Troubles with UWPS string jump after an upstroke

Playing Technique
#1

hi there, i’m brand new to the club here, and i’m absorbing as much of this fountain of information as i can. i’m almost certain the answer to this question is to be found somewhere in the info presented on the site, and i apologize if i haven’t stumbled across it yet. but here goes.

from digging into the info on the site,i have figured out that i use a fairly typical UWPS technique, with typical wrist deviation, and a pronated (?) wrist, with both wrist bones flat on the guitar body. sounds like my issue is typical of this technique. i can string skip very cleanly either up a string or down a string if my last note on the previous string is a downstroke. but if the last note of the previous string is an upstroke, it’s a clumsy mess; i guess that’s called getting the pick trapped?

anyhow, can someone either explain to me or point me somewhere on the site that explains how Troy and the folks here recommend overcoming that obstacle? it’s definitely the most immediate roadblock stopping me from increasing my speed, etc. do i have to learn two way slanting or is there some other solution for UWPS people?

thanks!

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#2

If you don’t want to use two way other solutions are:

  1. Sweep. If the next string is descending (in pitch). Reverse Yngwie style.

  2. Swipe. If the next string is descending (in pitch). One stroke plays two strings with the second note being ‘dead’. Search the forum or Troy’s youtube channel for “swiping” if you’re not familiar with it.

  3. Switch that last pick stroke on the string to a legato note. Yngwie style again. Doesn’t necessarily have to be the last note, as long as it leaves your last pick stroke on the string as a downstroke.

  4. Reconfigure the fingering. Is it possible to arrange the pattern so that every last note is a downstroke?

I hope this makes sense/is helpful…

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#3

This is a good list, quite comprehensive.

The only thing I would add, is that 2WPS doesn’t have to be super-complex and time-consuming. Sometimes, it can be just a very quick tweak of your mechanics, possibly where you add an additional mechanic at just the right time… for just a fraction of a second… and after you clear the string… your mechanics go right back to your traditional UWPS mechanic.

So yes, the alternatives are many… but you should still consider at least experimenting with a few 2WPS approaches… .you might have a breakthrough.

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#4

So, the point of pickslanting is that you optimize your picking technique such that you accept the pick getting trapped in one direction, but you get an effortless pick escape in the other. In upward pickslanting, you bury your pick on upstrokes, and in return the pick effortlessly escapes the strings on downstrokes.

So, the flippant-sounding answer to your question as to how you get your pick to escape the strings if your last pickstroke before changing strings is an upstroke, as an UWPS player, is you don’t. You do one of the four things Squeaks suggests, and you just optimize your playing such that you just never need to switch strings on an upstroke.

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#5

This is all excellent insight and clarification. Thanks guys. I’m going to dig into learning DWPS, at least enough to see if I can tweak things enough to use two way, as per the suggestion from @hamsterman

Thanks again. Happy to hear anything else anyone wants to weigh in with.

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#6

Everything that has been said here is great! And comprehensive. I’m just here to apologize for not making this stuff easier to find on our side. All the pickslanting techniques, both one-way and two-way, are summarized here:

You are correct that single-escape type motions are limited, but that is their beauty, and you work your vocabulary to suit them. Two-way pickslanting is what most people do who are primarily single escape type players (either downstroke or upstroke) but want the occasional opposite escape. This is what @hamsterman is referring to.

For players who need continuous dual escaping, like if you’re into bluegrass and you do arpeggiated stuff, there’s crosspicking and we have two lessons on that here:

…and here:

Thanks for signing up and good work sifting through all of this so far!

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#7

i’ve been working on this stuff, and finding some limited/slow success with developing some DWPS to complement my natural UWPS approach. how far do you have to develop the DWPS stuff to start to be able to do TWPS? just a little? i’m debating about spending a ton of my practice time in the near future really trying to develop the DWPS thing so that it’s as natural as my UWPS. but it’s all a bit of a swamp at the moment. thanks for your work!

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#8

I’m also a reasonably strict UWPS’er and I had the same issue as you. Other peeps have summed up the options pretty good already but as I have the same technique as you I thought I’d chime in with what I do;

So after an upstroke I do the following;

  1. If moving to a lower string (toward the low E) I sweep upward.

  2. If moving to a higher string (toward the high E) I feel like I roll my wrist downwards into a DWPS orientation to sort of roll the pick over the top of the string I just played and get to the higher string. As soon as I contact the next string my hand switches back to UWPS orientation.

This technique works for all but two edge cases;
a) 1nps patterns - for this I think I switch to a cross picking technique
b) string skipping when descending after an upstroke. All other string skips work fine and feel reasonably easy but I can’t string skip to a lower string if I just played an upstroke as the pick is jammed in the strings. Usually I would sweep in this situation but obviously we can’t do that now, so in this case I either rework the fingering so I can play the same phrase without the string skip (or put the string skip in a different place in the lick so it avoids this edge case), or I switch to crosspicking if the lick isn’t too fast for that. Also worth noting I can’t switch to crosspick part way through a lick, my hand has to kind of “reset”. I think this is mainly a mental problem but I haven’t overcome it yet.

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#9

As we were discussing on the other thread, this is where some basic instructions can clarify quite a bit, and where I think our current instructional stuff falls down a little. As you can see from this clip we put up recently, when you’re using wrist motion — which it sounds like you are (?) — any string change can be achieved from a mostly centralized setup without having to “switch” anything other than the motion the wrist is making.

Are you using wrist motion, and are you using the same arm / hand contact points I’m using here, with both thumb and pinky heel on the strings or body? If so, then you’re good to go with all string change types.

Re: “rolling” of the arm. Pickslanting still applies because a downstroke escape motion and an upstroke escape motion are still slightly different motion paths. But the key here as they’re both relatively flat diagonal motions so the difference between is small.

We’re still figuring out the best way to teach this, but I would approach this with the mindset that you shouldn’t feel the need to change your arm setup too drastically. A small difference in wrist flexion/extension, as demonstrated in the Pickslanting Primer, is all it takes - just that when your motions are flat like this the difference in actual practice will be much smaller than displayed in the Primer. You do not need to achieve radically different arm positions to execute each type of phrase.

As part of finding that “centralized” arm position, I recommend trying all-downstroke escape phrases and all-upstroke escape phrases separately - again, while keeping the arm in relatively the same orientation. If you can find, by feel, the arm position that works for both then “crosspicking”, if you want to call it that, is nothing more than alternating the two escape motions back to back. And I wouldn’t even worry about that yet.

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#10

In addition to all the ideas so far, another thing you can do is simply find workarounds that continue to use uwps

if you think about it, that pretty much what Yngwie did as he developed his style. He used DWPS and probably never gave it a thought and he just went about finding ways to play fast stuff anyway and thus he developed workarounds etc.

for instance with UWPS if you are going to do an ascending 3nps scale, you are good to go for 6 notes until that string cross to a higher string after the upstroke lol. So at that point you can work on stuff like 1) repeating those last 3 notes and thus you end up going to that next higher string after a downstroke, or 2) possibly developing your scales sort of like Yngwie does with his descending stuff where it is a mixture of 3nps, 4nps, 2nps etc. So like on your ascending scales maybe go 3 notes then to the next string and do 4 notes there using a finger slide etc.

the idea being you are using a 2 pronged attack. Yes, learn some DWPS so you can work in some 2 way slanting ideas, but also just maximize what you can do with strict UWPS by using your own workarounds

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#11

A post was merged into an existing topic: Adambrad technique critique - Crossroads