Four Types of Pickstrokes - Can You Spot Them?

Here’s a cool little comparison we just filmed which was both instructive to film and to watch. For those still trying to sort out picking motions in your mind — and that probably includes all of us including me! — this is pretty much exactly what the different varieties of alternate picking look like when lined up back to back:

It was challenging and instructive to do this and try to get them each to sound as similar as I could, without looking, and making sure I could tell by feel when I was switching from one to the other. For simplicity of comparison, I’m doing them all with wrist motion and keeping the arm more or less in the same, or very similar position all the time to reduce the number of variables.

For the crosspicking motion, this is a very good reference for what optimal form looks like. You might look at this and think, that’s crazy, it’s too large and too high. It is not. It feels very smooth to do this, and it feels like the margin of error here is thin. In other words, I don’t think I could actually do this any flatter at this tempo without hitting something. If I speed up it might flatten out a little. But I cannot go flatter at this speed specifically.

Also, I am intentionally making a motion that is large enough to go past the surrounding strings, as a test that I am truly avoiding those strings. This means I am putting some power into the pickstroke so that it travels farther in the alotted time. That’s how motion size is controlled. However, because this motion is efficient, it’s not a prohibitive amount of power, and the notes are not being slammed with attack. That’s why large motions are not “wasteful” as we were so often told. Economy is a ratio of what you put in versus what you get out. In this instance, I am putting in the minimal energy necessary to get this large motion. Any other picking motion that is more vertical than this would require more energy per pickstroke travel, even if it were smaller.

Also, note that the motion is already traveling approximately three strings worth of distance. This is why I am able to transition smoothly from playing on a single string to roll playing across multiple strings, with no perceptible change in feel. Obviously, a single-string motion is not the same as a motion that plays notes on different strings at different distances apart. But the key is that they are close enough that they feel the same, and smoothness is optimized. This is the bluegrass way, and it is why that method of learning produces the alternate pickers that it produces, whereas the rock way produces players with a different set of capabilities.

I realized after we did this that I forgot to include the “trapped” pickstroke that you’d use for sweeping. So we may do this again in a slightly fancier format including that motion as one our “Two-Minute Tutorials” like we did last time. We’ll put that up if we do it.

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Very nice!

Incidentally, I’ve been working on the the three pickstrocke types as well lately, the difference being I’m using the wrist/forearm version. It is quite fun to try and keep the arm in more or less the same position and switch between the three as you do here.

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That sounds good. Let’s see some video!

Oddly (?) out of the 3 strokes here the ‘upstroke escape’ is the one that feels the less smooth for me.

Provided you’re doing the motion correctly, “smooth” could be related to edge picking and pickslanting. Even though I’m fudging it here, the single-escape motions really require a slight pickslant to offset the angled motion path. Otherwise, whichever pickstroke is on the wrong side of the pickslant will feel more grabby than the other. This is the “garage spikes” problem we’ve discussed before.

If you’re referring to the motion itself, that I can’t say. These are all pretty similar in terms of the actual wrist motions going on.

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I’m positive it’s the issue.
It’s not that bothering though, just a tad more bumpy than the other moves. In other circumstances I’d say it feels less natural, but I know nature has nothing to do with it really.

It’s also that it screws up the sound of the attack. I think most us manage this instinctively without really thinking about it, but when you really look at this in your audio editor, there is a pulse to alternate picking because the two pickstroke are usually not equal in volume - in a good way. But the bumpy stroke is usually louder and screws that up to where it sounds a little alien if it’s too much louder.

Yes, that’s very true. btw I tend to prefer picks with fairly rounded tip, and it might be to compensate for that in some way. There’s more glide to it, I prefer the sound - though with single coil it has a tendency to sound overly glassy if you lose control. It’s a bit of cheating in a sense … but it’s more the tone I’m drawn too.

…and then there were four! Added in “trapped” and filmed a slightly more polished version for general consumption:

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I’ve been an upward pick slanter for some time now but when i try to do the crosspicking thing I tend to do downward pick slanting with the uplift on the down stroke for some reason. I’ve tried the upward lift with my standard upward pickslanting but it does not feel as good to me. as an aside i think it has improved my downward pickslanting.

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The crosspicking Chords sounds fantastic. I’d love to play that some day.

Technically speaking, crosspicking requires no pickslant. We were wrong about this when we did the Steve Morse video way back when - we’re more right now! In actual practice you may see what appears to be a pickslant, mostly as a result of small variations in grip and arm position, but it’s slight and has no effect on the motion itself.

