Pickslanting is dead. Long live pickslanting!

Playing Technique
#21

When I said pronated or supinated, I was referring to the motion, not necessarily the arm.

If a neutral stroke (one that is unescaped on both sides) is considered “neutral” stroke, then what else are you going to use to convey a different stroke trajectory?

If a player starts with a neutral stroke and then supinates his forearm, he now has a downward (supinated) stroke. If a player starts with a neutral stroke and pronates his forearm, he new has an upward (pronated) stroke.

(Relative) Pronation and supination of the forearm is what controls the angle of the stroke. Pronation or supination of the wrist has little to do with it.

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#22

… another way to look at this is to consider the slant of the path with regards to the 4 possibilities of string transfer : ascending outside, ascending inside, descending outside and descending inside. I don’t know exactly what acronym to come up with but there’s a certain logic I think, which also is useful from a practical standpoint (although a single string sequence can also be slanted, but I believe the core of the matter still is string crossing)

#23

Not completely sure I’m following you, but again, for wrist players, they can have any pickslanting path they want without changing their forearm at all. The forearm and wrist are independent.

#24

Are you really going to change the terminology you use to teach people because Andy Wood does things in a way that doesn’t fit in with your particular method of teaching guitar? If you change the terminology are you really going to want to back through all the instructional videos you’ve made where you use “upward pick slanting” to describe a motion and “downward pick slanting” to describe a motion and edit those videos by substituting new terminology in the parts of those videos which use the old terminology? That would be awfully time consuming. Rather than find a terminology that will apply to the way Andy Wood picks, why not just ask yourself if you think the way you have been teaching alternate picking has been successful? If the answer you arrive at is yes, it has been successful, then don’t try to fix something that isn’t broken.

#25

No, we change because we were ignorant about certain things, flat-out wrong about others, and we can do better now. You can go back and watch the John McLaughlin stuff I filmed as recently as a couple years ago for the Pickslanting Primer. What was I doing? Same thing Andy Wood does, upward pickslanting with a supinated arm and a “2:00” wrist movement. I had to interview a stranger, and then think about it for two years, to learn something I could have seen in the damn mirror any day of the week!

The result is I can play things now I couldn’t touch two years ago. That’s why we change the stuff, to be clearer and more effective. The old stuff gets out of date, big deal. The person that signs up six months from now will learn more and faster than I ever did, that’s for sure.

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#26

Troy to be honest I think you have always been very clear in the videos and lessons about what matters (escaped pickstrokes, avoiding repeated movements). I think you are beingtoo hard on yourself!

I can see that in hindsight dwps and uwps may not be uber rigorous terms, but I would be happy to keep them.

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#27

Then you’ve answered the question. You can teach more effectively using new terminology. That’s a valid reason to change the terminology. The way things were stated in the OP it seemed the changes were being made because you had found a guitarist or maybe even a few guitarists to whom the old terminology didn’t accurately apply.

I wonder if maybe you can incorporate term “pickslanting” into the new terminology while still accomplishing the goals which necessitate the change in the terminology you use to teach alternate picking. You and your team have used that term so much, it’s so ubiquitous in the CTC teaching method, that whether you realize it or not, “pickslanting” has practically become your company’s brand. Someone mentions your name to a couple guitarists and they reply: “Oh, he’s the pickslanting guy, right”?

#28

We still need the term, and it still describes what most people think it describes, i.e. the pick orientation. And it’s an important grip concept. We’ll see that when we get to Gambale soon for sure. So I think for a lot of people who find their way to us, for branding purposes there’s really not much worry there - if they want to hear about pickslanting they’re still going to hear about it.

When they get here, and they dig into the movements, they’ll discover there is also more to learn about how those things work. Which is presumably why they’re here in the first, so I’m guessing they won’t find that weird at all. Hopefully!

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#29

A post was merged into an existing topic: Crosspicking Workshop

#30

Given that you work in a branch of science that is known for arguing with itself, I will suspend my disbelief. Are you saying that you’re ok if we keep calling the movements “pickslanting”? How would the distinction be made between the grip and the movement? We’d just say “pickslanting motion” vs “pickslanting grip”, and explain to newbies that these two often correlate but sometimes don’t?

#31

I always liked the idea of “inward” to refer to strokes that end below the plane, and “outward” to refer to strokes that end above the plane.

