Pickslanting is dead. Long live pickslanting!

2xl = double escaped legato!

so what if it means nothing…its MARKETING!

(see old Rock Hudson movie about “VIP”)

I hereby make a prediction that Tommo will object to physics being conflated with engineering :wink:

But in all seriousness, USX/DSX/2SX work just fine to my ears, FWIW. There are lots of weird acronyms and jargon all over the place in science, and many of them conflict such that you have to come up with workarounds when you need to use both, say, temperature and a transmission coefficient in the same equation. It’s just letters, at the end of the day. Zargon Picking and Blork Picking would work just as well, once we managed to remember which is which.

Troy, you mentioned (somewhere, I don’t recall where) the possibility of categorizing the most common picking styles (That super common DWPS wrist/forearm blend, 902, and whatever else) into a few small groups and then being able to show people “here’s a few different ways to go about it and how to set them up, now go practice some single-string licks” – wouldn’t this at least partially obviate the need for non-nerd-accessible terminology anyway? That is to say, if you don’t need to talk about Zargon and Blork picking because you can just show someone the setup and say “hey you can play this kind of lick in this style,” does it even matter?

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usx/dsx/2sx

fine

but what replaces 1wps, 2wps. how do we say “oh, just do a one way lick”

2wps does not equal 2sx. two different things

“You can play this with Zargon picking only, no Blorks.”

(In seriousness: 1SX, bam)

yeah we could use a player name for certain movements (do u Eddie?)…problem being they change styles over the years

1 sex? hetero picking?

I believe pick slanting is the brand of the house and really addresses something in technique that was never considered before or at least never was thought as something crucial to pick fast and yet all of the pros use it wether consciously or not.

Really even if the names are changed in the future some people will get it and some of us will need further explanations. Besides the fact that I think now Cracking the Code is going towards how to generate the motion itself nowadays (this is just my point of view nothing more, might be wrong) and how to teach it to people who doesn’t have it yet.
Plus another SUPER AWESOME thing of that CtC has Magnet Slow motion footage of real world players, many of them already legends (I Still can’t believe you got Steve Morse or Batio, Gambale, etc) to backup what they say.

You really can’t, that’s the point. There are threads right here on the forum where we have players holding the pick with a pronounced “downward slant”, but they’re not actually escaping. They think they are doing “downward pickslanting” because the pick “has the slant”, but they’re actually not getting any of the benefits of pickslanting. Until they understand the way the pick has to move, they will continue to not be able to do it right.

Upward pickslanting is trickier because the escape trajectories tend to be shallow. You very often can’t see any “slant” at all from looking at the pick. Andy Wood is a good example of this. If you try and figure out what he is doing by looking at the pick, you’re not going to get very far. The only way to really copy his movement is to first look at what kind of escape path he is making, and then to look at the arm position he is using. Both of those together tell you what kind of wrist movement you need to make to get the same result.

And so on.

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Interesting you say that … I agree with what you say btw. UWPS sometimes is almost like no pick slant. This is basically how I pick. The funny thing is that even though angle is very minimal, I find it easy to escape. It never crossed my mind before reading CTC stuffs that there is an escape path to work out, it just … escapes. Escape-DWPS on the other hand, I don’t really get it to work well. I didn’t really put any effort on it but If I’m doing it it feels awkward to me. Seems to me like a very steep angle is required for doing what is the opposite thing of an almost-no-slanted UPWS. YMMV of course.

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I was thinking about extending the current notation:

DW=downward
UW=upward
PS=pick slanting
E=escaped
T=trapped

So,

  • Classic DWPS suggests “DWPS, DWET, UWTE.”
  • Classic UWPS suggests “UWPS, DWTE, UWET.”
  • Classic “crosspicking” suggests “DWEE, UWEE.”
  • Classic downward sweeping suggests “DWPS, DWTT.”
  • Classic upward sweeping suggests “UWPS, UWTT.”
  • Classic “crosspicking” also suggests “DWPS, DWEE, ends up UWPS;” etc.

Not perfect, but not terrible… in some sense DWEE is thought of as DW,E→E (holding for all four combinations, EE, TE, ET, TT).

Sorry, I’m dense and I don’t understand what you have put here

I don’t get the ‘ET’ and the ‘TE’. I read this as Downward Pickslanting, Downward Escape Trapped, Upward Trapped escaped. I’m confused!

In my mind we shouldnt mention both escaped and trapped - just say one and assume the other by ommission.

Isn’t 1WPS and 2WPS fine , but include the upwards and Downwards as a prefix that references the buried pickstroke? (U-1WPS and D-1WPS). For 2WPS we could specify the primary pickslant with PD-2WPS and PU-2WPS. For crosspicking, we could rename to ‘Curved’ to avoid the confusion with the bluegrass meaning (C-2WPS). If pickslanting is a linear motion only and shouldn’t be related to crosspicking/curve picking, then just refer to it as ‘Curved double Escape’ (CDE).

Sorry if any of this has been suggested above, I have come to this thread pretty late…

The reason for this means that we keep DWPS etc the same as we always have.

ET is really read E→T, and TE is really read T→E. So, it might be confusing!

Possbly, but it would be nice to describe E→E and T→T. The question is, “how?”

Other systems, like the one that you suggest, might be better!

so is the Pickslantng Primer now known as the Pickescaping Primer?

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It seems I’m a bit late with this reply and a lot happended below your initial reply :slight_smile: Anyway, in Physics I can’t think of obvious uses for appending an “x” but then again I don’t remember much outside my field! I know we have T= temperature/kinetic energy/transmittivity or R= resistance/reflectivity/center of mass position depending on the context - so yeah plenty of room for confusion in principle!

I agree with you though that it is probably clear and concise enough to write “upstroke/downstroke escape” in full length, it seems to give the crucial info and there’s no need to mention the trapped side of things.

Somehow any of the proposed shorthands don’t have the same elegance of DWPS/UWPS but I may have some weird emotional attachment to the latter acronyms, due to the incredible shred gains they brought into my life :smiley:

Oh but there is one brilliant exception hehehe:

Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking of.

Com’è meraviglia che ti sei addattato non solo alle techniche che discutiamo ma anche ai neologismi inglesi. Come si inventerebbe “Zargon” in Italiano?

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It happened! I got tired of typing all those letters and used the acronym. I think it’s fine. If everyone knows what I’m talking about and it saves me the forearm RSI from all the video editing and forum-izing, I’m fine with it!

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Hahaha non lo so, devo prima fare ricerca sul significato di Zargon e Blork. Mi piaceva il suono!

Hey Troy take care of those virtuoso hands, get an assistant, one more if necessary.