Yes but then watch him play scuttle buttin’ and it looks more crosspicked to me. I don’t know how you’d play it with dwps alone.
I don’t doubt it. I’m just saying there some very obvious DWPS in the clip I’m commenting on, not that it’s the only tool in his toolbox. There’s probably more techniques even in just that clip, I didn’t watch it the whole way through.
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True. I never realized it before but you’re right
Interesting thing about your Sayce clip is that he seems to be predominantly UPS, whereas it seems most of the players in this zone of fast blues picking (Hendrix, SRV) are predominantly downward slanters. Other thing is that even when Sayce switches to the pick, he’s using a hybrid technique to bypass string switching/slanting issues and get crazy across-string stuff happening at high speed. Why a LOT of great players–Hubert Sumlin, Albert Collins, Jeff Beck, Derek Trucks, to name a few–opt for that thumb-forefinger technique instead of using a pick at all. Sayce seems more like a thumb-forefinger player who sometimes uses hybrid picking to get the same effect, rather than a picker per se.
I’d take a little issue with the “speed” thing. BPS is just one measure, and deceptive despite its apparent objectivity. I think @Troy mentions this in the Eric Johnson stuff: that there are things that may not be insanely fast in BPS but seem a lot faster to the perception because they involve the wider-spaced sequences of pentatonics, as Eric demonstrates all over the place. There’s a punchiness about it that has its own kind of impact when you do it fast and fluidly, even if you’re not achieving the same BPS as a neo-classical Yngwie scale or the like.
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I’ve been taking an intense look back at SRV recently in light of pick slanting stuff I’ve learned here. I think you’re right that he’s a predominant DWPS player but he deploys a lot of UWPS when he wants it, particularly that way he has of throwing in descending sweeps in the midst of a sequence–his hand just easily rotates in and out of that position, and I think he can switch from one to the other with equal facility. So maybe more of a TWPS? Somewhere on the site there’s a line about sweeping across the whole neck as a way of practicing the two movements, and it almost seems like that’s something SRV did a lot of.
Anyway, this clip has some pretty good views.
There’s a bit starting at 3:43 where you can see him moving very easily between the two–maybe cross-picking is the better term? The camera angle at 9:09 is quite good for looking at his wrist motion and pick angle. Right around 9:50 he starts doing a characteritic single note bend thing, starting out with repeated up-picks, his hand flying way out from the guitar, like a super-exagerated version of a DWPS exercise (he does it again a little further on). OTOH the bit starting at 11:53 looks predominantly UWPS and involves a lot of what sound to me like SNPS bits in between the doublets. It really just seems like he can use whatever is appropriate to the moment he’s creating.
His use of UWPS interests me b/c I’ve had breakthroughs over the years where I’ve been able to get something like that “wristy” SRV looseness–that feeling like you’re whipping your hand across the strings, hardly any tension in the fingers–but haven’t had a good way of understanding it and thus fixing it in my playing. At least for my playing, now that I’m revisiting this stuff with CTC in mind, a big part of what gets me there is being able to switch into UWPS mode and stay loose. Like, ascending riffs starting from a single downstroked note on the lower string and then 2-note-per-string after that, with the downbeat on the downstroke, so the two-note phrase occurs across the strings rather than along them. Just a punchier sounding thing. But then you want to be able to turn that around with a single-note upstroke at the top and then descend, so each TNPS pair now starts on the downstroke and string switching off the upstroke, standard DWPS style. (If you see what I mean–still a newbie at the terminology). When I’m able to do that fluidly is when it feels and sounds more like that wristy-loose movement SRV and some other blues pickers get. They do a lot of other things of course.
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Honestly, if you have to think about all those different things when you;re playing, I don’t see how you;re gonna have any room left in your head for creativity. I’m starting to lean more and more towards the David Grier philosophy. There’s no way SRV was thinking abut all these things such as “which way do I need to slant my pick for this lick” or “how many notes per string is my next lick gonna have and what type of pick slant does that mean I’ll need”?
I love what CTC has provided for us, but people are horribly overcomplicating it in some cases.
Well, sure, but practicing is very distinct from playing. Analysis is helpful to me in getting out of my own ruts so I don’t just end up practicing them in deeper.
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I forget if it was Miles Davis or John Coltrane or some other jazz luminary, but one of them famously quipped, on the subject of how to become a great jazz soloist, “First learn all the theory you possibly can… and then forget it all.” What he meant by that isn’t that theory is useless - far from it, in fact. Rather, study it until you have it totally internalized, and then just play, not thinking at all about “Ok, this is a b5 over the II, I should be playing Locrian Dominant” (note to the theory gurus, I totally made that up, so it probably makes no sense at all, bear with me 
) but just trusting their ears and the thousands and thousands of hours of practice they’ve put in to make sure all these concepts they’ve spent so long studying so they can just come out naturally in their playing.
