Trying to focus on mostly 2 and 4 note patterns. I don’t know how to get the pick flapping out of mostly the B string for some reason? Around 3:30ish I hit a some double time stuff BPM=1000? and a few more times before the end. I’m going to slow down some of the patterns to get the hand synchronization better, but I feel even after only a few weeks of doing DWPS, I have been able to get speeds that I have never been able to be consistent at using crosspicking.
Thanks!
Monty
Sounds and looks nice. The Dava picks have a tendency to boss you around a little because of that “flap point” in the middle. It’s like having a limb with an extra joint that you have no control over. How do you go with picking with a regular pick?
The tempo doesn’t change at the time point you mentioned but you went from swinging 8ths to 16th triplets.
I’d love to see what this looks like after a couple of weeks with a stiffer pick like a jazz or big stubby. I reckon you’ll own it.
Thanks Jakku!
The flapping seems to happen with whatever pick I use. I was trying to do 1/16th notes. Back to the drawing board! I haven’t worked on triplets too much yet using DWPS.
Monty
As long as you play evens, mechanically it’s the same as playing 2nps. I’ve had that flop problem as well because I had developed a tendency to slant 2 ways even on one string which of course is completely unnecessary
Great playing as usual!
This is an interesting clip Monty that can help a lot of people. Because it highlights the fact that just holding the pick with the appearance of a downward slant isn’t really the whole story when it comes to pickslanting. It’s the picking movement that really matters.
Specifically, you’re using two new movements in this clip, which I don’t think you were using in the previous clip, and one of these movements is “more” downward pickslanty than the other.
The first movement, everything before 3:30, where you’re doing swing eighths. Yes you’ve altered the grip to be more dwps in appearance. And yes you’re playing two and four note patterns… but can you feel the rocking movement in the arm as you play these parts? The pick isn’t moving in a purely straight line trajectory toward the guitar body.
If you watch this in slow motion, you can see that the downstrokes tend to move horizontally toward the next higher string, and sometimes even have a little rising tail on them. This despite the downward slant of the pick. That is a crosspicking style movement. Because you’ve altered the trajectory here to be more like dwps, the downstrokes no longer fully escape, so it’s not really a full-fledged crosspicking movement in the sense that you can use it to play any number of notes per string. But the key here is that this is not the very rapid straight-line movement we associate with downward pickslanting. It’s somewhere in between.
Whole different ball game. If you slow this down in the youtube player, this difference should become apparent. The picking hand is much more rigid, and the pick follows a straight-line trajectory into the strings, and back out again. The upstrokes pull almost straight up into the air. This is classic downward pickslanting.
The key point here is this: It’s not downward pickslanting that is making this “fast”. It’s that the movement is linear. You can have no pickslant at all and make a straight line picking movement that is fast. And you can have a straight line picking movement with an upward slant that is fast. But the reason your swing eighths playing isn’t as fast as your double time playing is because the movement is different, plain and simple.
So, where does this leave you? Well, you have three different movements (at least) that you can choose from.
If you want to play moderate speed swing stuff, I think the finger crosspicking technique from your earlier clip is actually a little more flexible than the “dwps swing” form you’re using here, since it allows you to play any number of notes per string. For Martino-style playing where you say in position and play combinations of 1, 2, and 3 notes per string, I would use that form - it’s a great technique and a lot of players would like to have it. I would like to think there’s more speed there too if you want it - you just have to recognize the technique for what it is, and work on those movements specifically. Martin Miller’s technique is similar and he gets a lot of mileage out of it.
For very fast double time stuff where you can arrange lines to be even numbers of notes per string, your downward pickslanting technique will work great for that. You can also experiment with slowing down that movement and keeping the straight line form, without lapsing back to the rocking motion. That would work well for non-swing rock grooves.
The dwps swing form seems less interesting to me just because you cover those bases better with the crosspicking technique. But that’s up to you.
Options!
Great work here.
So in other words when @MontyCraig is cross picking style he is better off doing that from a neutral position? It would make more sense to not do the cross picking mechanics from the DWPS angle? I would assume cross picking from DWPS angle would cause a lot of swiping, hopping, n stuff?
This may be true, it may not, I don’t know. But in this case, I’m not really making a general statement, just looking at the two clips Monty has posted and comparing them. And the first one very clearly has no problem at all getting over the strings for those kinds of lines. It also appears to work pretty differently, with a finger component, so again, different animal. But it looks pretty consistent, and gets results, and I think it probably still has more speed in it. So why not use it.
@MontyCraig if you get a chance to film a clip of the original movement, but from this closeup angle, that would be instructive to look at. In fact, doesn’t even have to be this close - can be a little farther back so we can get a look at what forearm component it may have. Just keep the same angle, toward the picking hand, as you’ve done here - good work on this.
