This is the crux right here. The slant of the pick has nothing to do with generating the escape. You can escape in either direction no matter what your “pickslant” is. The escape is because of the arm position and the motion mechanic.
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We don’t have any way of measuring this, but my impression is that the effect has been net positive in the other direction, i.e. the terms being so sticky have probably been a driver of awareness more than a turnoff.
Either way, I’m not super concerned about the marketing aspect of this. Those videos are out there and they’re not going away. People find their way to us now through all sorts of avenues and when they get here, they need to find concepts and teaching that are clear and effective.
Glad to hear it. 
Glad to see we’re having this conversation (and what a conversation it’s been!!) as this was definitely something I got hung up early on in the CTC material. I didn’t realize for the entire first year I’d been watching the public YouTube material and several months as a member here that the orientation of the pick actually had very little/nothing to do with the concept, and rather it was about the trajectory of the pick through the strings. And I didn’t think I was THAT slow a learner. 
A couple observations:
*at least in the concept of pickslanting vs crosspicking, since making that connection I’ve taken to referring to them as “single escaped” (or “one way escaped”) and “two-way escaped” techniques, as to me that’s really the crux - pickslanting is a linear-motion technique where the pick breaks above the plane of the strings in one diirection, while crosspicking is a curved-motion technique where it escapes in two directions in a single stroke. I think the “escape” concept is really the critical observation. (Lukhas above me seems to be arguing in that direction too).
*my initial thought is that referring to escaped upstrokes and escaped downstrokes is kind of confusing compared to downward pickslanting and upward pickslanting… But as I’ve been writing this I’m kind of coming around. Would it be confusing to go from downward pickslanting to escaped upstrokes, where you go from focusing on the downstroke to focusing on the upstroke? Maybe… But, it makes for a crystal-clear differentiator between the two descriptors, and honestly, again, the upstroke is really the important part of downward pickslanting. I’m actually coming around to thinking of it in that manner.
Idunno… End of the day, I think this change in thought makes the concept a lot clearer. Though, to be fair, this is coming from a guy who can’t pickslant for shit - my mechanic just doesn’t work that way, though I’m trying to learn.
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Well I don’t know that that makes me then, a glacial learner? Because I’ve been doing this for oh a couple decades at this point, and I would say I haven’t fully appreciated the distinction between the two until recently.
How did you find us, did you watch one of the YT videos? Which one? I think we used the escaped/trapped terminology most prominently in the second Crossroads lesson, below. Was this one of the things you watched and did you find this presentation confusing or easy to grasp?
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…actually I’m rewatching this now, which I haven’t in a while. And to me this presentation really makes the escaped and trapped concepts clear. However I also state directly and rather hilariously that it is the slant of the pick that causes the escaping. So we’re probably going to have people coming our way for a good long time with some baggage to unlearn. And unlike the other picking problems we’ve have to address, this one is ironically of our own creation.
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Oh, I wouldn’t say that by any means - there’s a difference between learning when you’re watching someone explain the exact mechanics of what they’re doing in a lesson format, and learning when you’re just watching someone play, and trying to work out WTF it is they’re actually doing, with the aid of freeze-frame and slow-mo on an old VCR. If anything, as a guy who tends to be hyper-analytical, I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t sit down and try to reason my way through an approach to picking that would have solved my early issues back in the 90s, rather than just getting really good at leaning on legato for faster playing!
I actually don’t remember - I remember eons ago learning of this project back on Jemsite when you were first getting it off the ground, hearing about this crazy dude doing slow motion video analysis of the picking mechanics of a bunch of shredders, notably Rusty Cooley, and being intrigued right from the start. Then it was probably, god, six or eight years later someone mentioned this was out on Youtube, probably over at metalguitarist.com (I’m an admin over there), and I think one friday night after work I poured a gin and tonic, grabbed a guitar, and fired up Season 1 Episode 1… and ended up binge-watching most of it that night.
I’d definitely seen the Crossroads video (in particular I remember being really impressed by the logical process behind your reconstruction of the pickstrokes, working backwards from a pinch harmonic, if this is the video I’m thinking of), but honestly I think the “escape” concept really clicked the most while talking about it on the boards here, that “pickslanting” had little to do with the physical orientation of your grip on the pick, but rather was about the angle the pick moved in relation to the strings. I think it’s the kind of thing that, in your original presentation where it was more focused on the angle of the pick in EJ’s ang the Yngster’s playing (where it WAS a lot clearer of a slant) it all kind of worked because the escaped upstroke was a byproduct of the hand position and the downward “striking” motion of the pick into the string… But it didn’t really call attention to itself as the critical “feature” of the appproach.