I suspect guys like Stevie Ray are exactly the same - I guarantee you he isn’t thinking about pick angle while he’s playing, probably because that’s something that doesn’t even occur to him he SHOULD be thinking of. I think it’s all just happening, because on some level his body knows it works, so it’s just encoded in the muscle memory of how he plays a particular lick or run.
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Yep, the fact that he didn’t consciously think about those thing doesn’t change the fact that he did them. If we inform our practice with analysis of what he did maybe we can shave off a few of the thousands of hours of practice it might take to develop our own take on the same technique.
And to echo the point further up about the difference between practice and performance: even if SRV didn’t apply the same mindset as Troy, I don’t doubt that he spent a ton of time away from the spotlight attempting licks over and over until he “felt” his way into a version that worked.
To me, the whole point of CTC is that once one person feels his way into a solution that works, the rest of us can try to learn by watching him, instead of putting on blindfolds and hoping that by shear chance we’ll fumble our way into the same solutions he did. Sure, experimentation and feeling things out still play a role, but analysis of people like SRV provides sign-posts that help us evaluate and tweak what we’re doing with an understanding of “what is known to work”.
And Troy has reported that an ongoing theme with elite pickers is that most of them developed their technique within an intensive period of less than two years. So if you’ve been playing your heart out for two years and you haven’t re-invented picking yet, chances are you never will, and it makes sense to look at what has worked for other people. With most other instruments, that sort of “struggling in the wilderness” is widely viewed as wasteful or even harmful to the development of “proper” technique in the long run (due to the development of “bad habits”), not as “necessary to creativity”.
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His brother Jimmy once told in an interview that his uncles of both sides played the same style and most people couldn’t even tell a difference. Seems the chances are pretty good that actually somebody tought him how to do that.
And if you look at it with pure logic - DWPS on pentatonics …checked.
Reststrokes (which he uses a lot in the accoustic) are probably the best choice when switching between agressive strumming and scale playing.
Technically you can explain all of this (or at least most) without rocket science.
In the end it’s not the technique that makes the great players ‘great’, it’s the flawless and confident way they use it, combined with the right choices when to leave the ‘laws’ of technique (and theory).
CtC gives me good hope that the technical part is approachable for a good percentage of players (at least in near future), but to get really great it takes more than that, escpecially time with the instrument, and practice is time with your instrument.
And beside the time that’s saved by better knowlledge of the technique and how to trigger specific motions, we can even estimate the efforrt to put into specific techniques, which enables us to clain realistic goals.
To be short: understanding the technique is not against creativity, it helps you to focus on it.
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If you mean the “just feels right” approach, when I put that into my practice and really focused on it, it has worked for me, and produced something more in the way of a cross-picking movement than anything else. But I would find it difficult to stay on that bicycle for more than a week or so. Stiffness creeping in, or old habits reasserting themselves. Generally I would try flipping my usual patterns around, try starting on upstrokes where I habitually used downstrokes, that kind of thing, just to shake things up, break some ice jams… for a while. Because without really understanding the mechanics of why it was working, I couldn’t figure out what to do when it stopped working. So the CTC thing has been hugely useful in that respect for practicing. Getting those big, wide-open sounding pentatonic blues things going has always been a big challenge for me, sometimes I can do it, sometimes it goes away, so thinking about it in this more granular way–like, just having a logic for when you want to sweep vs alternate, not that it’s an absolute rule but knowing that’s going to be more efficient (read “EASIER”!) for certain things, is huge.
There’s a learning styles thing, too. I think some players have a gift for imitation–for really fitting their ear and mechanics to reproduce not just the notes but the “feel” of other players, without necessarily involving the cerebral cortex so much. Sit down with a record, go over that guy’s lick until you really get inside how he’s playing it, why the same notes sound better if you do it this way instead of that. One way that works is that those licks act like anchors (in a good way), reminding your brain of that this feels right feeling, so you can return to them as a way of keeping you in that groove while you’re moving around in a solo. I think SRV has that kind of thing going. I think the players for whom it works are some of the best in the world.
