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!
This is a really good point and one that I know that I have to keep reminding myself of. I am on a 2WPS mission as I have always wanted to have that uniform machine-gun picking to rip up a scale. However, you only have to listen to the like a of Yngwie, EJ etc to get reminders of how fluid and beautiful lines can be. 1WPS is not limited - it has a few constraints as part of it that drives creation and sonic dynamism! I know I will struggle more with DWPS that utilise the ‘escape hatch’ pull offs, slides and sweeping tools - to me its a lot harder and will take more time to ‘bed in’.
Hence, why I hope crosspicking will come to the rescue to ensure that I can play more interesting lines than just scales!
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I think up to now, I have in fact had the “limiting” mindset. This morning I rewatched to segment with Strunz and Farrah. Initially I kind of skipped over those examples because there is a lot of chromatic movement and I felt like those weren’t the best ways to apply something musical to a solo etc. Strangely enough I can usually play through chromatic lines relatively easily. It’s the larger stretches in the diatonic shapes that give me problems. …what I need to do is work on applying those patterns to diatonic shapes…I think doing that will yield some very usable figures.
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I Here is the all alternate version @Troy asked about.
My first attempt at a slo-mo video.
Hopefully it’s not too dark…
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This is great. Not entirely clear from this camera angle whether or not there is swiping, but if it sounds good it is good. Since it appears to be working I wouldn’t worry further about mechanical details unless you start hearing swiping noise you don’t want to hear.
Instead I’d just run through all the common 2nps and 3nps fingerings with this, starting on both upstrokes and downstrokes, and see if there is any particular subset of them that feels weird or you can’t figure out how to navigate by feel.
Nice work!
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Sorry trying to get use to the site.
Awesome! Thanks. I’ll start working on all the possibilities.
I think I start to get some swiping happening once I try to lay faster than I’m capable of. I’m thinking the key right now is to play comfortably and cleanly at a fast but manageable speed. Once I’ve got these motions perfected (or as close to perfection) then I can worry about speed. The speed im playing in this video is fairly quick anyway.
I see what you mean and I often think like this, but be careful because it can be a limiting mindset. It may still be useful sometimes to just try to see what happens if you go as fast as you can (or to your target tempo).
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Funny you should say that. Just this morning I was watching the MAB interview and there was a section where he was talking about playing slow to play fast. At the end he also said something about just going for it…play as fast as you can. Just because.
But when I said I wanted to perfect the motions, I meant at the speed in my above video. I didn’t want to try to go too slow where thenpocking motion changes or too fast to where it’s pure slop.
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Yeah I also spend most of my time practicing at “medium” speeds (where I can’t do hopping but I don’t get exhausted), to clean up the technique. But then I also noticed that speed does not improve if it is not trained specifically. I don’t know what the right proportion is, for this week I may try something like 75% of the time at medium speed, 25% at “high” speed (where I can just about play the thing).
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nice brother very clean .
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