Hey guys, I was just wondering if any of you had ever (successfully) tried to play one note per string arpeggios with alternate picking using swiping instead of double escape motions? Do you guys think this could actually sound any good?
well if swiping is done with muting as well then its possible I imagine. If you did it with DWPS then you would clear on the upstroke and swipe on the down and vice versa for UWPS.
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Swiping won’t sound as clean as sweeping but if you want a grittier sound then yeah, it could work depending on how good your swiping technique is. Swiping techniques vary in how much extra noise they create.
I think steve morse kinda does this.
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I was going to say the same, although it didn’t look systematic - he clears most string changes IIRC - and he does it very gracefully/silently.
It might be helpful to distinguish an audible “swipe”, as you can hear sometimes with some players, and a completely inaudible… I’m going to call it a “brush”, which is as good as missing the string if it makes no noise.
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The original “swipe” concept was in fact that it is inaudible. It was combination of sweeping plus stealing = swiping! i.e. You stole that note, somehow.
Despite the negative connotations, I don’t think of it negatively. If you can’t hear it, then it may as well not be happening. All of the swiping I personally do is of that type, where I didn’t know I was doing it until I filmed it. And that was only pretty recently, as of maybe Antigravity time frame, three or four years ago. There’s a bunch of it in the clips from that time period on the platform, especially on the lower strings. Even in slow motion it’s not obviously audible in most cases.
But again, as @Tommo says, it’s probably because I’m actually trying to make a motion which clears the strings, so the contact is not super aggressive. In fact if you check out one of the most silent clips of swiping we have filmed, you’ll see a good example of this in action:
Super silent! Now switch to the “slow motion” version of the clip, and also set the speed to 50%. That will give you 8x slow motion. And check out the third bar, second sextuplet. The third note that Joscho plays on the B string is actually a different motion than the first two pickstrokes. It’s the string change pickstroke, and it’s moving more parallel with the strings. If you watch it again and look at the wrist you’ll see it’s more of a wrist extension motion than the other two notes - a 12 o’clock or 1 o’clock type motion. And because of the arm setup this causes the motion to go more parallel. Because of the pickslant, the pick has very little grab on the E string, it mostly just slides right over it. Thanks to the muting, you really only get sound on the B string note and not on the E string note.
This is the idea - you don’t just mute and power through. For the most silent swiping, you use a directional pickslant and make a more parallel picking motion. If you’re a high gain player, the sound of the ringing note will further push down the sound of any muting, thanks to amp compression.
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@Troy, since i now subscribed i was able to watch the intire Morse interview you did.
I is obvious in the slowmotion footage that he swipes a lot. I knew he did because at times you here it ( like in the lower string aperggio stuff on tumenie notes), but most of the time you can’t or barely hear it and i am trying to figure out why.
A big part is off course his muting techinique with both hands, but i believ a lot of it also has to do with the way the pick hits the strings with the pick.
It is very clear in the upclose slowmo footage that although his movements are not realy small and it seems he is hitting the strings pretty hard, the pick itself just barely touches the strings; just the veeery tip of it. Also he is holding it very loose.
So when he swipes those notes are mostely not accented, with that loose grip and just the very tip of the pick hitting the string combined with the muting you most off time will not hear it.
After seeing all this footage of Steve i am even more impressed by Martin Miller who is able to play all this same insane Aperggio stuff without any swiping whatsoever; Damn!!!
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I moved this to this post because it’s relevant to what Steve is doing. The previous post outlines how swiping works. In Antigravity, we address this with examples where you can hear how the amp compression and the ringing note push down the sound of the muted note:
In Steve’s case he is making a curved picking motion so he’s not slamming into the strings straight across, or down with a rest stroke, he’s still moving up eventually. It would be more silent if he used an acute pickslant, but he’s not. In the ideal scenario you want all three ingredients, the pickslant, the mute, and the ringing note. But if any of those are missing, you’ll hear it.
In general, again, I don’t try to do swiping. I try not to, and if I’m off a little here and there, some of those three ingredients will be present and lessen the noise.
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I think this is the only CTC concept that confuses me a little. With certain types of picking motions / trajectories, I can predict exactly when swipes will happen. So how can I try not to do them, unless I consciously choose a different mechanics?
An example to be more concrete: if I play elbow, I know that only my downstrokes will escape. If then I want to play the “Batio 4s” with this mechanics, there is no way I can try not to swipe unless I introduce new motions (and let’s assume I don’t want to). The only thing I can do in this situation is focus on the left hand muting - and of course I can choose a helpful gainy tone. Doesn’t this amount to practicing swiping explicitly?
