These clips are great. As @Johannes is pointing out, you can’t look at the “slant” of the pick to know what kind of motion you’re making. Instead, you have to look at the path the pick is travelling.
In the first clip, the key insight here, again via Johannes, is the the direction the pick is moving is different when you are picking on the string than it is during the string change. On the string it looks like a DSX motion. During the string change you switch to USX. Then you go back to DSX again. There is nothing wrong with this approach. It’s what players like Andy Wood do during “outside picking” type phrases. Like you, Andy uses the “lightly supinated” arm setup, and he has a default preference for DSX wrist motion. He will switch to USX motion briefly when he needs to, and then he will switch back to DSX.
So the arm position you’re using here is not a “DWPS” arm setup. It’s just an arm position. From that arm position, you can get either kind of escape, downstroke or upstroke, just by changing the direction your wrist is moving. You can also get double escape, where the picking motion is semicircular. That’s the motion we’re seeing in your second clip. Was the second clip played more slowly? What does the normal speed of that clip look like? If you can post that, that would be great. But generally, this motion looks perfect. Can you tell by feel when you’re using the motion in this clip versus the mixed approach in the first clip?
The key about both of these clips is that there is a way to do it wrong, aka stringhopping, and a way to do it right. You’re doing it the right way. Specifically, the motion you make when you go over the string on the upstroke isn’t really a “jump”. You are simply moving your wrist sideways. But because your arm is tilted a small amount, the pick goes up in the air. When you play a downstroke string change, you’re actually moving your wrist along a different path of motion. This is the real secret to “alternate” picking - the muscles used for each type of string change can’t overlap, they have to alternate.
Since your DSX motion appears to be a default, what I would do is try phrases where the entire phrase only switches strings using downstrokes. You can play the Pop Tarts lick starting on an upstroke, or you could create some other phrase. Whatever you like. Longer musical phrases like this are great because you can really feel the smoothness and hand synchronization.
For the double escape motion, I would try some phrases that do not conform to any particular number of notes per string. Something like this for example:
In this example, there are no consistent picking patterns you can work out for even numbers of notes per string. If you can tell by feel how to activate the motion you’re using in clip 2, then that’s the motion you want to activate for this. If you can’t tell yet, then just try to play this without thinking too much about it, and try to make it feel smooth at a medium speed or better. Don’t worry too much about wrong notes at first. If you give this a shot, put up a clip and we’ll take a look.
Nice work!