Incidently, in the email digest (to switch gears for a second), there was a post you’d made about how even a lot of the crosspickers you’d looked at (Andy Wood and Chris Thiele I believe were the names you’d mentioned) still tended to shift towards a directional pickslant/single-escaped stroke as they moved into utra-fast single note playing. Thanks for posting that - it’s gotten me thinking, and while I’ve made a lot of progress smoothing out my default (crosspicked/two-way-escaped) mechanic, I have felt like I’ve been brushing up against a bit of a speed limit where I can still play pretty damned fast, but nowhere close the “shred” speeds of someone like Yngwie really tearing it up. Like I said, pickslanting and a straight/slashing/non-curved pickstroke still feels weird to me, but I’ve been trying to work on developing one and once it starts to click I suspect it will help me break through a speed barrier. Incidently, if this thread ultimately results in a new “intro to pickslanting” video with some of the observations from here and from your clock face/four picking directions videos, I for one would love to see it.
So, ultimate theme of this post, I guess, is this: the video content you produce is great, both in educational and entertainment value (I want a lot of non-guitarist friends to watch Season 1 because I think it does an awesome job of capturing the feeling of being a kid in your bedroom and having your mind blown by a record), but ultimately I think seeing the videos is one thing, then getting to sit down and talk about them with a bunch of like minded players (and especially get video feedback) has been invaluable in my understanding.
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For what it’s worth, this is the video I generally point people to for the “pickslanting elevator pitch”, largely because of the animated bit showing the movement of the pick between the “trapped zone” and the “escape zone”.
I also really liked the animation in one of the 2WPS videos, where you have an animation of some kind of industrial-looking machine operating the pick, where the picking motion is represented as being totally linear (even if that’s a little white lie), and the entire “linear motion” apparatus gets rotated on a pivot to change between upward slanted strokes and downward slanted strokes.
I suppose I would say that’s it’s possible to escape “regardless” instead of having “nothing to do”, because it’s not as if it’s to be totally dismissed, even though I usually prefer economy picking or outright crosspicking to, well, linear “TWPS”. For me, crosspicking registers in my mind as something different even if terms like pickslanting still describes certain things in the crosspicking world. Therefore there isn’t confusion for me. Or at least, when I browse the forum I know that if someone describes their video as TWPS, I know I expect lines with one-way escapes. If they describe it as crosspicking I know I’ll look for a double-escaping motion… even if pickslanting is used there as well; to my understanding it’s also used to ease the escape of the string while not allowing escaping alone. Well that’s how I understood it in the Steve Morse video at least…
I don’t know what I’m arguing about anymore to be honest. 
I think what I was getting is having “nothing to do” with generating the escape, i.e. causing it to happen. Because it really doesn’t. However it is related in that these things are sometimes correlated.
I feel like the most natural scenario here is to acknowledge in future lessons that the pickslant of the pick is a separate thing from the motion, but that in certain playing styles, they’re definitely correlated in a natural way. Gypsy guitar is a great example. I really don’t have a problem calling that a “downward pickslanting system”, and if we teach anything like that, I’m probably comfortable using those terms so long as I clarify why it is a special case of all the parts being aligned.
Here is my take on this terminology issue.
There are 3 dimensions of the pick and each of them operate in their own axis.
Edge Picking is the rotation of the pick and what side of it you are using. The leading edge, flat, or the trailing edge. This is the Transverse Plane.
The Lean refers to the picks position from neutral which is sticking straight out of the guitar body and to what side the pick bends- towards the bridge or towards the neck. This is Frontal Plane.
The Slant refers to the picks orientation versus the string. This is caused by your arm positioning- Supinated (a Downward slant) and Pronated (an upward slant). I think it is best to call the Picks Slant relative to the string either pronated or supinated beacuse that is what is required of the arm positioning for the pick to have that appearance. This is the Saggital Plane.
The Wrist has Deviation and Extension/Flexion. These movements operate normal to each other meaning that there are 2 possible linear motion paths in each arm position for a total of 4 different motion.
Supinated Wrist Deviation- this linear path will be “Upstroke Escaped”. This is the 9 o clock movement
Pronated Extension/Flexion- this linear path will be upstroke escaped. This is the 10 o clock movement.
Both of these should be called Downward Pickslanring because the motion of the pick travels down into the next string and the upstroke escapes. Therefore you have Pronated DWPS (PDWPS) and Supinated DWPS (SDWPS)
Supinated Extension/Flexion- Downstroke Escapes. This is the 2 o clock movement.
Pronated Wrist Deviation- Downstroke Escapes. This is the 3 o clock movement.
These are also respectively Upward Pickslanting. Pronated UWPS (PUWPS) and Supinated UWPS (SUWPS).
These are the 4 different wrist movements in their pure form (no combinations to create the 9o2 or 10o3 Crosspicking).
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One guitar player who is doing this is Wayne Krantz. At least when he was a young jazz cat after he went to Berklee. If you check out YT clip with Leni Stern, you’ll see a very pure crosspicking technique with a downward pickslant. It’s almost textbook what @Troy explains about crosspicking, the arm set-up, the clockface motion, etc…
An interesting thing is that it is applied for jazz. At that time Krantz sounded kind of like Mike Stern and would play long alternate picking sequences. Later on his style evolved in a way that is very unique, but the crosspicking foundation of his technique is still there, with some quirkiness to get those syncopated/jangly kind of phrase he’s known for.
