Geez, I thought I understood pick slanting pretty well and I have to admit I’m not following you/this thread here @Troy. I’m thinking this may all be referencing more recent material on crosspicking that I haven’t gotten to yet.
The thing that jumps out to me - in what contexts and for what players are these things NOT correlated? Or, related, what do I need to read/see to know what the **** you guys are talking about?
Correct me if I’m wrong but the first Albert Lee clip that CtC did basically shows that, with string changing in an “illogical” way wrt to pickslanting (DWPS in Albert Lee case)
I think Albert Lee was using DWPS-CD to be specific 
Just joking, I am trying to push for my proposal 
Troy,
I think the videos clearly communicate what you have been talking about. What is the danger of keeping it the way it is?
Beginners (players in years 1-3) will find your site and likely model their playing after one of the seminars.
Intermediate players (ones who never had the “breakthrough”) will use the knowledge to alter their approach or modify their technique. If there is a young “Andy Woods” who hasnt had the picking breakthrough, why encourage him to play that way when the existing systems you documented work at least as well?
Advanced shredders do what they do regardless of the analysis.
If the purpose is to teach, there is a point where making things too complicated can detract from the lessons.
All the nomenclature was lost me long ago to be honest, which is why I don’t post as much - I simply can’t wrap my head around a lot of the anatomical terms. Sure I’ve watched the videos, but I’m not good at scientific stuff.
This thread is making it even more confusing and it now seems that the analysis of playing is starting to only appeal to players with a higher level of understanding of the terms and of actual human anatomy. Maybe those people are your target market but, if things get too technical, you could essentially scare off new comers.
Yes, I am the jerk that tries to say “baroque” when I mean “baroque” and “classical” when I refer to Papa Haydn et al! But in this case there is a practical concern
This is actually incorrect, and the main reason why we want to clear up the terminology. The orientation of the pick by itself doesn’t really do anything to the motion. And there are a number of “Technique Critique” videos right here on the forum where you have players saying, hey, check out my downward pickslanting, and they’re “slanting the pick” but not actually moving it correctly.
By form do you mean “forearm setup / orientation”? If so, yes. I have been doing this for years, and you can see it in our videos. It’s just not a thing that really fully clicked in my brain until the last year or so when we started working on crosspicking techniques, where this understanding is actually required to pull apart why it works.
Yes Bryan Sutton rest strokes on upstrokes and we show it in slow motion right here!
I’m not really sure you’d call what he’s doing an “upward pickslanting” grip. But again that’s what we’re sort of trying to iron out here. I haven’t watched Bryan in a while but I used to think of him as an “upward pickslanter”, by which I basically really just meant “person who uses escaped downstrokes a lot”. I also recall there was some forearm action in a Normal Blake kind of way. Again, I’d really have to go back and look at his techique again, because I’m sure it’s pretty clear given our current understanding what’s going on.
That’s where I’m not sure if I follow. To me, something like DWPS meant “I escape after upstrokes”. At least it felt simple enough to me. How other players contort their arms to make it work didn’t seem to matter when it came to defining that. However, how they achieve it and being able to describe it obviously is very important in order to be able to teach it. I suppose it’s a matter closer to how Greek modes are objectively misnamed but otherwise pretty clear regardless. Or am I mistaken again?
Andy Wood and Molly Tuttle are good examples - which we address in the crosspicking broadcast. Both can appear at various times to have “downward slanted” picks while using “upward pickslanting” picking motions.
Andy is perhaps the best case example, because what he does is both
We addressed this a little in today’s Instagram / YouTube post about Andy, Anton, and Petrucci. The more we learn, the more we realize that it is very common for players to use a supinated arm setup, have a somewhat “downwardly slanted” pick, but have any kind of picking motion they want - either where the downstrokes escape, and the upstrokes escape. I’d add Paul Gilbert to that list as well, because I’m pretty sure he fits that description.
So rather than this being some kind of super advanced “mechanics nerd” topic, it’s a thing that everyone really needs to get straight on, and it is our job to show it to them in the simplest possible way.
Currently, I think the Crosspicking broadcast is the best job we’ve done of this by far. Because, simply put, we didn’t know this material a year ago, and could not have presented things as clearly - particularly the clockface wrist analogy.
Since you’re an ace teacher, we’d be grateful if you watched that and gave us your impression of how well you think those instructions would play with beginners. Because ultimately that’s probably where we’re headed here, i.e.:
Making this as simple as possible for new players is our goal.
Oh totally. But what you wrote above is the “pick orientation”, which doesn’t actually control that. The movement you make controls it, even if the pick orientation actually looks backwards from what you think it should look like. I maybe was reading into your choice of words. But maybe that’s also the problem here. We have not sufficiently clarified that the “orientation of the pick” means its visual appearance, and the movement results from the arm and hand position, and how you choose to move those arms and hands. I think that’s why the “arm contortion” thing matters. Most people cannot figure out all this stuff on their own, and I put myself squarely in that category since it has taken me years to do so and I am still learning.
