Solving 3nps Fours with One-Way Pickslanting

Then you can do descending fours using upward pickslanting, one upward sweep, and one pulloff, or ascending fours using upward pickslanting, one upward sweep, and a hammer! That’s a fun exercise if you want to work out the details.

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I will ABSOLUTELY start working on that. In a couple of weeks when I’ve built a decent flow I’ll post up a vid.
Thanks man!!

Ok, so I tried to workout the details on this last night and fell a little short. Lol
Do you suggest doing He descending fours using the ascending pickup notes like MAB does? I found it much easier to just begin the descending way. If I played it with the ascending pickup notes it changes the pick strokes.

Now, I don’t want you to give me the solution, I want to figure it out myself. I just want to know whether you are doing it with the pickup notes or just straight descending.

What I was doing was a 2 string repeating descending 4’s…let’s assume G and D strings both with a 4-2-1 fingering pattern.

I wasn’t really thinking of any particular start note. For any given note in the pattern you’re going to choose upstroke or downstroke and work it out from there. Only one of these choices will produce a workable solution with one-way pickslanting.

Note that when you have a fretting sequence applied to a fingering with a consistent number of notes on every string, the sequence iterates exactly as many times as there are notes in the fingering before repeating itself.

No matter whether you use dwps or uwps, and no matter whether you ascend or descend, when you do fours agains a three-note-per-string fingering, only one legato note is needed before “repeat”. The rest of the string changes can be handled via the standard methods - escaped alternate or sweep.

IThanks for moving this to it’s own thread…last thing I want to do is hijack someone else’s progress thread.
I’ll give this another crack tonight after work.
I’ve been thinking about this problem all day today and still haven’t found the correct solution. I need to review the uwps rules again. I obviously remember to switch strings after downstrokes but there’s got to be something else I’m missing. I feel like a moron for not having found the solution already. Lol
This morning before work I quickly ran through the exercise a few times using swiping,…mixed results. I can play it with pure alternate picking but my swiped notes are really sloppy and audible.

Hey if it helps I think I found an uwps solution. I can’t play it that fast or clean but I know it works mathematically, if you want I can post a short video here later!

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Cool!! I just got home from work. I’m going to work on this tonight too but I would not at all object to help at this point.
I know earlier I had said I wanted to solve this on my own. And even though while at work I didn’t have a guitar to play, I ran through all the scenarios I could think of and I’m stumped!!!
So, absolutely…post up a vid when you get a free minute.
Thanks!

Alright, so here’s a way that should work for 4s descending, pure UWPS (I mess up a bit at the end when trying to speed it up a little):

I think the pickstrokes are

d - u - pulloff - d - u - d - u - d - u - upsweep - d - u - repeat… well I’ll need to double check :slight_smile:

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Awesome, @tommo
Thank you. I had the pull off in the right place but the sweep was just not coming to me. Thanks again…I owe you one!!

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No problema, actually this is an interesting solution that I’d like to practice more myself! In return, you can figure out the ascending version, which I haven’t done yet! :smiley:

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Don’t hold your breath…I’m struggling like a mofo with this one.
Lol

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Alright, I spent an hour or so playing through one 6 nps segment. It’s getting smoother.
I guess it’s going to take some dedicated repetitions with some of these concepts in CtC. Many of these picking motions are either new to me or things I avoided for years because they didn’t come easy at first.
If I want to conquer these things I need to put the work in…

I came up with another solution to this, this morning before work.
It involves some TWPS and an upward sweep. I’ll post the details after work tonight but this feels much smoother to me.

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Ok here’s the solution I came up with. It uses a little TWPS withbone pull off and one upward sweep.
The pattern is:
D,U,D,U
D, PULL,U,D
U,Sweep,D,U
D,U,D,U
@tommo
@Troy
Thoughts?

F

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Hm, this doesn’t really fit your one-way pickslanting homework assignment. No extra credit!

Kidding. Actually this looks cool. In fact, I’m seeing fully-escaped pickstrokes in there, and not much of a one-way pickslanting motion path. One-way pickslanting solutions are for people who expressly want to avoid - or can’t figure out how to make - curved motion paths. If you can do that this easily, I don’t really see what benefit sweeping is even providing here.

Try filming an all-alternate version of this exactly as you’re playing it here and don’t think too much about the movements. You may get something cool.

Also try getting the camera a little closer, and pointing the headstock a little more toward the lens a more ‘down the strings’ type of view. And also try centering the framing so the picking hand is a little closer to the center of the screen. You don’t want to cut off all the forearm, because that’s instructive to see - just a little closer to the center.

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Thanks!
Ok, I actually bought a small tripod to hold the phone specifically for making videos for this. I’ll set it all up this Saturday afternoon and make a few passes at an all alternate version.
I’d love to really work towards being able to TWPS. That, to me is an ideal solution rather than designing all of my patterns to fit a one way slant.

Edit:

I actually just gave it a quick run through (not filmed) and even though there is some swiping and overall banging into other stings, it’s not half bad and I can play it at least twice as fast as the above video.
Maybe I really should be spending my time working on TWPS…??

Try not to fall victim to the “one way pickslanting is limiting” mindset. It’s an illusion. A lot of two-way pickslanters just play scales all the time, because they can, and they sound the same as everyone else who does that. They can sometimes have little in the way of 2nps chops, or mixed alternate/sweeping chops… Ironically, when you can do “pure alternate” for things, it can be come a limiting mindset. If you are still learning and not super fluid with anything in particular yet, I would prioritize getting awesome at something over getting awesome at any particular thing.

What you are doing in this clip looks a little like crosspicking because some of the notes that you may think are pure uwps appear to be escaping at both sides - but that may be the camera angle. That’s why I recommended filming this again.

Even then, I still recommend getting awesome at anything as the number one priority. It is your creativity that will make your stuff memorable, not which mechanic you use.

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Here’s how I do ascending fours. I play it with DWPS and a couple of swipes, although looking at it closely I might be doing a little thumb motion to get around the swipes. For descending I’ll use UWPS and swipes but I’m really rusty at it.

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Ok I’ll definitely keep all of that in mind. The last thing I want to do is limit myself I’m amy way. Yes, I’m still at a point where much of this is not ingrained, especially the sweeping, crosspicking and TWPS ideas.
I’m glad you mentioned that some of my licksteokes looked like possibly crosspicking. I’ve been wondering that myself lately.
Even though I’m a natural uwps, I think I tend to have a fairly shallow pick angle. This may actually be beneficial in achieving some of the other various techniques. Dwps, for example may be just a very small tweak to what I’m already doing and once I’m comfy with that TWPS and crosspicking May feel a lot more natural.
I’ll get another vid up as soon as I can.

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That looked really good. I like how you broke down the first 4 note chunk, Gilbert style. I think I need to do that too. I’m still looking at it like one big six note chunk, if that makes sense. I need to reduce to the Lowest common denominator…lol
Math was never my strong suit. Ha!