Pickslanting is dead. Long live pickslanting!

Playing Technique
#122

I think that at an intuitive level maintaining the visual of “downward pickslanting” might be better kept for the actual angle of the pick. Ie–>> the top half of the pick is closer to the floor than the tip. I think the visual is more in line that way, rather than “downward motion that escapes the strings”. Or “downward motion that escapes the strings by moving “up” away from the guitar”. (maybe I’m wrong, but what feels intuitive to me).

I just posted re. the idea that “supinated” and “pronated” could be thought of as guitar “stances” similar to orthodox/southpaw in boxing.

It seems that supinated would almost always being using “downward pickslanting” - meaning the angle of the pick - though as you point out, the degree of slant would vary quite a bit.

Personally, having to choose between “slanted pick” or “slanted motion” I would think “downward pickslanting” would be more easily grasped when applied to the pick itself. The “slanted motion” could be labeled something different (what? Who knows? lol, that’s why there’s this thread).

#123

One more thought. This comes back to the idea of visualizing what is actually occurring. I just realized that in your 1st post you essentially mention the idea of “decoupling” the actual slant of the pick from the motion that the pick–>travels.

Describe the motion? Ie–> the pick is “travelling” in what used to be thought of as “dwps” or “uwps”. Just substitute the word “travel” for “slant”. The path traced by a pick as it moves through space isn’t necessarily “slanted”, but a pick itself will be slanted.

How about just “pick travel”? Ie_> Andy Woods uses a “downward” slanted pick angle (the actual pick) while utilizing an “upward pick travel”.

#124

pickslant / pathslant

Assume they’re the same, and just call it ‘slant’.
Specify when they’re different and use ‘pickslant’ or ‘pathslant’ when necessary for clarity.

This terminology might reduce the need for a massive rewrite of existing material.

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#125

So ok code crackers, what are the motions? What’s a “dwps” phrase? Is it an “upstroke escape”

I honestly think that’s fine.
Do we even need an abbreviation?

“Joscho Stephan uses gypsy style DWPS, so upstroke escaped phrases are super easy for him to play.”

“Bill is an idiot, he uses gypsy style picking motions, but awkwardly holds the pick with UWPS. He plays Upstroke Escaped phrases but can barely get the pick through the strings without dropping it due to the absurd level of resistance. Don’t be like Bill”

“A string escape strategy is very important. Pick-slanting may correlate with the string escape strategy, but the actual slant of the pick mostly just effects the resistance of the pickstroke, it’s the motion that’s important.”

If an abbreviation is truly needed, I’d go for:
“UE”: “Upstroke escaping”
“DE”: “Downstroke escaping”

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#126

Hilarious. I think it will be clear in time with common usage whether perpetuating the “pickslanting” term for the motions really offers anything beyond confusion. If so, it will become a grip term. I think just given the etymology it’s ideally suited for that usage, at the very least.

#127

I appreciate that you want to change the terminology to make it as accurate as possible, but even from when you first started using the term pick slanting, you knew that just because the pick is angled a certain way, that in itself doesn’t cause the subsequent pick strokes to go in a certain direction didn’t you?

As I understood it, the idea was angling the pick such as in DWPS makes it easier to escape the strings on an upstroke. However, that doesn’t in itself cause the pick to escape the strings on an upstroke just because it is downward pick slanted, right? After all, how could it? At least that’s what I thought you were always saying from the beginning. Is that correct?

#128

After some recent discussions in my technique critique thread and some experimentation (no metronome or rigid practice routine - I’m on holiday with a 30€ classical guitar!), I realised the importance of this discussion!

Until recently I was associating dwps with a visibly slanted pick, which brought me to practice “Yngwie stuff” with a significantly different posture compared to my usual uwps/twps mode. So it was until now difficult to combine my two approaches in the same lick or phrase. I also thought that forearm involvement (which to me doesn’t feel great) would be necessary to change the pick path.

Now I can see that both uwps and uwps “paths” or better both “escaped pickstrokes” can be achieved with very similar hand positions and mostly wrist, just focusing on the pick path. The recent crosspicking discussions and the 9-02 jargon were also very helpful for understanding this stuff conceptually - even though I’m not explicitly practicing crosspicking.

I’ll try to film something to give the idea, when I’ll get the motions baked in to a decent level.

That being said, I still have an emotional attachment to the past use of “pickslanting”, even though I can see its limitations.

