Here is my normal right hand style. I’d love any comments and suggestions. I tend to plant my wrist on the bottom strings or just free floating above the strings. I notice my birdie finger sometimes starts to stick out, but I have been working really hard to keep it relaxed.
Thanks for the comments in advance!
Monty
Here’s some upward pickslanting from “Joy” by John McLaughlin and Shakti. I just saw him on the Meeting of the Spirits tour Sunday!
Great work on these! This planting of the hand, as you describe it, is a very common upward pickslanting posture. You will see this in the David Grier and Molly Tuttle interviews. And you can also check out a very similar example to your first clip in the Gary Moore thread on the forum here:
Pat Martino also uses a similar approach, which again would lend itself well to the kinds of lines that you and Gary play here.
The second clip is interesting because as you point out it is a very straightforward pure upward pickslanting approach where the pick moves in more linear fashion with respect to the camera. A lot of players who can do what you’re doing in the first clip have trouble doing what you’re doing in the second, and vice versa. You seem to be able to turn these modes on an off, which is a great start.
What I would not do is the unmeasured tremolo stuff to start phrases, because it leads to the lack of synchronization of the hands that we’re hearing in the second clip. We’re also hearing and seeing some swiping in that clip. This is what happens when you use upward pickslanting, and attempt to switch strings using an upstroke which unintentionally plays the open string below it.
A very simple thing you can do is to work out a McLaughlin-style phrase that does not begin with tremolo, and specifically switches strings only after downstrokes. That will allow you to use the full speed of your uwps approach, but in a more synchronized fashion, with no swiping. It doesn’t have to be note-for-note what you may have transcribed from the McLaughlin tune. In fact, it could be an adapted version of one of his licks, specifically designed as a uwps learning tool. That would be cool to see.
Yes, John does also use temporary two-way pickslanting interspersed in his uwps playing, and he’s a master of it. In this respect he is a classic “primary up” player, in that he has a default posture which he occasionally and temporarily switches away from. But that would be the next step beyong the straight uwps stuff, once you get that sorted out.
Great work!
Hey Troy,
Thanks for the note and all the free videos on youtube! I watched the Molly Tuttle interview and I do a lot of the same things. I use the curved strumming style, uwps and planted hand on the fast stuff and cross picking. I try to play free handed/unplanted crosspicking as well. I love Martino and would love to play that fast. I feel that for playing bebop lines, I have hit a wall with the planting the back of my wrist. When I get to about BPM = 230 to 240 swing speed my eighth notes fall apart and my hand gets tight. I want to bump up to the 300 to 350BPM speed of the fastest bop tempos. I have been working on Up Down picking and that has seemed to help with descending type licks, but putting it all together in the heat of the moment improvising is tough changing pick directions. I’ll take the tremolo out and start on the runs. Downward pickslanting is still in it’s infancy for me. I’ll post some of that in a few weeks when I get that better. I’m hoping a combinations of techniques will help me get to the next level.
Thanks!
Monty
Monty - are you picking every note or throwing in some legato? Many a bebopper throws in legato to get through string changes, play odd note groupings, and most importantly, play with a swing feeling or horn-like sound…
I would stay focused on what’s working. You have plenty of speed with the planted hand approach, as your McLaughlin attempt shows. 350bpm eights is 175 sixteenths and you’re already playing that fast. So you’re already there!
Again, as an exercise, try composing some lines of the type that you want to play, but make sure the final note on every string is a downstroke. Alternatively, you can do what @geoffk is suggesting and use legato. But again, make sure the last picked note is a downstroke. So for example, you could write a line where the last two notes on the string are downstroke, and then pulloff. Or downstroke and then hammer. As long as your picking on each string terminates on a downstroke, you’ll be able to use your McLaughlin-style technique and you shouldn’t experience too much in the way of tension.
I was slurring in the first video and all picking in the second video.
I guess i feel that the raw speed is there, but I can’t just play anything I want, it’s only worked out things. I’d like to be free to just go anywhere and not worry about the odd notes per string. I have started doing two notes, and three note per string stuff.
There is no such thing as going anywhere, in music or language or any other improvisational art. There are tons of grammatical rules at play in everything I say. And yet I feel “free” when I speak. The answer isn’t fewer grammatical rules — it’s more words and better access to them, on the fly.