I didn’t read this all, but heres my suggestions for terminoloy:
- Keep supinated/pronated, as they are established medical terms
- Keep the term pickslant referring to the orientation of the pick itself, althoug this makes some of the older stuff ambiguous
- Refer to the motion path as strokeslant
I know that this would lead to the problem, that DWPS and UWPS would have to be renamed DWSS and UWSS, but I wouldn’t mind. These two usually got together (as far as I know) and you could alway get by with the historical explanation.
just my 2 cents
Guys! (that includes girls and boys if you’re wondering!)
something has been bothering me and I think this is the right thread to say it.
Don’t you think that all this is all relative? In other words:
At slow to medium speeds:
- DWPS (grip) can be be used to clear the string on an upstroke, but also on a down stroke, or both at the same time (cross-picking)
- UWPS (grip) can be be used to clear the string on a down stroke, but also on an upstroke, or both at the same time (cross-picking)
At fast speeds:
- DWPS (grip) is mostly used to clear the string on an upstroke, less-likely on a down stroke, or both at the same time (cross-picking)
- UWPS (grip) can be be used to clear the string on a down stroke, less-likely an upstroke, or both at the same time (cross-picking)
- Changing the pick slant in the middle of the lick becomes necessary to achieve the required speed. Especially for cross-picking.
At hyper-fast speeds:
- DWPS (grip) is almost strictly used to clear the string on an upstroke
- UWPS (grip) is almost strictly used to clear the string on a down stroke
- almost impossible to do clean cross-picking
My conclusion is: the higher the speed, the more DWPS and UWPS retain their (soon to be legacy) CtC definitions.
Who shares my picking-relatively analysis?
From a teaching perspective I think it is a good idea to have different terminology for the motions. DWPS/UWPS is perfectly good for describing the pick orientation but like you say falls apart when describing the mechanics of certain players.
With that in mind I think that terms along the lines of escaped stroke and trapped stroke are perfectly adequate. As long as the words accurately reflect the state of the pick, be that trapped or free then we’ll be set. What is more important when teaching is making it clear to the student that the pick needs to be escaping the plane of the strings on one, or both ends, of the path of motion.
Once that set of “rules” is established it is then possible to define what grip options are available, what movements enable you to succeed, how to practice them and how to identify/what movements to avoid. The latter being equally important when teaching yourself.
These are just my opinions but they are based on the process I’ve used to learn to alternate pick from the material that CTC has produced. Once a player knows what the “rules” are the problem solving gets much easier, any information on grip, bio mechanics and motor learning is an added bonus that shortcuts the learning process.
In summary, use words that accurately reflect the state of the pick. eg. Trapped stroke and Escaped stroke
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I think that’s the best suggestion yet. It’s succinct and directly addresses the source of confusion. Only drawback being that it doesn’t directly capture the notions of “trapped” and “escaped”.
Or maybe a term like “pick path”?
Great summary! To bottom line this though, you’re saying you’re fine with the term ‘pickslating’ referring to the motion path and the grip, and you don’t think that would be confusing to a new learner?
This is the crux of the issue, ie it is not relative. Andy Wood’s shred-speed technique uses a “downward pickslant” pick grip but is an upward pickslanting motion. They’re not always correlated, even at fast speeds.
But the bigger issue is that we have confused people, myself included (!), by telling them the slant causes the motion. And this is definitely not true. This matters because we get players on the forum posting clips saying ‘critique my dwps’, and they are “slanting the pick” as we have shown them in our various tutorials, but their motion is totally not escaping at all - or it’s stringhopping. And they can’t figure out why since as far as they know, they are “slanting”.
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That’s another one that’s pretty clear about the escaped/trapped concept. Can’t recall if anyone has ever mentioned this as an a-ha type moment, so I have no sense of whether it has been helpful to new viewers.
On the other hand it also shows the whole apparatus rotating, which is sometimes a thing that happens, and sometimes not. If a newbie goes around looking for arm turning movements to try and spot “two way pickslanting” in the wild, they’re not always going to find it, and they’re going to be… confused!
This is a totally great connection! You know, I’ve had that clip in a little folder of “cool stuff to look at one day” for years. He totally smokes on that. And I did notice the dwps grip at the time and just assumed he was probably playing even-numbered type phrases. But I never actually got around to looking at it. Now that you’ve brought it up, indeed, he looks like a great example of 902 kind of player.
I’ve seen Wayne play live at the 55 Bar from a few feet away, and his “slanted grip” has always been obvious. But as you point out, he has evolved to his latter style, which is also awesome, but doesn’t really lean on the linear stuff as much.