So I finally got the chance to use my magnet

…and my mind was blown! I came from the Paul Gilbert - Intense Rock school of guitar, learning from his videos in the late 80’s and early 90’s. They were my go-to videos for guitar calisthenics. Recently going through the Paul Gilbert section in the Antigravity seminar again, I wanted to see if there were any similarities from my technique to his, and I was surprised to see that a lot of what @Troy described with the swiping was also in my technique as well, so much that I went back into the woodshed and am working on “correcting” what I feel I need to in order to achieve better two-way pickslanting. Here’s a video that I put together for a Facebook group of mine, to show what I found.

I only played at a little over moderate speed as I wasn’t sure how much the Slo-mo feature was going to slow the video down. As you can see in the first half taken a couple of weeks ago, I’m swiping the adjacent string on the ascending pattern of 6’s on every string change, but not on the way down. I also used to overemphasize the upstroke as well, but worked on toning that down and making it more even some time ago. In the second half of the video, and working to consciously alter the pickslant, the pick now clears the adjacent string on the upstroke. I’m still getting used to it (old habits are hard to break), but I already am feeling that things feel and sound a bit cleaner.

With that said, I’m really loving the look into my playing that the magnet affords! I can’t recommend it enough for people that want to delve deep into their picking.

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I’ve watched a couple of times but without audio I’m having a little trouble with what I’m looking at (even though the vision is killer!). Where does the 2wps come into it? It seems like the licks are suited to UPS and I’m seeing bits of DPS but mostly it seems like UPS and less UPS. That’s not on you. That’s on me.

Can you explain a bit more? Are you naturally an upward player?

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Awesome! That cleaned right up didn’t it?

As @jakku points out, the lick you’re playing doesn’t really require two-way pickslanting if you start on a downstroke and just use uwps the whole way. But a lot of people play this line by adopting a somewhat neutral stance and switching to a more aggressive pickslant only for the string change. Parts of your “after” attempt look that way, so it sounds like that might be what you are referring to by two-way pickslanting in this case. Either way is fine. Both work.

Would be interested in seeing a faster (i.e. beyond moderate) speed take on this. Form can change when you try to play fast for any number of reasons, so you’ll want to double check that your faster speed is still making the string changes. If you post that, give us the complete normal speed version followed by the complete slow-motion version - that’ll make it easier to hear the difference.

I’m going to move this over to “Technique Critique” since I think it fits better there.

Thanks for posting!

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