Thanks for posting! Sounds great. It’s a little hard to see what’s going on here in this video, but in general, this looks like some kind of double escape motion. (We’ve stopped saying “crosspicking” because it was confusing.) The question is whether it is the good kind or the tensiony / slow kind.
My test for everything is speed and smoothness over accuracy. Meaning, if you’re using a motion which is speed-limited in some way, whether that’s stringhopping or something else that’s not efficient, then one side effect of this is that you might not be able to go fast enough to cause mistakes. I know that sounds weird, but we’ve seen players posting clips here where they describe playing as fast as they can go, and say they feel “tension”, but the clip sounds perfect in terms of accuracy and musicality. In those cases, the only thing “wrong” with the clip is the motion feel, and the fact that it was near the limit of its capability.
So that’s one question, i.e. can you do this motion really fast to where it gets flattened out and you hit wrong strings? If so, that’s good, because that means the motion is efficient. If you can’t go faster into the mistake zone, then the motion might not be efficient, and that could be the cause of the tension.
I don’t really think pure alternate players really “play anything”, I just think that’s the impression they have. For example, when you transcribe players like George Benson (when he’s doing bebop) and Tal Farlow, who are both dwps / one-way economy type players, you tend to see fretboard shapes you almost never see from pure alternate players. Tal especially — it’s amazing how he gets around the neck with almost no pattern-based lines in his vocabulary, at least not by modern standards. Of course pure alternate is great when you are forced to play things as-written, like classical. I like all these approaches, they each offer something.
