Hi all ,
I’ve been playing guitar (and bass) in the NYC area more or less seriously for over 30 years, in mostly what you might call a blues-punk style with some Country pedal steel/Chicken-Picking etc. thrown in, but always struggled to get my speed up. Tried the Troy Stetina book back when it came out, but never got far with his recommendation (at least as I read it) to keep the pick at a 90 degree angle when alternate picking, as the string-hop issue reared its ugly head. At times over the years I’ve given up on getting past my picking speed plateau, concentrating more on the left hand and legato for speed. More recently I’ve been trying again to get the picking hand going and came across Troy’s slant approach. I realized it’s something I’d already been doing occasionally, more or less by accident, but I always felt it was somehow “wrong” based on what I’ve read in various books and magazines. So Troy’s approach made a lot of sense, and I bought the Pickslanting Primer. Some of it is not directly usable in my style, but the concepts come across and I’m trying to pick up bits and pieces I can use from the various lessons.
I’m currently trying to get the Eric Johnson pentatonic 5 stuff going, but the fingers are getting a bit tied up on the fretting for some of the string changes and Troy doesn’t spend much time showing his left hand. I wish the tab included left-hand fingering!
I am having similar issues in both the descending and ascending 5s, but to keep it simple, can someone who has this stuff down answer this question: for the tab named “Fives - Asc”, in moving from the 9th note in the tab to the 10th–where both notes are fretted at the 14th fret, but the 9th is on the D string and the 10th on the A string, what left-hand fingering is going on there? Going by what Troy said earlier in the EJ video, I would expect the index finger to be on the 12th fret from the previous (8th) note, so the 9th note of the riff (14th fret) would then be the ring finger. How do you then get to the 14th fret of the string below in a way you can play cleanly at speed?? Hopefully this image uploads, it’s the 2 red-circled notes I am wondering about:
Do you roll the ring finger down and use it to play the 10th note, or do a partial barre? I can’t get either of those clean at speed. And I can’t lift that finger and move it to the string below at any speed, either. What am I missing? I’m willing to put in the work, but at this point I don’t want to waste any more time going down more dead ends. I’ve wasted enough of that already! 
So if anyone can shed some light, I’d appreciate it.
I also find I can play the open single-string tremolo stuff pretty quickly, but struggle a bit with the synchronization once the left-hand fingers come into play, for example on the classic chromatic 4-notes/4-fingers per string exercises. I did see this thread and am trying to work through the examples there: https://forum.troygrady.com/t/picking-fretting-synchronization/2379
If anyone has any other techniques that work for them, I’d love to see 'em.
Thanks,
Andy