PS: sorry if this is a bit of a repetition of some previous posts of mine, but I’m still a bit confused about the issue.
Hey Tommo, I have a question on that because I find it very interesting. However, since it’s not a problem I have, I don’t exactly understand the following: If you can use elbow and have downstrokes escape, why can’t you reverse the pick slant and then have elbow generated upstrokes escape? After all, it’s the same motion, just done in reverse, isn’t it? Or is there something I’m not taking into account? Thanks!
Do you find if you’re using delay the swiping is more pronounced?
Exactly! Don’t choose those trajectories. Choose the escape trajectories. The swiping that does occur will be more accidental and often muted by some finger.
If you look at some of the swiping examples in Antigravity, some of the supposed swipe pickstrokes on phrases like descending fours actually escape. And looking them now with the awareness of hindsight it’s easy to see why - they’re actually curved motions.
Even players like Joscho who do swipe legitimately on certain phrases are making a slightly different motion on that pickstroke.
If you really make the same motion on the swipe note as the others and you have no right hand muting, you’re going to hear it, especially on the higher strings. I can hear it pretty clearly now on certain lines in Speed Kills and certain lines in our interview footage, and I find it funny that I couldn’t hear it back then. It’s brief because Mike is playing fast and it’s also occasional because Mike is choosing phrases that don’t have it and beIng precise in general - so when it happens it mostly happens on one note of many. In Mike’s case I think those are the two biggest reasons why it works.
Think about how people watched the first Impellitteri instructional and continue to email us to this day about how awesome it is. Now remove all that and limit it to only one note every so often.
Swiping is the most perplexing concept to me. I don’t mean to be dismissive of people who make it work, but anytime I couldn’t execute a lick without hitting another string in the process, I’ve always changed my approach. That’s not to say I’m always right- just that I have a hard time understanding how you’d arrive there.
Sorry it took me a while to reply! In order:
As @Troy mentioned in another thread, the elbow joint can only generate an escaped-downstroke picking path - unless you blend in extra movements like wrist or forearm.
Good question! I don’t know but might try it when I get a chance. So far it seemed to me that gain & compression are the main things that can hide the “clicky” sound of a swipe, provided the intended note is played with enough authority.
I see what you mean and why this approach works in the examples you mention - but in my own playing I have a somewhat opposite experience.
EDIT: After writing all the stuff below, I’m thinking I should actually film one of these swiped examples in slow motion to check if I’m doing what I think I’m doing 
Do you/other forumers think it could be interesting?
Some of my fastest lines are done with the elbow - or mostly elbow with a preference for downstroke escapes. If I try to play as fast as I can in this “mode”, and if I try to clear a swipeable passage (i.e. descending outside), my rate of audible errors increases for the following reasons:
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I have to introduce a new mechanics for that one pickstroke, such as forearm rotation or wrist motion. This may not be as fast as the pure elbow thing, so it may mess with my timing.
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I now know this is not necessary but I tend to rotate to DWPS for escaped upstrokes (in the sense of the actual slant of the pick). So if the pick grabs the unwanted string in this setting, it makes a lot more noise.
Hehe it’s funny to note how different our learning experiences can be! Swiping is the only technique that I figured out on my own before CTC. For things like the Gilbert lick, I thought “no way I can change strings cleanly this fast, I’m just gonna mute the unwanted ones”. I also recall hearing the occasional unwanted open string in Di Meola’s playing in the famous Friday Night in San Francisco album - so I thought “hey, he also does that, so it’s ok!”.
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You can hear Vinnie swiping the strings on the acoustic intro to Saved By A Miracle.
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Yes, the good old “try it and film it” is the best way. Being familiar with your already-excellent technique, I wouldn’t worry too much about micro-managing the pickstrokes and “introducing new mechanics” and so on. You’re not strictly an elbow player, and you have a good foundation of wrist playing already in place. If you just wing it on whatever phrase you are trying to play, you might surprise yourself.
I only found out I was occasionally swiping because I filmed it. I didn’t try to do it - I just mildly failed at executing whatever clean string change I was trying to do, in a way that wasn’t super audible probably because, like Mike, everything was nicely synchronized and most of the other notes were clean. So I stand by my recommendation of actually attempting to do whatever motion hits each note individually as the most reliably good-sounding approach. This way, any swiping that occurs will be only ocasional and not too audible - especially with gain on the low strings.
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