"Skip sweeping"

Playing Technique
#1

Hey guys!

So I had the chance to get a bit of “down the neck” footage of Shaun Baxter doing what he calls “skip sweeping”.

You’d notate it as a sweep across non-adjacent strings, but as we can see it’s actually really flat string hopping! It’s a sweep-esque elbow movement, with wrist flexion and extension to dip the pick in and out of the plane of the strings. Very interesting.

Has anyone been able to make this work?

https://1drv.ms/v/s!ArEjfe1Y1clpgjw2y4hUbOIAHq9O

EDIT: Vimeo link:

Shaun Baxter Stringhopping from Nick Jennison on Vimeo.

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#2

Very interesting topic but I can’t watch the video at the moment (will have a look later). For these cases the only approach I found to work, so far, is to mute the string in between with the left hand and not bother to skip it with the pick.

It is a bit tricky to keep the timing consistent, though, and obviously it may not sound as clean (especially when we hit more than one muted string)!

EDIT: I watched and it’s a very cool sound, but the technique seems definitely string-hoppy hence inefficient (i.e. one cycle of wrist flexion + extension on every note). But I may be wrong, as usual :slight_smile:

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#3

Amazing, I love Shaun Baxter, one of my favourite British players (Jazz Metal is an underrated classic).

It looks like a smooth string hopping technique, really great stuff.

#4

Do gambale and jimmy Bruno do this also when skipping strings?

#5

Good question! Maybe @Troy can shed some light on this? Perhaps there was something in the FG/JB interviews…

#6

Hi Nick! I don’t recall Jimmy or Frank playing anything string skippy. Caveat being I haven’t looked at the Frank footage in a long time but I don’t recall anything like that.

Personally I have no appetite for repeated wrist-extension, i.e. stringhopping, movements. Doing that fast for any length of time is an invitation to RSI type injuries and offers no benefit that I can think of when a true crosspicking movement will do the same job with no more stress or strain the “regular” alternate picking.

The other method for repeated downstrokes is the gypsy rotation way, and there are players like Joscho who can do this pretty fast:

https://troygrady.com/interviews/joscho-stephan/clips/arpeggio-min-gypsy-fast/

I was able to get good enough at this for about five minutes, just long enough to film a section for one of the Eric Johnson lessons:

https://troygrady.com/seminars/cascade/chapter-22-skip-fives/

To be clear, Eric doesn’t actually appear to pick all the notes in the “skip fives” patterns, but in tooling around with the fretboard shape I found that I could do two consecutive downstrokes really fast with a rest stroke / rotation approach that I think is essentially what the Gypsies are doing. I haven’t worked on it since, but it feels less strainy then the repeated wrist pecking motion of stringhopping. I can’t say why that would be, but that what was my impression.

Again, to be completely conservative, I’d suggest everyone avoid repeated pickstroke type movements since it’s basically double the abuse on the muscles and tendons for the given number of notes. We’ve already heard enough horror stories on the forum here to scare me off of these for good.

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#7

I’d agree with that. FWIW, I can’t make the skip sweeping thing work, and neither can the majority of my students (this is an excerpt from a piece on year 2 of Shaun’s university guitar syllabus, which I teach).

I (and about 80% of the players I coach) deal with this piece and others like it using crosspicking. There have been a handful of students who’ve found the “skip sweeping” thing easy enough at the speeds required by the course (8th triplets at 100bpm - pretty stately!) but almost none have been able to make it work faster than that.

Thankfully, Shaun’s big enough not to mind what technique we use, as long as it sounds good.

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