It took me way too long to discover this…but i"m a naturally upward pickslanter…this was made obvious to me today when i couldn"t play the “Black Star lick” to save my life…but i could pull off some Mclaughlin licks at relatively high speeds…
What"s the ideal play YJM Or EJ while maintaining my natural picking technique… I really love Yngwie…but i don"t love him that much to radically change my technique…Any help or reference would be appreciated…Thanks
Not wanting to be glib, facetious or reductive but…start everything on an upstroke instead of a downstroke.
That sorts the “even notes per string” runs - but may not work with the “mini sweeps” of the form DDU and similar. But it may be possible to refret those and / or make them playable with additional hammers/pulloffs
A lot of the sweeping stuff won’t work, exactly, but as far ad his picked runs, stiff like the Yngwie 6s pattern, I can play it as a two-way pattern simply by doing a rotational movement from my default escaped downstroke orientation to move into a temporary escaped upstroke just for the string changes.
But, end of the day, if you want to full replicate his style, it’s based pretty squarely around an escaped upstroke/never change strings after a downstroke unless it’s a downwards sweep movement, so it might be worth spending some time exploring a pick motion where you bury downstrokes, if playing Yngwie lines faithfully is an important goal of yours.
Barring that, you could always just go about reverse engineering his licks and creating your own licks to revolve around escaped downstrokes - sweeping upwards when possible, using hit ons or pull offs in picked runs to allow you to change strings after downstrokes in a run that would normally change after an upstroke, etc. Could prove interesting.
I echo the sentiment of just changing around fingerings / techniques to suit your play style. If you plan on playing his music or others that “require” dwps, it would be good practice to streamline the fingering / technique to suit you.
I’m pretty sure that Joe Stump is a down storke escape player. If you subscribe, watch his session, or go to his Youtube channel. It’s about starting with upstrokes, but also like Yngwie, putting in Hammers/Pulls to more easily change strings.
Hey Saad22,
With you all the way there. I was in a very similar situation to you; I admire YJM’s technique very much even if I’m not particularly excited by his music. EJ on the other hand - I always wondered just how the heck he did those phenomenal fast picked descending pentatonic runs like in ‘Camel’s night out’. With my innate DSX technique and considerably gain / overdrive, as soon as I started approaching fast speeds, it got messy. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done with a DSX technique but my overall muting technique wasn’t really up to it either, making it too noisy. My technique really needed an overhaul. So I chose to really focus on developing the USX rotational technique. Lots of Yngwie 6s, chromatic scales and the like.
It’s taken a good three months for it to stop feeling so weird and to be able to “lock-in” comfortably. It’s bizarre considering it’s really only dropping the outside (pinky) edge of my picking hand about an inch at the most. Is it worth all the effort?
In a nutshell: Yes, definitely. An unexpected side-effect is that my RH muting has improved. These fast runs are sounding a helluva lot cleaner at high speed. I’m glad I made the change although it’s an ongoing process of developing the technique. Furthermore, since I’ve always been comfortable with DSX and I’ve paid a lot of attention to “locking-in” to the opposite pickslant, I’ve found that I’ve gained the ability to two-way pickslant for free.
I’d say bite the bullet and go for it. You won’t regret it