Four Types of Pickstrokes - Can You Spot Them?

So are you saying there is a way to pickslant, and there’s a way to do these moves without pickslanting?

Yes. You’re seeing it in these videos. Can you see any pickslant? Especially in the first clip, there is essentially none. And yet we have four different motions happening here.

We have seen clips right here on the forum of players using a “downward pickslant” but making a stringhopping motion. They can’t understand why they are slow because they watched our videos and they’re “doing pickslanting”.

The pickslant just controls the attack - the more vertical the motion, the more you need. But that by itself is not enough. You still have to do the actual motion.

I see, but are you sure the moves are just too subtle because of the speed?

One thing I’ve noticed, and I know it’s not good to generalize from one’s own experience, is that I practiced the twps motion for months and months. When it finally started to click at high speeds it looks very flat, like the slants are super-subtle. My approach to the strings is very shallow, just using the very tip of the pick. It looks very flat like the video above. But I presume I developed this mechanic with the exaggerated slanting practice I did for months.

I seem to remember someone posting a vid of a Russian player who explains twps and when he speeds up the movements are so subtle as if to no longer even look like twps.

This is awesome, thank you! Keep pushing forward!

Pickslanting is not a “move” - it’s an orientation. The move is the motion, and you have to “do” the motion deliberately. The pickslanting will not “cause” the motion.

It looks like I’m failing to explain this so let’s try a super obvious example. The distinction between pickslanting and picking motion is precisely how strumming works. Strumming is a trapped motion with a pickslant. As opposed to upstroke escape picking motions which are escape motions with a pickslant:

pickslant + escape motion
pickslant + trapped motion
no pickslant + escape motion
no pickslant + trapped motion

You can remove the pick from my hand in each of these examples and nothing will change. It is the choice of wrist motion that governs the motion that happens in these examples, not the “slant” of the pick.

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Nice! Thanks for posting this. I see what you’re going for here. As an addition to what you’re experimenting with, I’d suggest removing the finger anchor and trying an all-wrist version of this. One of the nice characteristics of the Steve Morse-style setup that you have, when you go more specifically wrist, is its wide range of motion. The flexion-extension axis can easily reach four or five strings, but you have to give it some freedom to do so. And the fingers locked down seems to make this motion smaller and bouncier in appearance here.

Even if you do choose to stay with this, experimenting with something similar but slightly different can spark insights which makes the original thing better. In this case, that would mean trying to make a wider, flatter motion that resembles flexion-extension but still hits only one string in the middle of its range. If you try to get it both as large as possible, and as flat to the strings as you can, you may find a sweet spot that helps give you a better physical sense of what flat and smooth feels like.

Related to that, you may want/need to try a middle finger or three-finger grip to reach the strings with this degree of supination. I know it can feel a little alien. But again, grip experimentation is a great way to feel something different and get out of a rut. And you may even like / prefer alternate grips for certain things.

Nice work, and thanks for sharing.

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I’ve been practicing crosspicking and depending on where my right hand is resting on the strings/bridge, I will think of what I am doing this way - either,

  1. “the position formerly known” as dwps with an downstroke that lifts
  2. “the position formerly known” as uwps with an upstroke that lifts

so , either one of the positions, with a “bounce” aka. stringhopping" on the trapped stroke.

It has worked best for me to think of it this way, since I can understand it more easily than the whole axis thing.

I do believe I saw this in a CtC video and the above is how I store it in my mind.

So there is two different crosspicking positions - the molly (down) and the andy (up) with different bounces to escape the trapped.

Does that make sense @Troy and fellow CrC forum members?

If you are talking about wrist motion specifically, yes, there is a strings-supinated setup and a strings-pronated setup. Steve Morse, Albert Lee, and Andy Wood are supinated. Molly and David Grier are pronated. Did you get this from our tutorial on the subject? Because Andy and Molly are indeed two players we use to demonstrate the difference.

However, two things. Pickslanting is not required to do this. This is one thing we got wrong when we looked at Steve’s technique. At the moment the pick hits the string, it is essentially moving parallel with the strings, i.e. it’s not an angled motion. If you do happen to have a slight pickslant it doesn’t affect the motion, per se, but it does affect the attack. Any more than a few degrees off vertical, and you will notice that one of the pickstrokes will be smooth and the other one will catch and feel unsmooth.

