Speaking of flubs, I was relieved to hear some in Mike’s playing. It makes the rest of us mere mortals feel a little better. 
As for stuff in the can, yes, Gambale is my top request for an interview as well!
Check out the “Sheets of Sound” books for a guy who has taken Gambale’s concept a lot further… oh, and Dweezil Zappa for applying some of Gambale’s thing to Frank Zappa’s music!
Hey, forget what I said above… my top request for an interview is Dweezil!!!
I saw Dweezil in October, my mind exploded! Some of the stuff he’s able to pull off is crazy. He’s got incredible technique and is able to apply it to all kinds of bizarre time signatures and fretboard patterns. If time ever allows, a conversation with him would certainly be interesting.
The sequenced lines Mike plays in this interview are some of the most non-traditional things anyone has played that we’ve interviewed. And he’s working some of them out on the spot as an exercise. So it only makes sense that you will see mistakes. I wouldn’t take any of this as a comment on Mike’s technique, only his unfamiliarity with these ideas that he’s still working out.
Mike is in that small category of players who can actually alternate pick pretty much any line they are likely to write, because his technique has a solution for every kind of alternate-picked string change you can make, i.e. all four of them.
• In GP6, click F7 to open the “Stylesheet”
• Then click the “Texts & Styles” tab up top to manipulate the fonts. They have quite a few jazzy choices.
No way dude really?!?
I don’t have any inside information, but Troy has made glimpses public in the past.
I wonder if Gambale still sweeps everything?
They met up several years ago!
His hand looks so relaxed , like there are no strings on his guitar and he is just moving through air.
Dude, they need to get the magnet on this pioneer of sweep/economy. I want 2 hours of the fastest arpeggio and economy line clips on SOUNDSLICE. RIGHT NOW!!! 
Don’t let him get too Jazzy and sidetracked on theory. Stick to the goods!
Then go to Rick Graham’s house.
The jazz IS the goods! The best thing Frank does is get around the board, from everywhere, to everywhere. I feel like he might not get enough credit for being the masterful improviser that he is. In the right tune, like funky fusion type grooves, his vocabulary is a great blend of retro and future and he has it on good days and bad.
We’ve reached out to him recently, but he’s in LA now. If we can’t make it work for New York we’ll maybe see about going out there.
Ahh I quit after watching that!!! The coordination between his hands is just incredible to watch.
Is Frank an UWPS?
Mostly, yes, when not two-way sweeping.
Cool! I’ve always associated sweeping and economy picking with DWPS, so that’s another guitar playing myth busted!
I also love how Frank plays with those large bass style picks, just goes to show that picks and pick shape doesn’t matter too much.
I may be a little (or very) late to the party, but what is a good definition of “economy picking”? What does it mean in light of DWPS, UWPS, and 2WPS?
People use the term indiscriminately. If I use the term, I am referring to a picking style where you use sweeping for string changes, and if you can’t, then you use alternate picking. In other words, it is a superset of both string switching methods. I am not aware of there being any connection between “economy” type players and downard pickslanting specifically, unless you’re referring to what Yngwie and Eric Johnson type players do. Which sure, could be described as economy - but only when they play ascending string changes.
Everyone that I am aware of who plays this way for both ascending and descending lines uses two-way pickslanting to do it. Jimmy Bruno is a good example among those we have interviewed. Frank is as well. As we’ve been discussing, Frank has some signature type lines which involve repeatedly descending sweep patterns, which is where you see the upward pickslanting tendency. But he is very much a two-way pickslanter when playing two-way sweeping lines.
Incredible feature, thank you so much for putting this together. Very inspiring.
Had YouTube playing in the background at work here and this footage of Mike Stern playing with Billy Cobham in 1981 came up. Great playing all around, I love MIke’s solo during the first tune, towards the end you can hear a snippet of the “Fat Time” arpeggios pop up. My ears perked up again during the song “Crosswinds” which I love. Some great licks from Mike here and I was happy to see some killer Code angles during some of his fast runs. I figured it’d be worth a share for some of the folks here:
Scope out 30:55 and 31:20. I might have to transcribe that first one.