Hey,
I’m new here and to pick slanting as well. I’ve been practicing for the last few days and I feel like I’m doing well. Before pick slanting I was doing Ben Eller’s ‘Punisher’ chromatic exercise at around 60 bpm 16 notes. Since starting with slanting I’m doing basic 4nps chromatics at about 100 bpm 16 notes (no muting at the moment though ) I tried pushing the speed up to 105 bpm just a bit ago and found that my picking started to break down.
I was still supinated for DWPS and pronated for UWPS (wrist flat on the body of the guitar). I’d watched myself play up and down the strings and focused on keeping the proper rotation throughout. So I tried this using DWPS on the high E string:
E |-4-3-2-1-|
Then freeze at the moment I would normally switch to the B string. I pushed my pick straight down towards the body of the guitar and my pick was still in between the High E and the B string. So it seems that for whatever reason I’m not fully escaping far enough to move to the B string with a down stroke. And when I paid closer attention I noticed that after the 4 notes on the high E I would shift my right hand up slightly so that the down stroke would make contact. This obviously breaks the flow and is not proper pick slanting technique as far as I can tell.
So if you’re still reading (thank you) my question is this. Do DWPS and UWPS require me to incorporate an extra bit of wrist deviation on the last pick stroke before switching strings? Has anyone else had to do this? I wonder if this is a relic of my old picking habits in which I tried to be efficient and move as little as possible?
Also, as best as I can tell now without recording myself all my pick movement is coming from wrist deviation and none from my forearm.
BREAKING NEWS:
Started watching the AntiGravity series after posting this. In it Troy mentions that Eric Johnson never bothered with small movements. Got me thinking that this is just an artifact of my old attempts to gain speed that needs to be unlearned. When I attempt to go faster I just instinctively start making smaller movements with my picking hand. These small movements are not necessary to speed when using pick slanting no?
Any one have any thoughts on that?