Shawn Lane's extreme pick edge angle for shred

Playing Technique
#23

Tiago della Vega - faker, unfortunately. The contest video isn’t sped up but the audio was clearly overdubbed and does not in any way match the hand movements. Count the picking motions in any live performance, it’s always the giveaway. There’s a clip of him on a live Mexican television show that is not faked, and it is horrendous. Sadly, I think the guy probably does have actual skills, and if he just wrote cool tunes and played them cleanly at 210bpm or whatever, it would all be fine.

Counting the motions was what led us to @milehighshred. He wasn’t faking anything, and now that I’ve gotten to know him it clearly isn’t his style anyway. He may not have been hitting the tempos he thought he was hitting at the time, but of everyone we looked at who did these “world record” videos, he was actually moving the fastest. Ironically, he was probably the world’s fastest of all those attempts, even though he thought he was, then wasn’t, but actually was!

4 Likes
#24

Has he got a mini sweep in there to keep the sequence starting on an upstroke or is it just that he prefers the first “lap” to start that way?

#25

There’s a 2 string sweep in each group of 4 and 5.

#26

Correct, as @Tom_Gilroy points out. This is a classic dwps-style pattern that uses downstroke to ensure upstroke string changes.

#27

It’s worth noting though that Shawn calls this “strict alternate picking,” even though it categorically is not.

#28

Yeah that’s why I was confused - that, and an inability to work out what was going on from watching it in slow motion.

#29

What would this look like in tablature?

#30

More info can be read in my post in this thread

#31

He totally says that! But in context it makes more sense. In the example just before this one, he’s talking about a lick that uses a mix of picking and legato, and how it gives things a different sound. So I think all he was really saying is, here’s another example but this one is “all picked” and has that “all picked” sound.

In general, one of the things that has become clear from interviewing great players is that you can’t get too hung up on the precise wording they use. I know that can be confusing for the rest of us. But there usually is some sentiment that they are trying to get across, even if it’s not always literally what they are doing or saying, and sometimes even when it is the exact opposite of what they are doing or saying!

I’ll leave you with a funny example of this from last year’s Batio livestream. Here’s the YouTube comment:

1 Like
#32

I agree with all of that, it’s important to distinguish between what somebody says and what they’re trying to convey. Sometimes, you have to think about context or experiment with different interpretations, to try to find what somebody really means.

I think Shawn isn’t even remotely the worst offender either. Eric Johnson’s Total Electric Guitar has some major red herrings, like the bounce coming into play for his fast playing, or the section on circle picking.

1 Like
#33

Yes I think the hard part is that it’s not always entirely one or the other. The EJ videos are a good example of that. He was clearly on to the pickslanting aspect of things, and in that respect I think he deserves credit. Almost nobody who does these things is aware of it, and he clearly was at some level. Moreover, he knew it was important enough to include in an instructional video. He got confused with the “bounce” being a different movement, so we can probably only appreciate how close to effective that explanation was in hindsight. But he went farther than anyone else I can think of in trying to explain how his picking motion itself actually worked.

#34

Is the “bounce” Stringhooping or Crosspicking?

#35

In it’s simplest interpretation it’s stringhopping - he mimics the movement in the air and describes the arm tension that results from it.

But he also talks about tone and demonstrates edge picking, and then talks about pick trajectory and picking “away from the pickguard” on upstrokes, aka dwps. So he was really conflating all these things into one “bounce technique” concept, even thought we here would be likely to see them each as different.

So it’s kind of hard to say which of these he was really getting at most specifically, hence the confusion @Tom_Gilroy was referring to.

#36

Sure, and I was able to figure out what he was trying to get across after studying the video several times. There’s gold there, if you’re willing to dig.

#37

Regarding: “‘Human wrists don’t move side-to-side’ This coming from the guy moving his wrist side-to side.”

When Batio picks fast he completely changes his hand position. He arches it above the guitar and picks using an up and down movement with his wrist. He described this up and down movement as being similar to the motion of knocking on a door. That he picks as fast and as clean as he does this way without ever having incurred an injury in his 40 plus years of shredding says a lot about the ergonomic soundness of this picking motion.

I think the funniest contradiction in what Batio used to state compared to what he says now regards what was his most important “rule” to follow for fast alternate picking. In his original Speed Kills VHS video, Batio demonstrated moving the thumb knuckle and he said words to the effect of if you do this when you try to shred - you’re dead!

He continued to state over and over for years that the one thing to avoid doing at all costs was moving the thumb knuckle when doing fast alternate picking. Batio repeated this statement until he met a guy who could play faster than he could - Dannyjoe Carter. Well, Dannyjoe’s alternate picking motion involves moving the thumb at the knuckle for every pick stroke! Batio realized he had to take back what he had been saying all those years. It was a quite a humbling thing for Batio to watch a guy not only do exactly what he had said was the most important thing not to do but also be able to pick faster than Batio by using that “wrong way to pick.”

#38

Not to get too far off track - we can make another thread about Mike’s motion if we want. But I think Mike’s fastest picking is mostly elbow. If there’s any wrist, it’s not pure flexion extension anyway, but probably more of a 7:00 to 1:00 flexion / extension - deviation blend.

Expecting any guitar hero to understand this level of mechanics though is super unfair. It took us decades and that’s pretty much our only job! Overall I think Mike gets big points for identifying the FE movement at all - which he definitely does use at lower speeds and which most people don’t even know exists in guitar playing.

1 Like
#39

Excellent diagnosis of Mike’s picking mechanics. That’s the best I’ve ever seen anyone describe it. I went to a clinic of his around 1993 and everyone was allowed to ask him one or two questions after it was over. I asked him if he got more speed from his wrist or his elbow. He replied: “Elbow? I don’t use my elbow at all. It’s wrist and if anything, a little bit of finger movement.” It just goes to show that you’re right; these guys usually honestly don;t know how they do what they do. In spite of that, I think Mike’s Speed Kills VHS tape is very good, especially for its time.

#40

I think this helped me understand something for my technique, or at least try to experiment with something. I don’t find the sweet spot for “pure” (with all of the required quotation marks) deviation movements. The wrist would “lock up”, for lack of a better word. When I see players who seem to be mostly deviated go to “shred” mode, I have seen that they often use elbow mechanics. I am, among other things, working on this passage:

Which IMO starts tapping into shred zone. Sometimes it would be easy, sometimes hard. I had noticed that having more edge picking helped, but I didn’t know why. But with this thread, I’ve maybe started to understand a bit more why: I use more wrist flexion when I use more edge picking: I don’t simply turn my pick inwards, I turn my hand and arm to create the angle and as a result I use more wrist flexion as opposed to using more deviation with a more conservative pick angle.

As a result, I’ve started to think that one of the reasons at high speed you start seeing more elbow technique is that the muscles that create the deviation movement aren’t powerful enough on their own to pick that fast, as opposed to the forearm muscles when using elbow flexion/extension or pronation/surpination… Stop me anytime if someone thinks I’m wrong somewhere.

This adds another thing to work on: blending a bit more flexion/extension into my deviation! :laughing:
Or maybe try again with more elbow…
Anyway, back on topic.

1 Like
#41

Does Shawn slant the leading edge of his pick (edge closer to head of the guitar when parallel to the strings) up towards the ceiling or down towards the floor?
Starting at 13:53 in the video posted by Troy looks to me like it’s actually pointed up to the ceiling?

1 Like
#42

Hmm good question…