Hey guys. I don’t know if you have seen this video yet. But recently TS shared this video in his Facebook account and I see a clearly pickslanting motion
I’m just sharing. Thanks for watch ^^
Edit: omg this video is 7 years old
Almost everybody is a pickslanter, whether they know it or not. It’s just a basic property of pick mechanics.
The only people that don’t really do 1-way or 2-way pickslanting are people who exclusively do crosspicking (I guess that’s just bluegrass flatpickers?), where everything is a curved double-escape stroke.
In this vid, Stetina has a clear preference for a downward pick slant, but he of course rotates to get 2-way pick slanting in alternate picking across strings.
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Great playing! This is a good example of why we need to look at motions and not try to evaluate the “slant” of the pick. Mainly because looking at he way pick is oriented doesn’t really tell you how it’s moving, and the way it is moving is probably what you want to know to replicate the technique.
There’s a part toward the end when he gets to the higher strings where flexes a little more and appears to be making a more classic USX wrist motion with a downward pickslant. However for the rest of it, it’s not immediately obvious to me what picking motion he’s making. Watching in slow motion, it looks like either a trapped motion or a downstroke escape “DSX” motion. With better quality closeup footage, we’d know more.
I do see the occasional form changes I think you’re probably referring to as “2wps”, but those appear to happen on upstroke string changes which would also imply that the motion is either downstroke escape to begin with, or even just trapped.
What’s clear here is that this is a wrist technique with a flexion-extension type motion and supinated forearm. The grip is also reasonably clear. If you want to try and replicate this, that’s what you’d do.
Sorry for not providing the simple answer @Extase is looking for!
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Very people, at least musicians in my town, don’t do clearly a pickslant. Use a very straight pick motion and tend to make some noise. I think that not everyone knows how to pick efficiently…
When you look at someone like Andy Wood, there is no “pickslant”, most of the time. However he does make an angled picking motion. He uses DSX. I think the reason he doesn’t need the pickslant is because the diagonal motion is shallow, only about 10-15 degrees, and he uses a lot of edge picking. The pickslant is only there to make the attack smooth. It does not create the diagonal motion. If you can get smoothness some other way, then you don’t need the pick to be angled, or so little that it would be hard to see.
It sounds like you know what you’re talking about! I apologize, I don’t mean to pick on you at all. I think it’s our problem with the terminology. When we make more updates to the Primer, we’ll try to make this even clearer.
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Well, his motions are very nice to looking for, and by the way I wrongly call all the thinks that I learned in here as pickslant. I think in my town that too much guitar players tend to use the arm to pick at fast tempo, and they cried because the tensions and pain 
Well I sorry if I have some errors. I speak in Spanish and have a bad English. I should stop calling everything as pickslanting.
Thank you so much for answer!!
Trust me, your English is just fine! Your “errors” are really our errors. We spent years calling everything “pickslanting”, and making no distinction between the pick’s orientation and the pick’s motion. We’re trying to clean that up now.
Re: arm motion, Brendon Small talks about that in our recent interview with him, and he feels relaxed and comfortable when he does it. I know we hear stories of people who don’t like elbow, or who get bad results, but it might be that they’re doing it wrong. Or playing too much. In general, if anything feels like tension, or feels painful, it’s a sign that something is wrong, and you should totally stop doing it. Just in general!
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I think you are right: While slant can make the up and down attacks perfectly symmetrical (a 15 degree angle suggests fifteen degrees of slant for perfect up/down symmetry, etc.), edge picking with a nicely shaped pick contour masks small differences in angle and provides a pretty uniform attack both ways.
Interestingly, I used to use much more edge than is needed… just a little goes a long way!
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