I love this guy, he’s really gifted, but when he plays the lick we never need to hear again I’m like, “Crap!” It’s the lick I’m trying to master right now. 
At the 43 second mark:
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Funny you should post that but I’ve been working on exactly that today.
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In fairness to me I was working on swapping between phrasing it in fours and threes.
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Guthrie is a fantastic player but sometimes in his teaching he perpetuates the old stereotype “you shouldn’t play patterns / fast with no feel etc.” (I’m oversimplifying for brevity). In reality we can hear instances of “mathematical patterns” both in his and Shawn’s playing, yet they can still sound musical and beautiful!
EDIT: Vinnie Moore (haven’t mentioned him in a while 
) is for example a master in creating musical ideas out of the 4s pattern, among others.
Agreed.
Moreover, Shawn played descending fours specifically all the time.
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Is that what that melodic pattern is? Descending fours?
Yes, that’s descending 4s.
Is that because the lick is so fast and difficult to play it’s intimidating or is it because it’s just a lick that merely doesn’t sound good?
Descending 4s is the rock guitar equivalent of “the lick”
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Personally I think it’s better to learn the cliches and then you can choose to play them or not, rather than refuse to learn them and then not play them because you can’t.
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I know he says that on the REH tape but it’s really not, there’s a note missing in his version. It’s one of the many instances you and I have already discussed where he says one thing and does another.
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Possibly… but if you’ve spent hours woodshedding something there’s a got to be a huge temptation to use it!
I guess the ideal is you learn the cliche, master it and then quickly move on to something more interesting than it by modifying the cliche until it’s no longer a cliche!
I seem to remember a video with Marty Friedman where he discussed this kind of thing, taking a well known lick and then thoughtfully modifying it to make it interesting again.
I think Guthrie’s point was that nobody needs to hear things that sound blatantly like something you work on purely to gain technique in a musical context. Licks and ideas have a sell-by date I guess 
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There is no doubt about this. You are what you eat. If you practice something to the point where it is totally automatic, and you are an improvisational player, it is going to come back out and you won’t be able to stop it. Unless you specifically learn something to replace it. If you don’t want that to happen, don’t practice that thing and definitely don’t use it while improvising.
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I think that’s just the all picked version? The legato version is a 12 note pattern with only 5 notes picked, but I think all the notes are there.
If you pop this into quarter speed you can hear that the first rep of each sequence only has three notes:
Descending down-up string changes aren’t in his dwps vocabulary so a few changes are in order. This allows each 11-note sequence to start on a downstroke.
The upstroke version of this would probably have just ‘worked’ for him, since it’s similar to the string changes we see in things like his stepwise pentatonic fives pattern. But he did the downstroke version and these changes are more or less what we would expect.
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That’s very interesting, but I’m not sure I follow what exactly is going wrong here.
The standard descending 4s pattern as a 12 note sequence across two strings is broken down across the strings as 3+1, 2+2, 1+3
It sounds to me like the first 4 has only the first 3 notes audible, but the last note, which is on the next string, is inaudible. What I don’t understand is that the inaudible note looks to be fretted in the video, and the note would supposedly be hammered (from nowhere). Later in the sequence, I think I hear that hammered note, albeit not too clearly.
I don’t really understand. I’d think that particular hammer isn’t consistent, and that’s why the note is usually inaudible. I’m not sure what this has to do with pickslanting or how it accommodates the sequence beginning on the downstroke.
I don’t think it’s being fretted. I haven’t stepped through the whole thing but I’m not seeing it in the first sequence and I’m definitely not hearing it. Keep in mind YouTube slow motion is usually off sync-wise so that may be what’s tripping up the visuals here.
This sequence never sounded like fours, legato or not, and I think that’s because it’s just not fours.
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I’m not too proud to not sound derivative at this stage of my development.