I’ve found myself playing licks like this for many years now. I’m not even sure where I picked this one up, but it would be one of my most common patterns. I’m wondering what the best way would be to approach a lick like this? Would you typically use two way pickslanting, or one way and swiping?
So, my take:
I’d use two-way pickslanting. The reason for this is that I’m (normally) primary-down, and I like to start licks on downstrokes if they start on the downbeat (to accent things the “right” way and for general feel purposes).
However, a primary-up guy might do it with swiping. I know I prefer to do things with swiping when I can.
(Someone please point out if I’m wrong here.)
For me, I’d do two way pick slanting at 120bpm if it were more towards 165-180bpm it’d probably be one way upward swiping unless you plan on using the legato escape hatch with a downward slant with it…
Would you use Yngwie style pull offs or would you go for swiping?
This is a classic Yngwie lick, and here’s how he does it:
https://troygrady.com/seminars/volcano/chapter-23-circular-fours/
It’s also a classic Batio lick. It’s addressed in a couple different places in Antigravity so there’s not a single canonical location for it. But the secret sauce is this:
https://troygrady.com/seminars/antigravity/chapter-15-the-swipe/
Both of these solutions illustrate the great conceptual secret of “impossible” alternate picked licks: a lot of famous playing we think of as “strict” and “clean” alternate picking doesn’t actually fit the descriptions of “strict” and “clean” that most aspiring players try to adhere to. Not that they don’t sound clean, and sound like they’re alternate picked, but there’s frequently something “not-so-strict” going on when you slow things down and look closer. As always, this isn’t a sleight against the guys who found these solutions, it’s just that naive assumptions about how they do what they do have caused thousands of guitarists to bark up the wrong tree over the years.
I remember trying “swiping” roughly 25 years ago, but I dismissed it on the grounds that “that can’t be how they’re doing it, I just need to practice more.” I also tried a picking approach CTC would describe as “crosspicking”, but I couldn’t find a way to do it fast, so I assumed nobody really did it that way. And don’t get me started on my attempts to make sense of upward pickslanters like Vinnie Moore when it never occured to me that they had the pick slanted the opposite direction…
And then we’ve got guys like Martin Miller and Andy Wood, who have found ways that they can alternate pick virtually anything (or Batio, who sometimes swipes things that we know he’s also capable of two-way picking), but one of the great lessons from the Yngwie and Batio seminars is that even if you can’t two-way or crosspick on the level of Miller or Wood, you can “fake” strict alternate picking so well without being strict that it sort of becomes just an academic thing. I guess there are some Wood and Steve Morse type licks with wide string jumps that you can’t really fake without decent crosspicking technique, but the large number of bluegrass players who have a handle on crosspicking give the rest of us hope that it’s something you can woodshed.
I just tried it with two-way pickslanting, no (noticeable to me) swiping. With minimal tension I can do it at 16ths around 140. BUT I’m still working on getting my rotational mechanic solid again at those speeds (my formative years were a mess mechanics-wise even if my string crossing was pretty okay back then), so the accuracy can suffer if I’m not paying attention.
So to answer the question: neither, personally. I’d start on a downstroke and go for all 2WPS.
If I were going to try to really blaze on this, I’d do UWPS with swiping.
Personally I see it this way: especially at fast tempos both swiping and the yngwie method are much easier than the `proper’ crosspicking method, and most importantly they sound good enough for me. So, rather than spending ages trying to crosspick the damn thing I would simply choose the way that feels easiest. This will save a lot of time and effort, which can be used to learn new things 
Thanks for all the input guys. I just wanted to pick your brains to see how you all play it.
I find it easier to pick with UWPS and swiping, or doing away with swiping and using some pull offs.
I found TWPS to be ideal for me in this case. I tried a few approaches, but this one was the best. I sometimes have a hard time getting swipes to be as subtle as I want. When it comes to TWPS, it’s easier for me to change the pickslant on an inside string change - on an outside one I sometimes end up hitting the next string and it’s just less comfortable.
In this lick, all the pickslant changes happen on inside string changes (assuming we start with a downstroke). So I start with UWPS, play the first three notes, then rotate to DWPS on the fourth note. The next 4 notes are played with a downward angle and on the single note on the e string I rotate back to UWPS. After that there are 5 notes on the B string. To get back to the e string we need a downward pickslant again. This is the tricky part, because if I want to repeat the lick, I need to start it again with UWPS (two consecutive pickslant changes would be too fast for me). So my solution is to not really change to DWPS on the last string change, but only do a Vinnie Moore/MAB style rotation that escapes the strings and goes back to UWPS.
That’s how I do it, hope it helps somebody.
Thanks for your info, I will try to play it this way later. 