Oh yeah, the Tuck one is so good. I forgot to mention that. I would say he is the clearest example of someone in the 80’s and 90’s who was super close, to the point that it could be argued that he pretty much had some of the CTC ideas, just in a slightly under-developed way. Like Josh, I have read that article a ton of times.
Just as relevant as the section that Josh highlighted is one from a couple of pages later (section 1.2.11). Tuck’s stuff is so information dense that it’s worth going sentence-by-sentence.
[E]arly on I realized that it was also possible to pick two or more strings in the same direction if they each had an odd number of notes, and that many jazz players did this using downstrokes on triplets and very fast passages, using a slur or rest later if necessary to get the downstrokes back on the beat if the picking got turned around.
Here I’m prett sure Tuck is describing players who re-finger parts in their left hand to maintain alternate picking (like you say about Jimmy Brown, and countless others). He’s like 75% there. Whenever someone starts talking about odd and even numbers of notes, you know they’re on the right track. The biggest gap is that he doesn’t connect it to his discussion of the downward pick slant, and doesn’t seem to realize why they work so well together (the “clearing,” as you say).
Inspired by Kenny Burrell, who played this way consistently on downstrokes regardless of speed or rhythm, I worked on it until I could use it anytime the note layout invited it, both on downstrokes and upstrokes, regardless of how it fell rhythmically. I learned to call this transverse picking.
Here’s he’s describing another level of players: those who alternate pick all the time and are able to play arbitrary lines without modifying what they’re doing with their left hand. Then he says he practiced it a lot and eventually learned to do it himself. So it very much sounds like he found 2WPS–but doesn’t realize what he’s doing.
(Later the term sweep picking was coined to refer to the same process applied to lines specifically constructed based on transverse picking patterns.)
…and here, again, he’s back to describing players that adjust the parts to maintain a 1-way pick slant, in this case players like Yngwie who favor economy picking when possible, and fall then back to left hand tricks when they can’t. But he doesn’t get into the whole logic of how exactly you need to rework the parts, and probably doesn’t know.
To me, Tuck seems like a microcosm of where we were at in the 80’s and 90’s: there was a fuzzy intellectual understanding of 1-way pick slanting, and basically zero intellectual understanding of 2-way pick slanting, although there were some players able to physically do 2WPS without explaining it (people like Paul Gilbert, Batio, and probably Tuck himself). It’s just that he was further along than just about anyone else who’d written about picking publicly up to that point.