I stumbled upon this site years ago, where this guy Jes Hodosy was selling an ebook entitled, “Guitar Speed-Picking Technique A New Approach To Fast String-Crossing.” It was a kind of proto-CTC, but a little nebulous on the instructional side. Did anyone else ever check this out?
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I didn’t see this until after I had seen CTC’s “Get down for the upstroke” video. I never followed up re: his ebook, but clearly Hodosy figured out the same essential picking geometry problem/solution that @Troy did.
Also, after I had found CTC, I asked an acquaintance (who is a very experienced classical music educator) about the whole “string crossing” problem with a plectrum, and his response was that the “solution” as far as he was concerned was “figure 8” style picking that matched what Hodosy describes, (which essentially correlates to the types of “double escaped” picking movements that CTC gets into when they talk Crosspicking and 2wps). Note that Hodosy also describes the single-escaped solution. My description of the Yngwie-style “single-escaped” solution, and the relative scarcity of double-escaped movements in “popular” guitar outside of bluegrass didn’t make much of an impression on my classical acquaintance. The reaction was essentially the perception that the single-escaped solution doesn’t add anything, despite my suggestion that for many phrases it would be difficult or impossible for a double-escaped approach to match the maximum possible speed of a single-escaped approach. Anecdotally, I think observation of guys like Carl Miner and Andy Wood supports the idea that even for exceptionally skilled double-escape pickers, there are situations where they gravitate to a single-escaped approach, even if they didn’t think in those terms before being interviewed by @Troy.
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Thanks for the response, Frylock, and some great insights on single vs double-escaped picking tactics. Interesting that there actually are some people outside the CTC universe are thinking about this stuff, too!
There definitely are. I didn’t know about this guy until a few years ago after we started putting stuff out publicly and one of the viewers mentioned him. There’s another guy, a German dude with an instructional video who had an upward pickslanting approach he called “easy strokes”. I would laugh but we’re guilty of some terminology crazyness ourselves. Don’t remember the name or link but I’m sure someone here can find it.
And let’s not forget the Gypsies who have perhaps gone farther than anyone, ever, in flat pick guitar in setting up a standard method.
I’d like to think we’ve gone farther in terms of capturing the whole universe of these techniques, especially lately in describing the actual movements themselves and being able to replicate and teach them. And I think we’ve gone farther in terms of connecting what we know to existing fields of research, and adopting a roughly similar methodology of observation, testing, and self-criticism. Or so we’ve tried.
But no doubt others have thought about these issues, many of whom may now be lost to history. So here’s to them!
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That’s very true.
It’s also true for many traditional / classical plucked strings instruments involving picking, such as Oud and Sarod. Btw it’s possible that the Gypsy way of playing the guitar historically derives from these instrument traditions / academics, because there’s some similarity. In contrast Bluegrass flatpicking is its own thing, that probably owes to emulating banjo players.
While I’m not a Pebber Brown acolyte, he frequently mentions the Oud and Sarod, and says his interest in them came from watching and reading interviews where John McLaughlin mentioned them.