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#129

That’s pretty much the crux of it. This isn’t just terminology we’re talking about. It’s how things work, and sending the clearest possible message to someone who is learning. Because when people get results, that’s what keeps us in business.

And two, just being selfish, if I have to answer the same forum question more than three times because my explanation wasn’t clear enough the first time, you can bet I’m trying my hardest to think of ways to not ever have to do that again!

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#130

I like this because it has visual aids.

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#131

I think it actually is possible to double-escape at very fast picking speeds… and to do it cleanly as well. Maybe not 300+ bpm, but upper 200’s… which is still blisteringly fast.

What I’ve found is that my current speed limits are all because of my weaknesses with tracking, not because of my inability to fully escape the strings on both sides. Maybe it’s different for others though.

#132

@Troy, I may have a solution to your choice of terminology change. Use the term “upward escaping” for clearing the plane of the strings on an upstroke. “Downward escaping” is escaping the plane of the strings on a downstroke. UWPS and DWPS would be just used to refer to as positions. So you could have UWPS downward escaping or DWPS downward escaping. You can have DWPS upward escaping or UWPS upward escaping. Abbreviations could be DWPS upscaping, UWPS upscaping, UWPS downscaping and DWPS upscaping.

#133

Ha. I can’t hear “upscaping” and “downscaping” without thinking “manscaping”. But “downward escape” and “downstroke escape” (and vice versa) are sort of equivalent to me, and I’m mostly fine with either of them.

I think what matters most here is that the term “pickslanting” be used only when referring to the actual visible appearance of the pick. It’s got the words “pick” and “slant” in there, and it’s hard to escape that very obvious visual reference. It makes a lot of sense for that. I would stay away from using “pickslanting” to describe a kind of picking motion, or a kind of phrase, just because it’s confusing for all the reasons we’ve outlined here.

#134

Heh heh, it made me think of the word “landscaping” but anyway, you don’t want an abbreviation that’s going to make people think of manscaping.

Perhaps you could continue using the original terms you came up with and just add a disclaimer saying: “This has traditionally been the pick angle we associated with this type of motion. We use it to describe that motion for the sake of simplicity and because people have become familiar with it, but just know that even though most people tend to use those pick positions for those motions, you don’t have to. You can use any pick angle you want for a motion as long as it works well for you.”

#135

These proposals go in the right direction, but as a long time CTC fan I have a brain that automatically associated the “down” prefix with “escaped upstrokes”. The risk of confusion may be high!

#136

I see what you mean and that is something I’m sure Troy’s team will consider whenever they make their final decision on what terms they ultimately want to use. I guess they’ll have to weigh the confusion that long time CTC customers will experience if they change terms - weigh that against the good they might do for future CTC customers by changing the terminology.

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#137

Actually, a simple fix to the above would be to refer to “the first pickstroke on a new string”, rather than the last pickstroke on the string you have just played.

This way the correspondence down~dwps is recovered. I don’t have good suggestions for new names though :slight_smile:

#138

That’s a good thought. Problem with it is that it’s very possible to start a new string with an upstroke although you’re in DWPS mode. It’s not what defines the benefits of the picking strategy.

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#139

This is how the Gypysies describe their technique, and I always felt it missed the point, because as @qwertygitarr is pointing out, it tends to obscure the fact that the escaped upstroke is where the speed is coming from. One weird side effect of this is that the Gypsies tend to consider all downstrokes equivalent, even when some are sweeps and others are repeated individual downstrokes. It’s clear that some of these downstrokes can be done super fast and others can’t, and their vocabulary bears this out, where the fastest lines are as you’d expect - either ascending sweeps, or pure alterate with even numbers of notes per string.

#140

Hey CTC team! Any spoilers on the new acronyms to describe the path of the pick? I’m trying to remember to always write “escaped this or that way” rather than the now imprecise UWPS, DWPS and crosspicking terminology, but I feel our conversations would get smoother with some shorthands.

PS: I have a bit less time these days to obsessively check all the CTC material (the updated primer is still in my backlog) - so it may be you already explained this and I missed it!

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#141

my 2 cents.

anything with the word “escaped” is just hopelessly clunky. there is the sort of built in need to “do the math” like “okay wait a minute, im escaping upward so I must be downward slanted”

uwps/dwps/crosspicking are already sort of trademarked things which are understood by the core community

Imagine changing “Coke” to “sugary brown liquid condiment”. Sort of loses the vibe ya know?

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