Technical advantages of primary-upward 2WPS?

Playing Technique
#1

Forgive me if this has already been posted somewhere; so far I haven’t found it :slight_smile:

I’ve been playing for about 15 years and have been a strict alternate picker for the last six. For as long as I can remember I’ve played with a mix of UWPS and DWPS, with a slight preference for UWPS, especially on descending licks. (Like many players, I find UWPS feels very natural for descending licks, since, among other things, your arm/wrist tends to roll upward naturally as you change directions.) Of course, I couldn’t have even explained that much until a couple of years ago when I started reading Troy’s stuff!

I tend to use a double-escape-stroke motion for slower licks, and even when I’m doing this, my right hand just “likes” a very slight upward slant a little better. Still not sure why.

On the other hand, I find the mental math of the primary-downward approach a lot easier to deal with. It’s as if you started with the classic Yngwie approach, which is very elegant and easy to think about, and added a minimal amount of upward pick slanting to deal with descending licks and to make strict alternate picking feasible.

For picking with a double escape stroke, I use an Albert Lee-type motion combining deviation and flexion/extension. When pick slanting I use deviation and a bit of elbow. That mostly goes for UWPS; my DWPS is a bit less consistent since I spend less time using it, but I think it’s mostly the same as UWPS but with a bit more elbow.

I’m wondering if there are any valid mechanical reasons behind my instinctive preference here, or should I just bite the bullet and try and master DWPS to become a primary-downward pickslanter? If there’s nothing in particular to be said for UWPS from a technical point of view, I’d rather choose the technique that makes it easier to think about constructing licks and chunking.

I feel like this must be in the material somewhere, but I reviewed a lot of the Michael Angelo Batio stuff where primary-upward 2WPS is first introduced and couldn’t find anything about the mechanical reasons for it.

#2

You just describe roughly how I pick. So curious to see what others have to say.

#3

if you are comfortable with one thing, id never in a million year try to switch to something else “just because”. ive seen this in other threads where people think they “should” do this or that.

AFAIK there is no “should” in any of this stuff

Id say there IS one nice advantage to slightly uwps. If you are going to do a fast 3nps lick and you go D-U-D, with uwps you are already set to go to another string with no extra work involved. no rotating, no this or that.

So even if you stick to a straight 3nps scale, with uwps you have 6 notes ready to go at all times with no extra work. With dwps you basically have only 3 notes ready to go and you are either going to have to go economy to ascend or you have to do your twps rotation etc… or even worse, if you descend that same 3nps scale you only get TWO notes and then you are already doing a pulloff? Well, yeah, to descend you can go DUD rotate, but you see my point. With uwps you have 6 notes ready to fire at all times

I find that to be a fairly significant advantage. To me, once you get good at string changes, momentum can take over and you can just let the notes roll. Those 6 notes at the ready get the ball rolling nicely

or lets expand it out. with uwps you get 12 ascending notes and all you have to do is ONE adjustment after the 6th note

with dwps and that same 12 note ascending run, you will do an adjustment after the 3rd note and again after the 9th note etc

my personal approach is to try to stay pretty neutral. That way if you stay on top of your string tracking, any uwps/dwps you have to do will be pretty small

3 Likes
DWPS vs UWPS, advantages and disadvantages of each approach?
#4

I definitely got over the “should” mentality many years ago. I understand that it’s usually best to start off in your comfort zone just to find your foothold and branch out from there.

However, I think once you become advanced enough in a given area, there’s sometimes another “level of enlightenment” possible where it sort of wraps around and becomes worth your time to force yourself to think about something in a way that currently feels unnatural. For example, I was a positional player for a long time and was seriously stuck in my fretboard visualization and being able things as one unified pattern (instead of a chain of scale and chord patterns). So I spent several months doing very little playing, and instead I just picked a key (C Major) and spent several months trying to imagine the sounds of all of its notes across the fretboard without picking up the instrument or even imagining what my left hand would do to reach the notes.

That kind of non-positional study has now become part of my practice routine, and while I can switch to the old mode, I now spend most of the time thinking non-positionally–and there’s a subtle, subjective freshness to the whole thing that I still enjoy every day, which I don’t think would be there if I just tried to gradually cantilever it out from my existing knowledge of the positional scales and chords. Even better, I feel the modes gradually merging together in a way that makes all the different ways of thinking about it seem equally obvious.

On the technique side, I did a similar thing with alternate picking. When I first picked it up, I focused on the differences more than the similarities, and I think I ended up understanding both better as a result.

In this case it is possible that the ideal technique for me is primary-downward 2WPS, and I’d rather force myself to learn it as something new if that turns out to be the better technique in the long run. I’ve already got my primary-upward style about 70% of where it needs to be, so I can always return to that if the new way isn’t working out. It’s just a question of whether primary-downward actually is a better overall choice, or if I’m getting some technique advantages out of primary-upward that I’m not realizing.

#5

That’s a good point about about using 6-note chunks for ascending runs. I’ve noticed that. I have a 6-note chunk that I use for the first 6 notes of 3NPS scales, which is longer than the “up, down, rotate” approach with 3-note chunks that the CtC material focuses on at the introductory level. Occasionally I’ll break through that and end up with a 12 note chunk with one angle turn, as you describe. Pretty fun ripping through all those notes with alternate picking and one flick of the wrist.

For better or worse, most exercises (and probably most licks in real music) start from a low note and go back down again, so it’s nice to be able to start these off with an easy chunk of up to 6 notes and, as you say, get the ball rolling.

1 Like
#6

well there r obvious advantages to both primary dwps and uwps. (hence i refuse to choose lol)

if you think about a 6 string guitar being 3 groups of 2 strings. The middle set being the D and G. if you have a primary neutral pick when you are on the D and G, then its sort of obvious to see that with only a very small amount of string tracking you can use uwps on the B and E and dwps on the E and A.

So it comes in handy to be super familiar with both

I find it slightly awkward to use uwps on the E and A strings but I do it anyway lol. Its almost like you start to run out of room

and then by the same token its slightly awkward for me to use dwps on the high E string. You have to really move the hand up there if u want to get a decent dwps on that high E.