@Troy @Hanky_Pooh @Jakku Thanks for all the great comments! What a great Christmas gift! I’ll be glad to post my regular style, but just for info, I have struggled for many years to get past 220 to 240 BPM swinging 1/8th with my regular crosspicking style. That’s why this is so exciting for me, even though right now, I feel like a beginner and am having to learn a whole new vocabulary! I think one thing that helps me in the DWPS style position is the planting of my hand on the body of the guitar. It gives me balance to go faster. Plus, I have some cool sweeping ideas I use in a similar way to the Jimmy Bruno stuff to share as well. I am working on getting a two camera setup for better clarity. I’ll get on some more videos this week! Also, any ideas about how to hold the right hand for DWPS on an arch top style guitar would be great!
The rest stroke of a sweep is the perfect trainer for pickslant trajectory rather than picking parallel with a slanted pick, as @Troy differentiated in his post. You just have to pull out at the same angle you went in but the opposite direction (same slant).
Well, actually rest stroke doesn’t help with pickslanting. In fact, focusing on rest stroke helps with just making reststroke. When I do large motions I have 2 reststrokes: one after downstroke and one after upstroke, which means my pick trajectory is parallel to body. Moreover - sweeping helps to train that straight parallel to body trajectory (if you’re doing sweeping fast enough).
I disagree. Ascending sweeping is a downward pick slant movement. Descending sweeping is an upward pickslant movement. Rest strokes are the original “pick slant” even before there was a pick.
Seems like you’re confusing two different conceptions. It doesn’t matter how pick is slanted itself (which direction it’s pointing). It’s not a pickslanting. As @Troy mentioned above what is matter is a trajectory - whether it goes from/to guitar body or it’s parallel to body.
So, ascending sweep movement usually done with picks tip looking a bit up, and you may think that this is ‘downward pickslanting’. It’s not.
Then you start to move your pick and - in order to make this fast and clean - you use trajectory across all that strings. Which is parallel to guitar body. Which is ‘zero pickslanting’.
Although, sweeping is really easier for those who use pickslanting in normal playing, because they already have necessary pick angle.
Well aware of said trajectory. If you you trace the path a pick lays out from the point it leaves one string, inward towards the rest stroke position on the next, and then back up through an upstroke of the string just picked (not the rest string), that is the classic pick goes in, pick goes back out downward pickslant move. I’m not talking about an arpeggio here, just for clarification. I’m talking about exiting one string and using the adjacent string as a resting or bounce point for the pick to trace out the same slanted line of motion, as Troy has suggested in the past.
This is an interesting and important discussion! And it underscores the ultimate need for a CTC glossary (which we know Troy and the gang are going to create at some point).
To my mind, DWPS can refer to two things: the resting downward slanted orientation of the pick itself (e.g., Albert Lee), or the angled pick path/trajectory that goes beneath the plane of the strings on downstrokes and away from the plane of the strings on upstrokes (e.g., Yngwie, EJ, etc.). For the former, you can switch strings after downstrokes, as when Albert crosspicks using the combined motion mechanics to achieve the orthogonal path of the pick. For the latter, the whole Yngwie five-rule DWPS system becomes possible and the angled pick path can be specifically practiced using the rest stroke technique.
I’m not seeing things. I do rest strokes when play with large motions (on acoustic guitar usually) and it has nothing to do with pickslant. Here’s the example (I used my electric guitar because my webcam is mounted on it):
as you can see I may do reststrokes on upstrokes or on downstrokes - it doesn’t really matter. I use from zero pickslanting to upward pickslanting. On speed passages I use UPWS only (although I try to learn DWPS).
As for sweeping. You just can’t do it without moving your pick parallel to guitar body. Unless you try to do some kind of Eric Johnson slow bounce technique.
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I guess this kind of misunderstanding appears after Ctc )) I think that Troy believed that picking motion is more or less symmetrical in terms of trajectory - which means that knowing angle of a pick gives you knowing of it’s trajectory. And I think it’s true for majority of guitar players. However, after his series about pickslanting there’re a lot of guys appeared, who want to learn another way of slanting which is not common for them. But learn new pick grip is easy, it’s much harder to relearn old mechanical habits. Consequently we now have guys who use some pickslanting while moving wrong (I’am a living example - trying to learn DWPS, but doing the same UPWS movement even with my pick slanted down).
I think the reason people are relating rest stroke to dwps is that the rest stroke is a way to take a “string hopping” movement and force it to become more of a linear dwps movement. That is, it is a way to get someone who starts their pickstroke above the plane of the strings to end their pickstroke below the plane of the strings.
Agree. And for the same reason it doesn’t work for people who start downstroke below that plane (like regular upward pickslanter)
And “downstroke” is an important distinction I didn’t make above: I assumed with my DWPS bias that “starting a pickstroke above the plane of the strings” necessarily implied downstroke, but that is only true in the DWPS case. In theory, maybe there are people who could be helped by doing “upstroke” rest strokes, though offhand I can’t think of an example of a high profile UWPS player who does a “rest stroke” on upstrokes.
Actually I do both reststrokes (after upstroke and after downstroke) when playing acoustic. It doesn’t help with slanting however. Seems like these things are quite unrelated.
“Rest stroke” necessarily implies “below the plane of the strings”, though “below the plane of the strings” does not necessarily imply “rest stroke”. So while rest stroke is not necessary for pickslanting, rest strokes always have consequences related to pickslanting. Sometimes it is useful to use those consequences as a teaching aid.