So if I’m following what you guys are saying, does that mean that what we were calling TWPS up until now could be achieved by staying in a supinated position at all time (or a pronated one) and just changing the picking movement trajectory ? And would that mean that crosspicking and TWPS are the same ?
Totally fair. This conversation especially, right here, is an “inside baseball” type conversation essentially asking what the best way to communicate complicated topics to new players, so that they do not get overwhelmed, and they get better information sooner. The goal though is to arrive at a point where someone who is not a mechanics expert gets clear unambiguous information on what is, at heart, a sophisticated topic, but doesn’t have to feel like an engineering student.
Amazingly, when you go from effectively no information on a subject to some information, and that information is maybe not incorrect but unclear, you can still actually help a lot of people. Because before Cracking the Code, the path of the picking motion, and why it matters, wasn’t something that was commonly discussed. No doubt we have caused a whole internet generation of players to go around poring over video pixels to try and “see the slant”, and not understanding why they could or couldn’t do so in various cases. I’ve done it, I’ve been there. The next step is clearing that up, a lot, with plain English descriptions of common motions, how to make them, and what phrases they can be used for.
That is 100% correct! That is what Andy Wood often does for fast scale type playing, and that is what I am doing in the clip we posted today.
I would say no. The crosspicking player tends to make the curved motion all the time. They learned this as their base motion and just do that, for the most part. That’s what we see when we look at Morse or Tuttle up close with the camera.
But the 2wps player economizes. They use different motions depending on the string change. And when they are on a single string, and there are no string changes, they probably don’t bother with the big curved movement at all. Maybe it would be easier to think of the 2wps player as the “multiple picking motions player”, who mixes and matches.
Are some of the actual motions the same in these two categories? Sort of. From a learning perspective, now that I can actually do some of this, I will tell you my impression is that learning to do the continuous back and forth curved motion of crosspicking, feels like a different motion that is not just the sum of the other two. So in the “Andy Wood” style of playing, I now feel like there are three motions to learn. The uwps motion, the dwps motion, and the curved motion.
In fact I will go farther here. To some extent, this is what I was always doing, even in lessons like Antigravity and the Pickslanting Primer. Was I moving my forearm around? Sure. There is clearly some relationship there where this can sometimes be helpful. BUT… was it ever actually going all the way into pronation? No. I was going from more supinated to less supinated. But I was probably supinated all the time. It is only now that we are coming to grips (pun intended) with the fact that is what was actually always going on.
Some examples of this are so obvious, it is now hilarious given our current level of understanding. As a totally great example, take a look at this clip from the old Vai lesson, and tell me how much pronation you see:
Some? How about none, not even close!
Then that would mean that for supinated player, learning 2wps could sum up to learn how to trigger the 902 movement when changing string after a downstroke (ie they would learn the chunk with that particular motion at that particular moment), and that would be the opposite for player who are pronated or would you consider it to be alternating between two different picking trajectories and keeping the old method ?
It looks like it’s just a matter of picking motion trajectory then, which is kinda cool as I have a really hard time playing in a pronated position 
I’m not totally following what you’re asking. Are you asking if these different movements can be memorized / chunked in a sequence, so you can do something like a scale? Yes definitely. That’s currently how we teach it. Nothing really changes there. You will always need some combination of the linear movements and curved ones as “connector” movements. That’s the whole “down up rotate” was supposed to communicate. To give us some credit, we drew curved arrows on the screen in the Pickslanting Primer for those “rotate” notes, because at some level I think we saw this coming. Just not totally clearly!
And yes, you can do this with a supinated arm - any amount of it. Very flat like Andy, to very supinated like Steve Morse. And anywhere in between. In the clip above, I appear to be using an “Albert Lee” level of supination, more than Andy less than Steve.
Troy, I think I understand what you’re at here. One thing that, to me, is missing, is the pickstroke depth variable. For the crosspicking curve, it’s important to strive for a shallow pick attack. It’s both a geometry thing (the shallower the pick, the flatter and wider the curve can be), as well as a tone thing, especially on acoustic instruments, because the width of the curve compensate the shallowness of attack. It’s interesting to note that on mandolin, because of the double string system, it’s even more crucial. No wonder why learning on mandolin is a good school for that.
Now for a shortened stroke, single escaped, the pickstroke can be deeper, but not necessarily. The Gypsy style goes extreme with that, the more slanted the pick (usually DW slanted) and the deeper the attack (with a side of the stroke much more trapped). It’s a different sound, different articulation. OTOH it would make sense that 2wps players use a shallower attack, because the motion of reversing the pickslant is smoother with the pick less buried.
That’s what I should have said, yeah.
Basically I can keep using what’s comfortable for me in terms of hand/arm position and ESPECIALLY muting. Muting while UWPS or TWPS was really spoiling my party.
Yes you can do that. Muting using some part of the palm/wrist is one of the advantages of a supinated setup.