Holy crap. That is some impressive playing. Damn accurate at that speed.
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Wow thank you, itâs not every day I get compliments from my guitar heroes (You, Troy, not to mention many of my fellow forummers)! Iâm having the time of my (virtual) life today⌠although itâs not my most productive day at work 
As I mentioned, however, I canât play like this every day, sometimes it just doesnât click and I just get a noisy mess with no time feel. And I feel like tiny details are changing every day.
But it is only recently that I managed to play these TWPS thingies with some confidence, I hope consistency will slowly improve.
Anyway thanks again, now I canât wait to go back in the sh( r )ed 
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Thanks for the tab.
are you starting on an upstroke or downstroke?
One thing I notice, and I might be wrong, is that you are using upward pickslanting and you donât seem to change to downward pickslanting and stay in that orientation and are only using it to get over the string. Itâs like youâre flicking your wrist in a certain way that allows you to get over the string, staying in DWPS mode for a minute period of time.
I might be wrong, but I would like to know either way.
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Good question about the pickslanting, it may be possible that Iâm doing it exactly that way.
Iâll try to film this stuff better with magnet, lighting and slow-motion to check. I wouldnât recommend this strategy though, because it forces you to rotate back and forth quite aggressively. The athleticity/complexity of the movement may be the reason why some days are better than others now that you mention it 
In this case I was starting with a downstroke. I forgot to mention that the pattern at the end of the video (the ascending one) is based on the âstacked Gilbertsâ applied to the above scale shape, all done with outside picking and mostly UWPS.
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I think tommoâs 3NPS strategy is pretty common, and it works damn well at high speed. I think very few guitar players (except maybe Troy) feel just as comfortable in both pick-slant directions. So they just momentarily do that flick to âhurdle overâ the string, and then go back to their comfort zone. Thatâs sorta what MAB does⌠he loves UWPS⌠but to navigate through the 3NPS, he very subtly does that flick rotation. So it looks like he spends most of his time in UWPS, but only subtly flings into and out of DWPS at just the right time.
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Yes you put it better than me - hurdling over the string using a flicking motion. Itâs like the hurdle puts a player in DWPS for a fraction of a period of time before they go back to UPWS.
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Damn! I love the way your picking sounds, but even more how it LOOKS! So smooth and relaxed. One of the best looking hands Iâve seen, and for some strange reason I really appreciate the look of guitar playing as much as the sound of guitar playing. But of course, it wouldnât matter if it doesnât sound good, and your playing sounds absolutely TERRIFIC! Makes me want to go and practise myself. You really are an inspiration!
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Yeah⌠3NPS outside/inside alternating is really a microscopic change for a lot of players.
Mine is next to impossible to notice⌠I have sorta a curved steve morse form. I watched it from front (magnet) perspective and thereâs zero change. But if you look at it from the back⌠you can barely see I stroke a tiny-bit higher on the outside switches⌠its sorta a pseudo 2WPS. Hereâs a horrible video I just made to illustrate. Its horrible unplugged crappy sound⌠but itâs more just to show the tiny slight change with each alternate switch.
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@Troy, @Brendan itâs really a honour to be asked to provide magnet footage⌠and it made me crap myself a bit 
This is my first attempt, my phone is a bit old but it has a âsmoothâ recording mode that does an ok job when slowing down 4x (though I lost a lot of lighting as expected). The first half is a rolling scale firgure one the 4 low strings, the second half is on the higher 4 strings. Please feel free to criticize both the playing and the lighting⌠having broken the ice Iâm happy to try it again.
This is recorded with a 120bpm click. I am aware that my timing is not 100% tight, and I think the reason is the TWPS rotation still being a bit too pronounced (see below). I think Iâll be able to improve it with practice 
@Troy, @aliendough you have no idea how much your comments about my TWPS rotations helped! I may have finally understood why the ascending side always felt harder and would vary every day. In a nutshell, I think I can afford to rotate much less and still clear the string on the 6th note - indeed thatâs what it seems to happen on the descending side, which always felt smoother and more well-timed. Thanks once more 
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Hilarious. This is some of the best 2wps scale playing Iâve ever seen and there are precisely zero things wrong with this clip. You should be teaching us!
Great work here.
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Another stellar performance. Again, your technique is flawless at that speed. Just out of curiosity, are you mixing elbow motion into your alternate picking?
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Thank you and thank you @troy, Iâm flattered! I feel like I made great progress even just today, when I noticed that I could reduce the rotation and make the whole thing less athletic/straining. And by the way, I tried a few takes 
About the elbow, Iâm not sure! Iâve tried tons of movements and picking mechanics over the past 3 years of CTC exploration, and I suspect here I may be doing a mix of elbow and wrist. I have the feeling I may be using a bit of finger movement as well, but I donât see it in the video when I replay it in slow-mo.
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Again nothing here to improve but I do have some fine-point technical questions because your approach is one that we see in other players and I want to understand more about what is actually going on.
Youâre using a primary up strategy here. So you will only see pickslanting changes in the two expected places: ascending inside and descending outside. However, like Andy Wood, you have a specific formula for this. Ascending inside is forearm. Descending outside is almost exclusively wrist. This is still two-way pickslanting because the picking path is indeed changing. Both of these cases are fully-escaped pickstrokes. It doesnât matter to me on a conceptual level that there are different mechanics are used.
