Sooo.. Is Pickslanting still a "thing"

Playing Technique
#21

You’re already plenty fast! I’ll try to explain escaped in one image using DWPS/UX. Troy has extensive ideas about how to actually make it happen in terms of movements.

The guitar has wood 110 and six strings, from high E 100 to low E 105. There is a pick 115 that has a tip 120. Position 115 is “escaped,” because the pick is free to choose any target string that it wants. Lets’s say the pick 115 decides to hit D: it will end up in position 130 possibly resting against G (a rest stroke). So this trapped pick is somewhat limited: It can go backwards through D again to return to 115, or it can sweep forward through G and possibly rest on B. Note that it cannot sweep through D towards A, because it’s ratcheted in the wrong way to make that possible. This is the absolute simplest description of downward pick slanting + upward escape that I can think of, I hope that it helps.

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#22

Have you seen these?



Would be interesting to see what your current motion looks like.
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#23

What you’re already doing seems to be working for you. But if you want an easy way to get the feel of DWPS, just practice for a while with only downward rest strokes. A down stroke that is stopped by coming to rest on the next string. Leaning your pick into the down stroke will feel very natural.

Then when that feels right, try to add in up strokes. Continue making the down strokes rest strokes. Push the down strokes into the next string. Pull the up strokes out into the air above the strings. If you have the downward lean, you will be doing this with just a straight back and forth wrist movement.

Or you can search for info on Gypsy Jazz. Just beware that there are some dogmatic rules that you can ignore, as it was developed to allow for maximum projection on acoustic guitars. But the Gypsy technique is a very simple and clear one, easy to understand. It is a cousin to the Eric Johnson type electric technique.

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#24

I should add though, although I am a one-way economy picker, I have been having fun practicing two-way slanting/economy picking. Such a blast to be able to just push through string changes on a descending line, which my base technique cannot do.

However, for me the practical utility is mostly on descending lines that don’t have much direction change to them. If there’s a lot of that, a lot of back and forth between strings, etc., it’s too tricky to constantly change pick slant, and I’ll stick with my home base DWPS.

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#25

Cool, thanks for the info and for checking out my situation. I’d love to be able to pick using wrist, so I will definitely give your suggestions a try. Being able to play 1nps stuff eventually could really lead to some interesting musical possibilities so heck yeah! The diagram makes sense, you must have a drafting background…

So the pick, to be a “downward slant” is with the point up, and the butt down, correct? like if one were to just grab a guitar and do a downwards strum, the pick would drag across the strings, right?

As I mess around with this, it’s pretty tricky getting a grip that works. Also, a lot of stuff that I normally do with “arm” isn’t really that viable but I think that single sting even number of notes stuff with wrist driven DWPS and USX isn’t too bad. The key was sitting here for about a half hour just doing rest strokes, so thanks for that - it worked! (I think).

I suppose that maybe art of the problem is that I can already play, and since I can fake my way through all kinds of stuff using the motions/escapes etc that I am comfortable, perhaps I am too quick to dismiss a new motion/escape. After all, I suppose a new vocabulary needs to be kind of created for that, yes?

One challenge I notice is that even though I am trying to just use wrist, my arm/elbow kind of tenses up - gotta kind of train it not to do that… Weird.

Anyways, working my way backwards with the metronome trying to do string changes on 1-2-3-4 across strings…