I think that’s also a very powerful way to learn, and sometimes, again, it has worked for me, but then I want to add something out of my own head that maybe doesn’t fit so well and… then it’s really great to have a logic for analyzing what’s wrong rather than just If I just do this a lot more and more and more it will get easier. But I also highly prize the ability to come up with crazy shit on the fly in performance. Like @Acecrusher-- “Learn it all, then forget it,” is a great way to put it. Or as a guitar teacher once put it to me when laying out some complicated etude for me to try and master, “You gotta go to prison in order to get free.”
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Yeah, great clip. And I agree about how his strumming morphs into single note picking and back again–something I’ve always noticed, not just with him but others, notably Hendrix, who somewhere talks about the importance of chordal playing and not just obsessing about single notes. I think it’s a key to something essential. Because the other thing about both of them is they belong to that category of blues players who can nail with a flatpick the kind of licks that a lot of others use thumb-forefinger for, precisely because of the problem of “escaping” certain kinds of blues licks. Sumlin, Albert Collins, Beck, Trucks, Johnny Winter (thumbpick and forefinger), many many more. You see SRV doing a bit of that, using the hybrid pick and ring finger version (I’ve used that quite a bit myself), but it’s that ability to fluidly blow through those same kind of angular figures with a flat-pick that’s so enviable to me.
It all seems to be built off of his wide, wrist-rotating strumming, so when he wants to alternate pick, his wrist is just habitually used to a motion that escapes the pick in either direction. I was thinking that thing of playing repeated up- or down-stroke licks with equal facility is a good practice technique as well as a dramatic musical gesture you can use to keep that “feel” in your playing. Like a super-exaggerated version of what you want to be doing as you move down into faster, alternate-picking lines. You should be able to get from one to the other without feeling like the essential movement has changed.
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True. It’s definitely crosspicking then. They’re treating each single string the same way they would strumming a chord.
I’d say not exclusively. There’s definitely lots of DWPS parts.
But now after looking after the piece you mentioned:
The main theme seems to be crosspicked (the outro has some good shots of the picking hand) and seems to pick every single note, there’s lot of DWPS in the improvising though.
The secret must be smoking and a hat 
Yeah let’s not forget that even crosspickers have a natural slant tendency. He is a primary down with some dwps sweeps, uwps rakes and crosspicking. He seems to have all the moves
That’s how it looks to me too.
Only a fool would discount the hat.
Great clip. Circling back to the original topic, I think what puts this kind of playing in a different category from all the other players that CTC examines is not the pick slanting so much as the fact that it’s not fundamentally about alternate picking. All the other guys, even the TWPS-ers and cross-pickers, are about keeping that steady up-down-up-down (or vice versa) going as you cross the strings, and that’s just not where SRV is coming from. He has a bit of it–he came up after McLaughlin and that whole wave took the guitar playing world by storm and one of the most engaging thing about his phrasing is that has a wonderfully “squared off” feeling, kind of like the way Eric Johnson starts of with that two-note-per-string chunk. That’s the bit I’m focusing on now–how he goes from that uber-typical g-string to e-string via b-string whole note bend (there must be a name for it!) and then comes back down into something very TNPS. Even his little throw-away licks have that going on.
But he’s not fundamentally about alternate picking at all, not the way all those other players are. That’s really apparent in this clip. He violates it all the time with unidirectional playing, either up- or downstrokes doesn’t matter, slanting the pick into the direction of playing or away from it, doesn’t seem to matter either. Stuff that seems inefficient as hell in principle, but somehow that big rotational movement he’s got overcomes just about anything without losing fluidity.
I think it’s really worth looking at, as much from the perspective of why it doesn’t fit the model as why and how it does.
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Though, I suspect being SRV doesn’t hurt either.
Your post after this one is excellent, by the way - there’s probably a lot to learn from where a guy like SRV DOESN’T see to be locked into a system, and still tears it up. I’d love to see some realy good close up footage of his picking hand mid solo, but I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anything really clear, and sadly it’s not like we can just have the CtC guys invite him into the studio… 
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NLP ( neuro linguistic programming) teaches us that you can get to “X” via unconscious competence - don’t know how I did that, just did and conscious competence which says all behavior can be replicated if you model the required behavior. Thus CTC allows us to analyze our picking style, demonstrate very clearly successful strategies and affords us the opportunity to learn and internalize ways to “improve” our playing to our individual tastes. Makes perfect sense to me and why I sub’d in within 2 days of finding CTC. Once you put the sufficient time in on any given behavior it moves out of the 4 +/- 7 items in our awareness. As a certified NLP practitioner I think CTC has done all the work for us in an elegant manner. It’s up to each of us to take what we want and incorporate it into our playing. Cheers.