McLaughlin’s playing is extremely patterned. He uses the same even-numbered fretboard shapes and picking patterns constantly. But he can connect them over all the neck through different chord progressions and that’s where the money is.
Hi Monty, great to see another McLaughlin fan here. I found this great video the other day of a good Norwegian guitarist playing the classic “McLaughlin Pattern” in a PILE of ways. Some of these are things that I’d considered and practiced working into my own playing already but there are loads of other cool applications in here. If you’re trying to work your Upward Slanting chops and are getting stuck on ideas, take a spin through this video. You can really do a lot with this pattern if you really stretch out where your 2/4/6 notes per string are going.
I know, what I meant was to be able play anything i hear in the moment without having to work out the pattern ahead of time.
Thanks so much for this!
I know, but that’s what I’m getting at - this stuff is all, at some level, “worked out”. To think about this another way, when you hear a player like Martino you think, that guy can play anything he wants to at any point. But then you realize it’s not true - he doesn’t have your levels of pickslanting speed, so super fast lines are off the table. He doesn’t really do sweeping, so even simple downward pickslanting patterns like the Eric Johnson fives pattern, you don’t really hear those. Can that sort of fretboard pattern be done with pure alternate? Sure. But it might be awkward, and pure alternate players generally avoid situations like that.
On the flipside, players who use mainly downward pickslanting, like Joe Pass, Django, and Benson, do the two-string “threes” and three-string “fives” picking patterns all the time. They are in some sense a basic building block of downward pickslanting mechanics. But they might avoid some phrases, like pure one note per string arpeggios, which might be awkward for them, at least at very fast speeds.
So everyone is limited. It’s just a matter of which limitations you want to work with. Call it “worked out”, “memorized”, “developed”, we can choose the term. But the reason these players create the awesome illusion that they can play anything at any moment, is because they have built large vocabularies that specifically contain lines that fit their mechanics, and avoid the others. You can do this with simple picking systems, like pickslanting. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you choose a system, get good at it, and then start down the long road of building the vocabulary that fits it.
I agree with you for sure. I have seen Joe Pass live as well as some other old school jazz downward pickslanters and their right hand always amazed me in that they had such a machine like accuracy. I can’t wait to get it feeling natural. I’m going to work the primer. I’ll post some videos on my progress. I am working on the lines from Joe Pass Guitar Styles with my students as well as some sax bebop licks from Eric Alexander. After watching some of Marshall Harrison friday night videos videos and him explaining his fingerings for all the classical pieces, I realized that I am going to have to go through all the bebop stuff and take a look at all the most efficient fingerings to accommodate for pickslanting and economy picking.
Actually if we are talking swing 8ths I think that the equivalence is lost: it is probably much harder to play the swing notes at that tempo. For example, if we use the common approximation
we can see that we have a first long note, then two notes in quick succession that at 350bpm would be approximately the speed of sextuplets at 175bpm - a quick burst of 17.5 notes per second 
Although usually fast swing 8ths seem to be a bit closer to straight 8ths.
To summarize: I believe swing 8ths require a much higher level of mechanical skill/athleticity than straight ones.
I’d expect that the biggest challenge of fast picking with “swing” is the lack of uniformity of note duration. Part of what enables people to execute alternate picking at extreme speeds is the simplicity of the rhythm for the right hand. You lose that mechanical advantage when you play stuff that “swings”.
Yep, forgot to mention that as well!
I like to sweep a lot of stuff as well to help with sax type lines, but nothing beats the “chunking” on those of burning lines like Martino and Benson. I think the problem, more than the unevenness of the eighths in swing, is actually the articulation. Bird emphasizes different notes different ways along a steam of burning eighth notes at 250BPM to 350BPM. That’s what makes it swing more to my ears than the textbook ding ding a ding rhythm. Sweeping helps with this for short licks, when you get a long two to four measure line of eighths with some sixteenth note triplets thrown in, picking gets tough for me. I usually trill and hammer on the 16th note’sand triplets, like in Donna Lee. And speaking of Donna Lee, that one is hard for me to get past a certain speed of maybe 220 to 240 without resorting to a lot of slurring, to my ears doesn’t sound as good as picked.
This is great! I am going to work these out for sure!
Does anyone actually do this when playing very fast? This seems like something that can be measured. My money is on “they don’t”.