The short answer is no there is no difference in speed of a ‘pickslant’ - that’s just the orientation of the pick against the string. But when you change your setup in the ways you are seeing here - great photos everyone! - then you might also be changing your picking motion. So what you are really asking is whether there are differences in speed between different picking motions.
And the answer to that is yes probably. Elbow motion is the fastest we have measured. Some people think forearm is also faster than wrist. Is it as fast as elbow motion? Don’t know.
And also keep in mind lots of players use combination motions which blend wrist and forearm, or wrist and other motions.
So to summarize, what you are changing here in these pictures is what I call the ‘setup’. The setup doesn’t have a Speed because it’s not a motion. But if you use different motions, they might have diffeeent speeds. But… they can all be done fast enough for most people!
Yes, this is a bit more like the Gypsy way.
It works allright but as i said it is limited for some stuff and on el with distortion you would have to bring the hand down to avoid noise; you can still have the downward pickslant though.
But you are not to far away with your hand so you would have to do just a bit of adjusting.
One thing I’m noticing is that I can have a lighter touch with upward pickslanting when I ascend, and that’s an awesome feeling. I want to flutter across the strings fast and light, and downard pickslanting seems to be harder work.
What are you referring to is know as the orientation of the wrist “supinated” and the gibsy technique requires to have the wrist more supinaded than the pic that I uploaded… and actually it’s something that I do as well… is just a bit harder to mute the strings so the left hand have to be spot when it comes to muting the strings… and that’s my point… when I do downward pickslanting… as you see in the pic I tend to orientate the wrist slightly away from the strings (supinated) only leaving one side of my wrist for muting. On the contrary, with upward pickslanting I tend to “pronate” the wrist to the guitar therefore, there is more string contact in my opinion… and it’s easier to mute the strings because, I am just slightly lifting the ulnar side of the wrist… anyway, best regards
Thanks for your explanation! 
it’s seems that there is a relationship between the set up of the wrist and the slanting of the pick… Downward pickslanting seems to require to hit the outside of the strings therefore, the more “supinated” your wrist is… the more you are hitting the outside of the string allowing your upstrokes to break away farder from the strings therefore the switch of the strings get easier in faster speed . Upward pickslanting requires the wrist to be “pronated” so you hit the inside of the strings allowing you to get out of the strings with downstroke easier… the more pronated your wrist is, the farder your away downstrokes are from the strings… it would it be awesome to hear any comments from you about this!! I don’t wanna start preaching wrong staments to my students
Hey everyone… I had an “aha!” moment reading through this thread. I’ve been trying to learn DWPS pentatonic licks ala Eric Johnson and Zakk Wylde for months now and I’m having a hard time performing it smooth and clean. Now I think I know why - I’m using a Gypsy style picking when I try to play faster.
I try to keep my palm anchored on the bridge, but my wrist angles and my arm lifts up in the air but as I try to push my picking, making it hard for me to mute the lower E and a strings. Could be tension as well. Any suggestions on how to fix this? Anchor my hand on the bridge and play the licks slowly?
I noticed that I have no problem (or less problems) performing descending 2nps using UWPS. Seems more intuitive to me, like I can use the weight of my hand or gravity to make my hand track to the next string. That’s how it feels but it could just be because I practiced certain licks that way for so long, unconsciously.
As i said, you can have a downward slant with muting all the strings at once with the outside palm (pinky side) of your hand very easy; you don’t need to lift your hand away from the strings. With upward slanting you can only mute the lower strings.
So my suggestion to you (if you want to play with a downward pick slant) would still be to lower your hand near/on the bridge for having more overall control.
I believe the Gypsy way of doing this has also to do with geting more volume. They mostly play acoustic without amplification.
On electric you don’t need to do this and you have far more control by resting the outside palm on or near the bridge.
I made a little vid.
I am, not so good in playing when not resting the palm, for showing what i mean it is good enough.
You can see that when i am resting my palm the downward slant does not change, i can mute all the strings very easy and have good control.
Cool, thanks! Yeah, I get what you are saying. I guess my problem is that I can’t stay in that position, my hand/arm defaults to gypsy style if I don’t pay attention. I am thinking positioning my hand properly and playing the pentatonic patterns slow until my arm learns to stay on the bridge. Maybe I am using too much forearm rotation vs wrist?
