Pickslanting is dead. Long live pickslanting!

Playing Technique
#142

I think the problem is: you and I and others who follow the discussions closely are able to understand by context whether we are talking about the pick “slanting” or the pick path. Also, it is of course quite common to have - say - upwards slanting when doing escaped downstrokes.

But I believe the worry of the CTC team is that newcomers may be confused about the distinction between slanting and path - because the names UWPS and DWPS suggest that the two things must always happen together.

As an extreme example, I believe this type of misunderstanding is (partly) responsible for the £$%^storm in one recent, well- known thread :sweat_smile:.

Also, yeah it’s probably tough to sell anything by describing it as a “brown liquid” :smiley:

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#143

To me that’s ‘crosspicking’ which is confusing, because 1/ that term has been used for ages in Bluegrass circles and describes a much more specific thing (crossing strings, involving a skip) than it does here, and 2/ that can be performed in non-alternate picking way (like George Shuffler or Tony Rice).

I seem to remember in the interview of Andy Wood they were joking about the ‘pendulum’. It’s a cooler description of what is happening IMO, and somewhat catchy (credit to AW though …)

#144

yeah its gonna be nerdy either way. But I mean, from a marketing and ease of use point of view, compare “crosspicking” to “double escaped pickstrokes”. Id be happy to go my whole live and never say “double escaped picking” lol

Another thing to consider is people coming here who have viewed 4 years of back material. It will be unfortunate to have to go thru the whole “oh yeah, NOW we call this that and that is now called this other thing”. Or even as u said earlier “the now imprecise yada yada”

ugggh. All of that jive is sort of the conversational equivalent of stringhopping

#145

I think that’s only the case because we’re used to the existing terms, and the problem is the existing terms cause problems - it actually has nothing to do with the slant of the pick, which it was MONTHS after I joined here before I realized that. :smiley:

The pertinent part of a downwards pickslant, as well, isn’t the down stroke - it’s the upstroke. If you play with a DWPS, then you bury your downstrokes, but your upstrokes pull away from the body of the guitar and you’re free to change strings (in either direction) on upstrokes. It kind of makes sense to reshape our thinking on the other half of the pickstroke, since that’s where the “magic” happens.

#146

yeah, I dont have a dog in the fight per se. Im not selling anything

But when we say “dwps” I can look directly at my pick and see if thats what im doing. when we say “upward escape” I have to then actually do a downstroke then an upstroke to see what the heck we are talking about lol. Thats what i meant by “do the math”

I dunno, I understood right away that dwps meant the path of the pick came away from the body on upstrokes. Buried on downs, “escaped” on ups. I never was confused about the path versus the slant of the pick. Isnt that explained on almost every single free CTC vid?

#147

…except, the only thing is, this isn’t always the case. There’s a pretty high correlation between a downward slant to the pick and buried downstrokes/escaped upstrokes, but it’s hardly universal and you can play with a downward slant but escaped downstrokes. Hence the need to abandon DWPS, because it doesn’t consistently explain what’s going on.

#148

yeah I understand there are certain exceptions. cest la vie. what is there in life with no exceptions? lol

I hope there is some perfect one size fits all terminology. I hope the cure isnt worse than the sickness lol

simplicity rules

#149

Seems to be working out fine, actually! Here’s an Instagram post from a couple days ago:

The top comment is someone, probably new to our stuff, who excitedly posts: “Hmm… from what I see, I think I’m a “upstroke escape” picker!”

That’s exactly the response we got when we first went wide with the “pickslanting” observations. The difference here is that this individual now knows exactly what to look for - the path of the pick. We have lots of “Technique Critique” clips on here of players angling the pick one way or another, but not actually doing the escape motion correctly, and sometimes not even escaping at all. This is very common. And again, it’s our fault because all our original videos told you to look at the “slant” of the pick.

My hope is that this individual won’t make that mistake, and with this clearer explanation I’m betting they won’t.

I’m not super concerned with how to abbreviate things. In the Primer material, we’ve just been saying “upstroke escape” and “downstroke escape”, which are very clear, plain-spoken descriptions of exactly what the pick is doing. Again, based on the Instagram reception, I think they’re going to get the message across just fine.

However if you feel the need, USX and DSX motion works for me. Since I have not used these yet in any forum posts (beyond this one), you can even be the first!

We never really forced the terminology — we just created them when we ourselves needed a word for something to make stuff clearer.

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#150

clunky is clunky whether it works or not lol

usx and dsx is a huge improvement over “upward escaped”

wait, does usx actually abbreviate anything? lol

#151

In engineering you have Tx and Rx for transmit and receive, and interestingly from my various Googling, there appears to be no clear consensus as to where the “x” actually came from. Physicists among us — we’re looking at you @Tommo — can comment further.

But the net result now seems to be a generally accepted practice of using “x” as a placeholder for omitted letters in abbreviations. In our case, the “x” sounds a little like “escape” so I think it clicks.

But we still need something for “double escape” though. 2sx? 2x? They sound like t-shirt sizes.

#152

2xl = double escaped legato!

so what if it means nothing…its MARKETING!

(see old Rock Hudson movie about “VIP”)

#153

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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#154

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

#155

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

(In seriousness: 1SX, bam)

#156

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

#157

1 sex? hetero picking?

#158

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.

#159

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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#160

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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#161

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).