However I still want to know why there are two different mechanics, because it appears thereâs a reason for this. And I suspect it is linked to the nature of the picking movement you are using.
If your alternate picking movement is a wrist deviation / extension blend, then technically the descending side of this would be stringhopping since at the moment of the descending outside string change, youâd be repeating the wrist extension movement to get over the string.
If however your movement is deviation alone, and you are escaping via your pronated arm orientation, then this is not the case, and there is no stringhopping.
But still doesnât explain why there is forearm when ascending and not when descending. That may just be a specfic tracking scenario where a primary up orientation only needs forearm when tracking âagainstâ the pickslant, and only during inside string changes. Why, I canât say. But I know you yourself have suspected there is some subtltety with respect to inside and outside picking and this may be another manifestation of that.
Anyway, great work!
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âŚor maybe is there some finger interaction here? Canât really tell. But thatâs another possibility. Not sure if this is what you were referring to as far as finger movement but there could be some.
Oh I see what you mean, but it definitely does not feel like hopping on the descending side, quite the opposite! When I do it slowly, it seems that I use forearm rotation upon descending - and possibly the fingers are moving a bit. But when I speed up, no idea, the descending side sorts itself out. It has always been the ascending side that required work and (a lot of) thought.
Could it be interesting if I recorded a chromatic scale, where all the string changes are âwrongâ for UWPS, and I am forced to TWPS on every string change both ascending and descending? I could try it during the weekend, as I may have had enough emotions for one day
Also, doing it in daylight may give a more decent image quality, apologies about the blurryness!
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Yeah, that is so true. The more different mechanics I mix in⌠the better my picking is, but the harder it is to analyze everything. lol
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For sure. I think the question is, is it possible to be stringhopping but only occasionally and therefore not enough to have a negative impact. Or is it indeed a distinct escape movement from the downstrokes.
Hereâs a great example of Andy doing what youâre doing:
https://troygrady.com/interviews/andy-wood-electro-acoustic-workshop/electric-clips/ascending-sixes/
I would call this two-way pickslanting because the sixth note uses a different movement than the other five. And I can pretty much guarantee you Andy doesnât feel any difference in that note. But without question the movement is different otherwise he wouldnât be getting over the string on that pickstroke.
Edit: Sorry getting a little ahead of myself. In this particular example, Andy appears to have a supinated forearm orientation with respect to the strings. That would make this particular case ânot stringhoppingâ, since the sixth note can be deviation and escape the way weâre seeing it. Itâs just a dwps-type escape, done via wrist, and the other five notes are uwps escapes, also done via wrist, but with the addition of extension.
Whatâs less clear is when the arm is closer to parallel such that you can no longer say categorically via video which type of escape would be required for which type of pickstroke, and which one is being made. All you can say is the player is playing quickly and appears to be doing so without fatigue.
Similar scenario in your case. Are you doing the âpronatedâ no-stringhopping approach, with deviational downstrokes and extensiony upstroke? Are you doing the supinated variety with extensiony downstrokes and deviating upstrokes? Or are there repeated movements, but theyâre infrequent enough to somehow escape the penalty?
Donât you do physics for a living? Isnât there a really expensive test we can do that will require a years of data cleaning and which nobody but us will find satisfying???
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Again amazingly clean playing. The fact youâre playing unplugged and every note is audible shows how precise your picking is.
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Yep I do physics, cool of you to remeber
I canât complain about my current situation, but if I could earn a living by doing guitar-physics experiments I would probably be the happiest man in the Solar System hehe!
To try and analyze better my descending outside change today I recorded some descending 6s with what felt like my primary-uwps setup, so that all the string changes would require a twps rotation. In reality there seem to be some pure dwps moments in my 6s playing, so it may not be fully representative of the descending scale playing I did above. But here it is in 8x slow motion (no audio for this one, sorry!)
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Great test! This looks like two-way pickslanting to me. Check out at the motion paths of the pickstrokes and trace them as they happen. If Iâm seeing this correctly, there appear to be generally two paths. The first note on each string is really just the tail end of the previous string escape stroke. So letâs skip that note for a moment. The next four notes appear to trace one path. Then the last note on the string, the escape stroke, appears to trace the opposing diagonal.
As to which movements specifically they are, I will shoot from the hip and say the middle four notes appear deviational, and the upstroke escape looks like dart-thrower, i.e. extension-deviation. So in other words, this would be like a uwps type approach except with slight supination, so the deviation strokes donât actually escape. In fact they rest stroke occasionally.
Anything more precise than that weâd have to have a way of measuring the actual movements or muscle actuation. But to the point of having different motion paths, and switching between them as the case requires, thatâs kind of the core of what â2wpsâ is supposed to be. Specifically how those movements are executed is really the second question we can ask. And in this case it appears to be deviation/elbow for the rest strokes and dart thrower wrist (with elbow?) for the escape strokes.
If you get a chance to do the reverse of this, with all downstroke escapes, either ascending or descending or both, that would be cool to check out as well.
What exactly do you do in physics?
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