Let's talk about the ideal alternate picker

[farren]

Imagine you’re a guitar teacher. You have one student, and this student is only going to be learning from you–they’re not interested in YouTube, nor do they have favorite players, though you are welcome to introduce music from your favorites. You control all the influences. They’re young and have enormous potential and you’re being paid a ridiculous amount of money by some oligarch to ensure this kid achieves virtuoso levels by the time they are adults. They want to be good at practically every technique a la Guthrie Govan. They’re not prone to straining (they understand their limitations), and they find upward and downward slant postures more or less equally comfortable.

The kid has enormous potential and you have carte blanche.

When teaching alternate picking, no matter how you intend to get them there, where do you aim for your student to end up? My hypothesis is that most of us will say the same thing. Can we agree that, in a perfect scenario like the one I’ve tried to outline above, an endgame where the player is neutral (practically no slant) when playing on one string and seamlessly transitions to whichever pickslant is called for when preparing to change strings is mechanically ideal?

I realize every player is different. I’m not trying to criticize the technique of primary DWPS or primary UWPS players. But if you could design the ultimate guitarist in a simulation, would they not be two-way pickslanters with more or less neutral angle when not transitioning? Isn’t this the ideal?

[milehighshred]

Isn’t this the ideal?

I feel, that what is ideal, is are they able to play their intended notes.

From what I’ve learned, nobody sticks with one type of pick slant. It varies. One slant tends to be preferred over the other from person to person. But, you said ideal.

As a teacher, I do not influence a student to do either or. I encourage playing with accuracy. I let their bodies do what is needed. I talk about types of slanting only when I feel it’s necessary, i.e. when the time is right.

Picking from a neutral slant (or no slant at all)? Well, the pick is going to go at some degree of slant no matter what. A straight on pick against the string with zero angle will result in resistance from the string. This has been my experience. This is also why a lot of players talk about angling the pick. I just use beveled picks. I don’t make an effort to angle my pick as it feels weird to me.

The ideal alternate pick would be able to go from UWPS to DWPS to cross picking, etc. whenever the need arises to be able to execute whatever piece of music they wanted to play.

From personal experience, I thought that I WAS picking from neutral. It wasn’t until @Troy sent me a video analysis of my playing that revealed to me what I was actually doing. Sometimes I’m a cross picker. Sometimes I do UWPS. Sometimes the opposite. Sometimes it’s both.

I don’t think it’s physically possible to do zero slant picking.

I did not proofread this, and I’m about to submit my reply. Oh lord…

[farren]

That’s a considerate thing for you to say as a teacher, and it’s the right philosophy. You don’t necessarily want a student like the one I describe and a teacher like the one I’m asking you to be for the sake of the hypothetical is the kind of teacher (not to mention the kind of parents) who can screw kids up in the long-term beyond depriving them of a normal childhood.

I’m deliberately trying to communicate a very restrictive hypothetical here. This student won’t even pick up a pick unless you tell them to. Think of them (it?) as a learning machine, and you want your learning machine to achieve the greatest accuracy and speed while expending the least effort both in practice time and in execution. If you don’t guide them in a specific direction, they have no direction, and there’s no asking for their opinion on what feels right because they do not know. Program them based purely on mechanics. So, what would you do?

Maybe the latter hypothetical (building the perfect player in a simulation) is easier to grasp. It’s certainly easier to communicate and I could have saved a lot of typing by just presenting it.

I actually said ‘practically no slant’ because I knew someone would say ‘there’s always some slant’. Also, cutting into the string with the edge of the pick is rotating the pick on a different axis than the sort of slanting towards the ceiling or floor ‘pickslanting’ in our sense refers to. To achieve speed, it certainly helps to cut into the string a bit, you’re right. That’s one of the many variables I’ve deliberately left out of this, however, because I don’t think it’s clear what the ideal angle is and, considering the affect on attack, this takes us into dynamics.

Cross-picking can be done with a neutral middle of the pendulum (versus the Albert Lee slant), so I consider it compatible with the neutral two-way pickslanter I’m talking about–yeah, I’d definitely make sure they master that.

