breaking up too bad but it gets much sloppier after 240 or so.
Take 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grSOlHGGAzM
Take 3