Hey guys i am new here so sorry if this was already covered. Is there any way to apply Troy’s technique to the first position pentatonic scale while descending in threes. I think Jimmy Page does this a lot in his solos.
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You can do it with only DWPS and a swipe. Down, up, down (swipe through the thinner string), up, down, up. Then it starts again on the next string.
EDIT: This is what I mean, the X indicates a swipe through that string.
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Yeah this is my problem after first swipe you hit the 5 fret on E string with down sweep and then you have to jump to 8 fret on B string. This breaks the pattern since your pick is now buried behind E string and you have to jump string on the down stroke which goes against DWPS rule of changing strings only on upstrokes.
That’s what the swipe is for. When picking the third note, the pick goes through the E string. If it’s muted properly, it will make almost no sound at all. That allows you to play the fourth note with an upstroke.
Ohh i see what you are saying, but this is kind of weird approach of playing a dead or silent note to adjust for picking. Do you have a clip of what that would sound like at fast speeds? Any other approaches? Thanks!
In this video Troy talks about swiping with upward pickslanting and shows clips of it happening.
Another approach would be two way pickslanting. I would start with an upstroke to make all the string changes use inside picking. It’s personally more comfortable for me, because with inside picking, I’m sure that no swiping will happen. That’s a more complicated approach, though, simply because it requires two way pickslanting.
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Thanks Sorc! Appreciate your help!
If you are willing to do a bit of stretching, you can also try this solution which combines two positions and can be played with dwps:
I would bet that Jimmy Page swipes it though!
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He sure does, you can hear a semi-muted tic on live recordings or the swiped/muffed note if he’s not on that night. He’ll switch between picking every note or doing pull-offs depending on the feel he’s going for.
I think the swipe is becoming a bit of a hyped thing here, as though it should be an intended strategy. Aiming to clear strings is a better goal IMO, but if swiping occurs as a consequence at speed then fair play. I don’t think any ground-breaking guitar player ever said: “I think I’ll practice hitting the wrong strings today”.
There are two mechanics in the lick:
First triplet: D - U ( both dwps) - D (uwps)
Second triplet: U - D - U ( all dwps)
Totally disagree. If you can play a lick cleanly and more easily, why would you obsess over a technicality?
If you can play a lick cleanly and easily, why would you practice hitting the wrong string as an easy fix?
I think you’re thinking of swiping as a “mistake.” I don’t think it is.
Who says it’s the wrong string? I don’t. The point is to get the effect you want, make the sounds you want to hear.
is one note enough time for a pick slant change? it took M.A. 3 notes in the video…
I guess so. One thing I see about “coders” is that one week it’s “downward slanting is the key!”. “No wait, this week 2wps is the key!”. “no, wait, this week it’s cross-picking”. “oh hang on, swiping is the key!”. I see the latter as an unintentional occurrence in some people’s playing as good to know, but not really something anyone spent any time deliberately doing. For me, practising clipping strings to get to the ones I want to play just takes it one step too far in over-analysis.
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Depends on your primary mechanic I guess. As a forearm rotator who doesn’t have the weight in my fingertips that MAB does, it works for me. There are 3 ways I actually practice descending 3s in pentatonics so when I get time I’ll tab them.
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And for me, I have something specific I’m going for. Let me explain my logic.
You ever hear people say “outside picking is easier?” Well, it’s not for me. I can inside pick a lot of lines at a fair rate of speed because that requires 2WPS, but when I was younger I could almost always “feel” swiping and thought “oh no, I’m making a mistake, better get more tense and try harder to get over that string to outside pick.”
Swiping was the real revelation for me from the CTC material.
Plus, none of those things are actually the key. Different people need to focus on different things. For me, it’s perfecting a motion mechanic that’s even and consistent across different speeds (I used to go from wrist deviation to rotation to hyperspeed picking at different speeds, making it almost impossible to nail the intermediate speeds) and swiping. Crosspicking(I think? don’t have videos for proof) and 2WPS come easily to me. For some people, the revelation was DWPS, and for others it was crosspicking.
EDIT: also, “clipping a string” is not even how swiping feels to me. I’m only just starting to get it, but it mostly feels like downstroke -> change string -> upstroke when I get it right. I can tell I’m doing it from the momentary “click” I feel (but not hear: DWPS swiping is pretty much completely inaudible), but there’s a lot to be said for minimizing complexity: I suspect that your top speed playing some lick will be a bit higher if you’re swiping it compared to 2WPS playing it.
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in the words of EVH "If it sounds good, It is good."
Dosn’t matter if its swiped, un-swiped two way pick slanting. Down, Up, neutral. Whatever it is and it seems to work for you do it. I don’t think Troy is trying to state that one is better than the other, he is just trying to show options when you are stuck on a thing.
Like the old saying
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around does it still make a sound. If so does it matter.
Alot of high speed players do swiping or play through a muted string as a means to streamline the line.
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Here I’m attempting the method using two positions with DWPS, with a healthy amount of gain and the bridge pickup. I would normally prefer the neck but it’s broken on this guitar!
The stretches are actually not as awkward as I thought, even in B minor position at the 7th fret, and the lick is very fun to play!
I also added a gratuitous swiping riff at the end (which would be quite hard with full on TWPS). In this case the swipes can be heard because I did not do a very good job with the muting 
…but I’m sure it would be almost impossible to tell this was swiped if Batio or Gilbert played it.
PS: I managed to record directly by connecting the output of the Vox Amplug to the mic/headphones jack of the macbook. The problem is that if I try to monitor the sound I get some unbearable delay. However the tone is not too bad, no? (note I’m using a cheap guitar).
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