Hey guys,
Just was wondering if any of you change your natural pick slant to play certain licks or styles? My natural tendency is an upward pick slant but I’d like to learn some Eric Johnson licks, which is catered to Downward Pickslanting. Would you guys switch to downward pickslanting to do those licks? Or re-work the licks to conform to upward picklanting? Thanks!
I would change for sure for those unless you’d like to start those licks with an upstroke. I’m currently working on escaping strings after upstrokes, it gives me loads of trouble and can’t really play any EJ stuff because of this.
(I’m not an expert by any means)
I change the slant (I assume more specifically your talking about escape paths) the time as I have go-to runs/patterns that I use for each.
You don’t have to change pickslants, just the motion path of the pick. You can also change the path purely for the string change and revert back to your normal escape motion depending in the lick.
Like others have said here I don’t think so much in terms of pickslant as I do about escape pickstrokes - and honestly at a certain speed I really don’t think about anything at all, lol. That’s probably how it should be tbh, the ultimate goal for these concepts is to be able to apply them without conscious thought just like most of our heroes do intuitively when they play. I think I have more of a DBX technique most of the time but I like to use DSX for ascending lines and USX for descending ones at very high speeds so most of my repertoire is unintentionally structured this way.
The in CtC analysis is great to figure out what you’re doing well - so you can totally milk it and take advantage of your strengths once you realize what they are. And then in the meantime you can use the same knowledge to pick up on challenges to your preferred techniques and address them so you have more options.