Second, I would suggest not thinking of this as any sort of “bounce”. It’s not what it looks like and not what it feels like to do it. I don’t recall if we ever said this, but again I apologize if we did, because it is really not the right way to think about this. Because the motion is shallow, there is no sensation of crossing over from one side to the other. It feels like a straight line, even though we know from video that it is curved.

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I think so! Yes, I think it was one of your longer talks were you introduced the whole system with the angles (902) etc.

Well, my preface to this should be - this is my understanding of it. I don’t think you said bounce either. Sorry for putting words in your mouth :smile: I am trying to put it out there and see how my understanding of crosspicking resonates and if it makes sense or nonsense :grin::rofl:

I see it like this – one of the strokes takes care of it self, without me really doing anything to escape the plane of the strings. This is very similar to either dwps or uwps and the two players mentioned gives (in my mind) a representation of how this works out.

You already gave two names for the other motion - the dart thrower and the reverse dart thrower - I think this is the “lifting”? I guess I associate stringhopping with bounce and also, crosspicking with a motion where one of the motions is stringhopping or lifting.

Another association it in my mind is ice cream scooping, however, in reality I would probably only scoop one way, towards my body, not away from it.

Thanks, I will try and investigate and see if I can find this in my own playing :sunny:

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That’s is the issue - none of these motions really take care of themselves. If you ask Andy Wood to play fast on a single string, he doesn’t do the 9 o’clock deviation movement. He does the 2 o’clock motion. That’s the automatic one for him that “takes care of itself”. This is why he plays pentatonic lines starting on an upstroke. It is his default fast motion. There is no concept of a 9 o’clock motion that operates by itself in his technique. He’d have to learn it. I’m sure he could of course. But currently he doesn’t really appear to do it.

We have this tendency to take arbitrary ideas like “pure deviation” and paste them on to body parts that don’t work that way most of the time. When you throw a dart, there is no “lifting”. It is several muscles operating together, to produce a smooth motion in a straight line. The researchers we interviewed, who wrote the paper on this, think of the “dart thrower” motion (their term, not mine) as the default motion of the wrist because it occurs in so many daily activities.

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I wonder how the picking motion with hand/arm setup resembles the way we write. I mostly pick with a 2-o-clock-downstroke-escape-motion like Andy Wood when playing fast. When I do it with my hand lying on the strings/bridge/body (depends on the model shape) it looks like my hand is lying on a flat table when writing on a paper (or on the table! bad kids carve “Mötley Crüe” in the tabletop and smoke in the boys room). And the motion is similiar… I think… and I mean real writing, not typing :wink:

Maybe we could all check the relation between both in a very short experiment. I mean, nearly everyone writes since the age of five and when starting with the guitar maybe a certain motion felt familar and we adapted it for the instrument?? I know, only very vague assumptions here. But to have a little data could be interesting. Even if the data is just for the purpose of ensuring how thinks work for our self.

Cool suggestion. I have never really thought to look. Probably because I rarely use a pen any more and I have pretty much lost the ability to do so.

Anyway my writing form is paper-supinated! Much more so than my guitar picking form:

Uh I can’t tell that from this point of view compared to the videos and other pictures I saw from you guitar playing. But I trust you. And I get your objection. Anyway, of course it is not the same in my case, too. I checked it again. But there is a tendency at least for the 2-o-clock-wrist-movement to be similiar. Indeed it feels familiar. And the feeling of a movement is important. Haha forearm rotation is of course not good for witing and Zakk Wylde’s elbow is only for Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Again - I get the objection. I don’t mean it per se, but on a more subtle and subjective level

I’m not objecting! I’m just saying, this is what it looks like when I write. I think it’s a cool suggestion to think about an everyday activity that we probably don’t think much about when we do it. At least I haven’t.

I was taught to write as a child by a total incompetent and as such my handwriting is appalling and my pen-holding form is bizarre.

A couple of years ago I actually thought about fixing it and got a couple of books on handwriting, but by sheer coincidence it was right around that time I discovered Cracking the Code so I’ve been shedding guitar ever since and never worked on my writing.

Thank you for your comments!

Yes, I can’t quite decide on whether the finger anchor is good or bad (both!)… I’ve been using it for some time and it solved the problem of how to rest my arm on the instrument without too much tension in my shoulder (I am tall and have long arms). Tracking is something I still have problems with, whichever pickstroke I use.

On a good day it works quite well though! I’ll have to try and catch it on camera. In the video it does indeed seem bouncy.

I will continue my experimentation. Double escaped picking is a tremendously useful technique and it would be nice to really make it work effortlessly.