I should add, because you’re such a good teacher and have access to so much funding, you can communicate mechanics clearly without being able to string skip while playing 18 notes per second, and you can fly out the world’s greatest guitarists for in-home demonstrations whenever you want. In other words, while a teacher’s style typically has a great effect on how they teach and what they teach, you don’t have to have chops from another planet and your student isn’t going to mimic your personal style unless you explicitly instruct them to.

Edit: Preemptive response to someone telling me “there is no ideal”: Imagine a person with an artificial brain, but all other parts are biological. Their brain can be programmed by another person, or they can program it themselves instantly writing to ‘muscle memory’ the sort of complex motor routines that take us much repetition and much sleep to retain. They’re effectively a CNC machine with biological servos and pistons. Better learning capabilities than us 100% biological humans, but with the same moving parts. Like a CNC machine in a factory, this cyborg can be programmed to accurately carry out their task as quickly as possible while expending the least energy with the slowest wear on their ‘tooling’.

To make our ideal guitarist a little more flexible while wasting a miniscule amount more energy, I’m overlooking cases like the Paul Gilbert descending sixes thing where, technically, you would be expending less energy by maintaining an upward pick slant the entire time and not going back to neutral in between string changes (since you don’t need downward pickslanting for this lick at all unless you go back up the neck afterward, like in Technical Difficulties). There can be exceptions like that, but I’m trying to speak generally here (this is complicated enough :P) and I don’t think these cases discredit the simple ‘ideal’. Besides, that’s a simple lick and we want our cyborg to focus on monstrous feats to prove their virtuosity as a complicated machine makes absurdly tiny transistors rather than the broomsticks an autolathe could manage.

Now, with real humans, it’s probably impossible to figure out what the true ideal mechanics of alternate picking are. However, I feel like we know enough that we can speculate as to ideal technique, and that’s all I’m asking people to do. A lot of people find such hypotheticals worthless. That’s fine–you need not play along.

[Sorc]

Well if you want an ideal alternate picker, TWPS and a good crosspicking technique would definitely be the ideal. But is alternate picking itself the ideal technique? Even though I’ve been practicing TWPS a lot lately, I still often prefer a DWPS only approach. That’s because I prefer the sound of it. The combination of alternate picking, sweeping and occasional legato usually sounds better to me than pure alternate picking, which can be a bit too robotic at times.

The reason why I don’t think we can objectively say that a technique is ideal is because our preferenes in tone are subjective. It’s definitely helpful to be able to use techniques which will allow you to play anything, but maybe you will end up focusing mostly on DWPS for example, because it gives you your ideal sound.

[eric_divers]

Not only this, but if you look at other instruments, “super-high speed staccato lines” aren’t really something you hear from, say, a violin. Past a certain speed on other instruments you mostly hear (if I’m not mistaken) slurred lines. Believe it or not, the thread I just posted (“when do you stop”) was not inspired by this post, but it sure ties in well.

[Troy]

The problem with this question is that ‘ideal’ is a value judgement for which there is no objective standard. What is the ‘ideal’ technique for Gypsy jazz? Well, if by ‘ideal’ you mean ‘sounding like Django’, the answer is Gypsy technique. Your hypothetical neutral-slanting crosspicking virtuoso will fail to be a Gypsy virtuoso without it, will fail to get the sound, etc.

If instead by ideal you mean ‘learnable in the shortest amount of time by the largest number of people of varying ability levels’, well that might point to downward pickslanting. Or it might mean upward pickslanting. We don’t know! We’d have to control for lots of variables, and test it. I’d love to know the answer actually.

Or how about this: Which technique leads to the greatest creative output, as defined by some objective measure of unique phrases created, or songs written, in a fixed amount of time for a given level of mastery? Certainly again, the sheer variety of players who use dwps and have created radically different sounds and styles - it could very well be that it’s the creative winner. George Benson does not sound like Django or Yngwie or Zakk Wylde or Eric Johnson and yet there are core mechanical similarities there. It could very well be that a limited mechanical palette which is easy to learn in a short amount of time, results in a greater variety of musical output. And it could be that if you test this, it comes out as the clear winner every time. Maybe. Or maybe not. Again, I’d like to know the answer.

In short, I think we would all be way better off to not think in subjective terms like ‘ideal’, and always think about things in concrete terms that can be tested, and learned from. There are tons of great questions worth asking if we can actually figure out ways of doing so.