So, for all your two way slanters out there, who have become pretty accomplished at it, does it get to the point where you can improvise and your hand just knows when to rotate and change slant? Cuz I’m mucking around with it in the early stages and I’m still having to ask myself if the last note on the string is an up or downstroke in advance and plan it all out.
I’d like to hear from anyone on this, but especially people who have consciously developed this ability, as opposed to people who have been doing TWPS for years without really ever analyzing it.
When you get really good at it, is in unconscious? And I don’t mean within set patterns that you’re stringing together and you already know they work out, I mean true improv when your making stuff up?
That would be a nice goal to aspire to.
Thanks for everyone’s advice and input on this forum. Very great resource.
well im new here and havent posted any clips yet so take it for what its worth. (playing for 30 years lol)
id say once you factor in possible swiping and then the odd pull-off then, yes, you can improve pretty naturally
if you think about it, this is probably how the majority of great players have always done it. Most probably were NOT specifically aware of every minute pick movement.
Malmsteen, Gilbert, Howe, Moore etc…all had instructional vids and AFAIK not one of them mentions pickslanting and they barely even mention the direction of pickstrokes etc
side note: for me anyway, it seems if I am doing a lick that I KNOW is dwps, then I may slant a bit more, but if I am just going to do some long improv lines then I hold the pick slightly more neutral so the slanting movements dont have to be so big etc
I found that tilting my arm up for coming off on an upstroke, and tilting my arm down for coming off on a downstroke, only a millimetre or two but a lean nonetheless, makes the process easier to remember and quicker to shift between the two.
I have my plectrum stuck up against the first pad of my index finger so it stays in place.
Also, making sure I get as much of my arm onto the guitar body as possible to help the stability works for me on both electric and acoustic playing. Until I did this I couldn’t do acoustic two note per string runs across two strings but I could do all six strings and back on my electric; the difference was that I wasn’t putting enough of my arm onto the body of my acoustic guitar.
For practising, I found doing a three note per string down up down, and then switching to a few strings of up down up, and then reversing the process was more enjoyable than getting struck playing inside licks back and forth between two strings.
It’s definitely possible to learn 2WPS unconsciously. And it’s not just a few elite players who have done it. It might be more rare in rock-world, where various forms of sweeping/economy picking seem to dominate. But in the roots music world, alternate picking is the norm, and there’s also not as much rearranging melodies to make them work for the left hand. So if you find a roots music player going at blinding speed, chances are they’re doing 2WPS. And of course, pretty much no one was learning 2WPS consciously until Troy figured it out
In a sense, all of this learning is unconscious. What CTC teaches you is more like how to identify when you’re doing the right thing (for a given goal), and stick with it. If I’m remembering right, I think Troy has signed off on this perspective in one of the videos; he said something like “we’re all feeling around in the dark” and that all these terms and technical explanations just help us know when we’re on the right track (Forgive me if I’m butchering that, Troy :))
Of course, it’s possible make the learning process “conscious” in the sense that you practice the motions consciously and then gradually try to speed them up. But it’s often easier to just sorta mess around and when you catch yourself doing right thing, keep doing it. And I suspect that even the “conscious” way just funnels you down to the same place eventually: you keep trying it until some lower, motor-learning-related part of your brain catches on and files it away as some variation on one of the other picking motions you learned earlier, unconsciously.
As far as getting it to the point where you can improvise with arbitrary numbers of notes on a string, I think there’s some debate about that. My best guess is that the answer is “probably, but it takes a lot of work.” You’d need to develop a large mental library of motor-memory chunks.
To me, the bigger question is can you can really improvise that fast with your left hand! In other words, can you really come up with original melodies and lines at 10nps+? As far as I know, this isn’t a settled issue. Most if not all people who “improvise” at that speed are just ripping through sequences and patterns that they’ve memorized. In which case, it’s not rocket science–just accept that you’re building up a mental library of melodies and lines, and as you learn them, make sure your memorized 2WPS patterns are good enough to handle them.
I’m still in the developmental stages but just thinking my way through it with simple runs mixing odd and even numbers Im clearly progressing.
Some days are better than others
What I run into is reverting to eco plus alt when I try to just go for it with any real speed.
Not that it’s wrong but I’m really wanting to master twps also.
So, I’m in the “I was doing it for years and didn’t know” camp, but now that I’m aware of what I’m doing, I’m also much more aware of the mechanics of what’s happening and where, so maybe I can weigh in.
And, for me, it’s definitely NOT a matter of thinking about it, it’s just a picking motion that my hands know to do. I’m going to try to explain this in a way that makes some sense, so bear with me if it gets a little wrong.
I’m not really an “up-down-up-rotate, down-up-down-rotate” guy, in that I hold a neutral positon with a slight upwards slant for like 90% of the time. when I’m picking from a downstroke on one string to an upstroke on another - from a pure probability standpoint, this is going to be the case half the time - there’s no issue since my default sland handles it perfectly fine.
When I’m doing the REVERSE, though, I don’t rotate fully into a downwards slant. Rather, when I play an upstroke leading into a string change on a downstroke, my picking hand rotates and sort of “winds up” on the upstroke, twisting back and pulling it above the string as I complete my upstroke, and then positioning my hand, off-neutral, in what would be a downward slanted position for that next downstroke. As the downstroke occurs, my wist “unwinds” back to its neutral position, and my hand returns to a normal upwards slant/escaped downstrokes orientation.
So, for me, this isn’t really a conscious thing I do, it’s just how I pick when I’m changing strings after an upstroke, and it’s kind of muscle memory at this point. I don’t do it consciously, but now I can feel it happening, and sometimes I’ll just loop through a scale pattern that requires thhe occasional escaped upstroke and just watch my hand, and clear as day you can see it sort of winding up on those notes. It’s kind of cool - it was something I was always kind of aware of in my picking, this weird cocking/winding up motion I’d do on some string changes, but I had no idea why, and frankly I figured it was a source of inefficiency rather than an optimization.
Does that make sense? It’s not something I think about as “ok, what direction is my pick moving,” but just part of how my pickstroke works - when I’m changing strings on upstrokes, by habit I rotate my wrist to facilitate an escaped motion on upstrokes. The other 90% of the motions are just escaped downstrokes/UWPS, it’s just that one particular motion, and my wrist just does that on its own now.
If you function differently and look at it as switching back and forth between escaped downstrokes for a while, and escaped upstrokes for a while, then yeah I could see that getting confusing and requiring some thought, but for me it’s just one note out of every half dozen or so that my wrist makes an adjustment for. So I guess my 90% figure is more like 83%.
I guess to expand on this, this isn’t just when playing rehearsed licks, this is also the case when improvising. To be fair, a lot of improvising does involve playing patterns you’re familiar with so it’s probably a little bit of an arbitrary distinction, but it’s not like I start with a series of movements and then past a certain point don’t have to think about them, it’s just that’s just how my picking hand changes strings on upstrokes.