@Cherphas. I am mostly using the movement where the pick goes in out of the strings, the turning a doorknob movement. You can see it better in this vid.
However, this motion with the downward slant has it’s limitations and therefore i am using a different technique for years with less slant. Nowadays i am trying to get the Martin Miller technique down.
Hi David! I think you may be referring to wrist flexion and extension, not supination. Pronation and supination are motions of the forearm, not the wrist. It’s the turning motion EVH uses for his tremolo, for example. You can also use a fixed amount of forearm supination or pronation in many styles of playing.
The examples you’re showing here - again, great photos - primarily demonstrate the effect of wrist flexion. That’s the bend in the wrist which creates the gap under the arm. Very often wrist flexion is accompanied by some amount of forearm supination. However, again, flexion-extension is the wrist part, and supination and pronation are the forearm components.
To make matters more confusing, downward pickslanting does not require flexion of the wrist or supination of the forearm, and upward pickslanting does not require pronation of the forearm. I will apologize for this since I know the Pickslanting Primer gets this wrong currently. The newer material we are filming now will be much clearer about these releationships.
Regarding the gypsy-style “flexed / supinated” approach, or the less flexed style where you rest on the strings or body, they both work fine. The lack of muting isn’t a huge problem, especially with clean tone. Here’s a recent instagram clip demonstrating a medium flexed / medium supinated setup:
Even with high gain, a phrase like this sounds mostly fine, because when the fretting hand gets to the low strings, the fleshy parts of the fretting fingers naturally mute all the upper strings. So any noise “erases” itself in the middle of the lick. Michael Angelo Batio is also famous for a flexed setup, and even when he is not using his string dampener device, you don’t hear too much noise, because the fretted notes are louder than the noise.
But the lower strings will keep unmuted. If i do the gypsy style with distortion the lower strings will give to much noise for my taste.
When i play for instance string aperggio with overdrive, downward slanting and extended wrist it is gonna be a mess because of the ringing strings.
When you use the Andy wood extended wrist style, you can still have muting - but the muting comes from the center of the palm, between the eminences, or from the watch band area of the wrist. It does not come from the side of the hand. That’s the trick. Reorient your arm accordingly.
When i want to do that i have to lower my hand so far that it is nearly in resting postion. Maybe it is a physical thing, how the build of your hand and how thick the palm is…?
nothing in the world like fast ascending 3nps 16ths with one way slanting
uwps makes it work
g---------------------------------------------------9–12–9--11–12 etc
d----------------7–10–7--9–10–9--10–12
a----7–9--10
pretty much straight off of PG Intense Rock
Thanks again for the vid! It confirmed a few things for me so I can move forward with my practice. I practiced pentatonics licks a bit last night and I am making progress. I think I get frustrated because I can’t play as fast and clean as EJ and Troy right away lol But there is definitely a difference from when I first started on this and now. Progress!
Very nice to hear i could be of any help.
I had (have) the same problem for a long time. When I need to “perform” in DWPS orientation, my body automatically wants to raise the hand from the strings. I guess it’s the body that tenses up to perform a motion that’s not really burnt in yet. Not sure how this would help executing the picking better though.
I worked quite a lot on this and I can definitely control it better now. But occasionally when I’m video recording myself I can still see the hand lifting at times. Gah!
I think that if you just keep working on it consciously, the body will adapt eventually.
This a great exercise Troy! I am using the same technique now with a bit less downward slant i guess.
What has been essential for me lately is the stringtracking as you do it in this example.
From the shoulder and more in a straight line as supposed to what i was doing before with a more fixed wrist moving as a part of a circle towards the bridge from low to high.
The tracking in a more straight line works so much better for me.
Also what is see in this vid is when you get to the lower strings it looks like there is more thumb/indexfinger motion due to the fact that you fix the other fingers under the high E string. It is an optical illusion because you are making the same motion over all the strings.
Isn’t this also a bit the case with Martin Miller?
In the last interview, where he shows some examples with his fingers stretched instead of fixed unfer the high E string, it seems that the thumb/indexfinger motion is less present.