“Single escape” picking motions technically require some pickslant, otherwise you get the garage spikes problem. But the closer you are to parallel with the strings, the less of it you will need to use to make the attack smooth. The motions in the comparison clips above are mostly of the flatter variety and that’s why very little to no pickslant is visible.

This is why I think we should stop thinking of “pickslanting” as a motion, and especially as something you “are”. Instead, it’s something you dial in or don’t, based on the motion you are using.

No need to wait until “some day”! Here’s our lesson on it, and since you’re working on picking motion, the more variety the better:

The lesson uses wrist motion, as I’m doing in these comparison videos. So it doubles as a tutorial on how the wrist works, where to place your arm and hand to make wrist motion work, and so on. In general I think most people will benefit from some experimentation with these ideas because it just makes you more familiar with all the parts and how they work, regardless of which method you ultimately choose to use.

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I think this is so great about the CTC! That you’re very open about this being a scientific journey and that you can never be sure that what we know now may be falsified by future knowledge. It’s a community where we gather information together.

Actually I really thought about this when the CTC launched. A lot of guitarist where labeled and put into categories very quickly for “being” something. This felt a bit weird and seemed to be a way of simplifying how to view different guitarists whole technique. I especially didn’t like the notion that a “one-way-pick-slanter” couldn’t be doing something else then what the boundaries of that technique offered. I understand that this maybe wasn’t how you thought of it but it came across that way for me. And I also think this was useful for selling the concept but I’m happy this is now put aside for a more open way of looking at guitar playing. Good work!

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I can’t lie, I kind of wish you called them upward or downward pickslanting. I see the double escape is like an arpeggiated alternate picking, which is cool to see can be done on a single string.

But… I kinda feel like the CTC lexicon is like the Facebook interface. It continuously seems to morph and shift without notice. While this may draw people to spend more time trying to keep up, it has had the opposite effect upon me.

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I think Troy is aware of that, but at the same time it would have been a mistake to stick with misleading terminology once a better understanding was reached of what was going on.

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I don’t mean to beat Troy up on this. Obviously, the content is as complex as the ergonomics of the human hand. Additionally, the understanding has evolved real-time over the interwebs where stuff just hangs there in time. CTC was new to me last February, even though the vids were put out years ago.

But what is the best solution to this? Is there a solution? Should old verbiage be scrubbed off all the old media and expressed in the more accurate terms? That sounds like a beast of a task.

My frustration is that language is important when expressing ideas to teach others. If the language shifts, the concepts are clouded. But if the language must shift to be teach better, can it be done without causing more confusion?

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What about when there is no pickslant, as in this comparison? Don’t you think it’s a little confusing when someone can’t see any pickslant, and we call something “pickslanting”?

This confusion is still going strong. We have @rickymaina’s post from Technique Critique a few days ago saying he can’t figure out “which pickslanting” he is using. When you watch him play, it’s pretty clear why he can’t figure it out. It’s because he is using a flat motion with almost no pickslant. If he spends any more time staring at his picking hand trying to “see the slant”, he’s wasting his time because it’s not really there.

Instead, he should be looking at his motions and understanding which way he is escaping. A Facebook comment from yesterday on the “Four Pickstrokes” video illustrates similar confusion:

Here is someone who is clearly familiar with our stuff. This individual watched a two minute video where my arm and grip (mostly) don’t move and don’t change, and concluded that the way you “hold the pick” is what is producing all these different movements. Obviously that’s not the case.

So now we need to differentiate between the pickslant and the picking motion, so people understand the difference. It turns out we already have terms for this: “trap” and “escape”. Our most popular video of all time about Crossroads, which has been viewed over 2 million times, features these terms prominently, in combination with pickslanting. There are some people on this forum who think it is our clearest-ever explanation of these things:

The one part where it falls down is that it says, sort of hilariously in retrospect, that you have to hold the pick with a “slant” and it causes the escape. This is not true. I don’t even know why we said that. I think we just weren’t really thinking. So Stefan from Facebook can be forgiven - it’s not his fault. It’s our fault.

So…

We’re still using the term “pickslanting”. It’s important! Certain motions require a pickslant in order to be smooth, and everybody needs to know what a pickslant is. We are also using the terms “trap” and “escape” to describe the way the motions work - the same as we always have.

So we’re just being a little clearer about the difference in meaning of these two important terms instead of smashing them together like we have in the past.

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I kind of had a feeling you would say that… :slightly_smiling_face:

Work in progress! The downstroke and double escape motions are not quite there yet. I’ve been an orthodox downward pick slanter/upstroke escape Django type player as long as I can remember.

(I am aware that the slow-mo replay adds no detail, I was just having a bit of fun with iMovie.)

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Oh great I will try this crosspicking!!! Love that bluegrass sound.

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