So what we had been calling dwps would be “inward downstrokes”, and uwps would be “outward downstrokes”, and in a 1-way context the corresponding converse upstrokes are “implied”.

And that format can still be useful for things like crosspicking, which entails both “outward downstrokes” and “outward upstrokes”. Or, if you prefer “in-out downstrokes” and “in-out upstrokes”. All of this is agnostic toward “pick orientation in space”.

To me, “runner up” terminology would be something that used some variation on “trapped” and “free”. With the caveat that “trapped” sounds universally negative, while what we really mean is “limited to picking one of the two adjacent strings”.

Edit: Consider also the body of video content and forum posts that already use the old terminology. There’s a tradeoff in potentially creating increased confusion by making a change. But I can definitely appreciate that many players might dismiss CTC due the thinking “pickslanting” refers merely to the orientation of the pick in space.

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#32

Remember the thread you started which was titled “Antagonism Towards Cracking The Code”? I wonder if the potentially increased confusion created by making a change would increase that antagonism. Hopefully not but there are people who think CTC overcomplicates things, so I think a change in terminology would have to be done very carefully to keep any possible confusion to a minimum.

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#33

I guess you could call it “pickpathslanting”, and argue that until now you had removed the middle bit for brevity? :slight_smile:

Re grip, my understanding is that the path is the most important bit that we want to describe - so that it’s ok if our nomenclature refers to the path only… or not?

#34

I don’t think the terminology should change either because in the end, it reflects terms that are well defined with a clear image. Much like “classical music” could be renamed “Occidental music of written tradition”, and sometimes is referred as such to differentiate it from music from vernacular tradition… and you could put “art music” somewhere if you were really pedantic. :laughing:
Nevertheless, the term “classical music” itself is perfectly clear. One of the few possible confusions come when you have to differentiate classical music with the classical era in music (and in arts overall), which essentially spans from the middle of the 18th century (Bach’s death) to the early 19th century, and mainly represented by composers like Mozart or Haydn.

So to round this up, “pickslanting” refers to something that was clearly defined and understood, that is separate from motion mechanics. To me it’s merely the orientation of the pick that allows to escape after certain pickstrokes especially when playing in a “linear” fashion (id est not crosspicking). Because it could have been made more accurate doesn’t mean that the term as it is isn’t perfectly clear.

EDIT: Also, did we talk about how Greek mode names are completely different from what they’re supposed to? It’s never ending! :smile:

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#35

@Troy: speaking of pick grip, have you ever seen a player who clearly has an upward pickslant grip, and/or who would often do upward rest-stroke (i.e. rest-stroke on the lower string as opposed to the usual rest-stroke) ? Maybe Bryan Sutton is doing that (I’m not sure) ? any other you are aware of ?

#36

NOW I get it… this must have been covered approximately a million times in the abundant Andy videos, but I guess sometimes it takes things a while to sink into my head. Now I can UWPS with basically my DWPS form!

#37

I’m a “hobbyist” so I’m mot sure if I qualify as a “player”, but I think I do it :slight_smile:

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#38

Ah… that’s interesting. I’ve seen some of your clip and I did not notice you doing that (but I’m not very good at figuring out these things) … and sure you are qualified as a player, at least in my book :smiley:

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#39

How about just using parentheses DWPS (sup) or DWPS (pro)

Or, + sign for pronated, - sign for supinated i.e. DWPS+ or DWPS-

Or, - :slight_smile: emoji for pronated and :frowning: emoji for supinated - just kidding!

#40

I think it is indeed time to be more specific.

It’s only logical after all we’ve learned. And I think this still wouldn’t make the old material obsolete since DWPS and UWPS still serve as good descriptions of what the grip looks like.

That’s how science works! I can think of the fact that I spent of big part of my childhood thinking of the atom as the smallest possible entity. And that was good enough to understand a big part of the universe. But then came the time to discover the little particles inside and the new types of forces that come with it. And then a whole new world of learning opened up! The old stuff that I’ve learned still made sense but I just looked at it differently and I knew it made sense in a very specific context!

My suggestion:

  • Clear Up, Clear Down: CU, CD? I like these short acronyms because they can be combined with the existing ones: DWPS-CD, DWPS-CU, UWPS-CD, UWPS-CU

What do you guys think? :slight_smile: