Paul Gilbert Up up picking

Technique Critique
#1

Around 4:30 in the video he talks about two up strokes after each other. He goes on about it more in the previous video.

Why is he doing this? I don’t wanna argue with this master… lol… but it surprises me he does it this way.

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#2

Welcome aboard!

Its not really 2 upstrokes in a row. its upstroke, HAMMER, upstroke. Huge difference.

There are often several ways to pick a particular lick. Sometimes u have to reverse engineer it and/or understand the player himself. Paul loves strict alternate picking. Thats his thing.

  1. He is generally going to start licks on downstrokes.

  2. He loves “outside” picking. Again, thats just his thing

Probably the hardest part of that lick is getting from the high E back down to the G. For Paul the easiest way is “outside”. So its going to be up on the high E and then down on the G. Thats a given and many players such as Yngwie would probably do the same.

Again, Paul is a strict alternate picker so after the down on the G its going to be up on the B.

He COULD play the lick strict alt picking all 4 notes but he says its too hard that way so he throws in that one hammer. Thats another one of Pauls things and the same for many shredders in general. Often they use one or two strategic hammers or pulls go make things flow better.

Yngwie isnt as pure of an alt picker as Paul is. Yngwie has no issues with throwing in some economy picking. Im guessing Yngwie might go down-down-hammer-up.

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#3

This is similar toTroy Stetinas approach is when you have a hammer on or pull off skip the pick stroke that the pull off or hammer on sounds so like with 3NPS you would have instead of DUD you would have D H D (down Hammer Down) or if you started UDU you would do UPU (Up pull off Up) and so on some still just use the alternate stroke regardless if the pull off or hammer happens but i’ve found that when you try to pick it all it seems a little different if you learn it this way.
so like a 3NPS could be similar to a pentatonic if you just go DUH then DUH on the next string but it would be a hybrid approach rather then strict alternate picking. Not knocking it just saying it is a different approach and if it sounds good it is good.

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