Awesome playing , @tommo! And thanks for posting it. That sure is is a good example of the ascending fours embeded in a solo, and you really nailed it. It almost looks like you’re doing some “cliffhopping” in the “slower” section before shifting gears to TWPS mode for the fours! I found a transcription for that solo so I may tinker with it and follow up with some more questions if you don’t mind. Great playing! And that song - Erotmania - is just a smorgasbord of all kinds of licks!
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Tommo are you Supinated or Pronated when doing your Upward Pickslanting motion?
You have many different mechanics for string Crossing it seems.
Ascending Inside is Forearm Rotation (Which implies your normal pickstroke is A. pronated doing wrist deviation- 3 o clock. Or B. Supinated doing Reverse Dart Thrower- 2 o clock) to make this motion have a different trajectory than the UWPS.
I do see the rest strokes happening against the lower string- this implies Supination since this would not be happening if pronated using Wrist Deviation. Perhaps more extension is needed. Or more pronation if doing Wrist Deviation.
On the other hand the Descending Outside String Change there is no Rotation at all. It appears to be the Dart Thrower Movement (which implies Pronation to be not stringhopping since the Supinated UWPS via Reverse Dart Thrower also has wrist extension). Maybe I’m just blind but I’m struggling to see the finger movement everyone is talking about? When do you feel this the most?
Either way this is great playing and has made me come to the realization that 2WPS can be done by using the different wrist movements from a given arm position instead of having to change between Supination/pronation by rotating the forearm- much like Crosspicking.
Do you do any 2 Way Sweeping by the way? It makes the scales with mixed number of Notes per string much easier in my opinion by using the Jimmy Bruno Approach- combining alternate picking with economy. And the forearm rotation mechanic is how he changes his pickslant and Sweep direction at the turnaround.
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Hey @DJ_Ddawg, I think you have analysed my TWPS technique much better than I could do, but in general I think you are right that my arm may not be pronated, as I often seek the feeling of rest stroke on the downstrokes as well as on the upstrokes (unless of course I need to cross strings after the pickstroke in question).
Also, I thik my technique may not be fully consistent across the various videos I posted in this thread, as I keep changing some details all the time, in my endless search for a fully comfortable technique!
Yes I tried it now and then, but at the moment this approach only works for me at medium speeds - say until 120-130bpm 16th notes. In fact, for these speeds 2-way economy feels more reliable than fully alternate TWPS, since the latter works best with some momentum. At higher speeds I can’t control my timing very well with economy picking and so I prefer to move back to fully alternate. If I could discover a “trick” to control my timing better, I would probably start using economy most of the time.
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This is awesome. You have become a two-way pickslanting ninja. Complimenti!
Looks like you put this up a while back but I’m just seeing it now. But this is a great example of several things we’ve been talking about recently, in our recent crosspick broadcasts, and on that very long thread about how the term “pickslanting” should be used.
Short story, you are supinated all the time here. Yes, there is forearm involvement, but like Andy Wood, it’s only taking you from more supinated to less supinated and back again. If you ignore the arm movement for a moment and just look at what the wrist is actually doing, you’ll notice the 9:00 and 2:00 movements for “dwps” and “uwps”, respectively, which we’ve been learning about. The arm just occasionally re-orients the whole setup slightly. We can ask why or even if that needs to happen. But it’s not changing the fundamental nature of the motions.
So we’ve come a little bit full circle in our understanding of what pickslanting really is and how many players actually do it. It is very often a wrist thing, and in those scenarios, the arm is just there to provide a slight orientation assist - for reasons we can speculate about. But the flip-flopping motion paths appear very often to come from the wrist, and they don’t depend on the “slant” of the pick, per se.
There are clips in the Pickslanting Primer where the actual arm involvement drops to almost nothing and still the pick escapes. You can take a look at this clip, for example:
…and you will see that the arm never approaches anywhere near actual pronation with respect to the strings. It’s just varyingly supinated. You can take a look at the third note, the downstroke on the top string, and note very clearly the 2:00-style movement that I’m using to get over the string. It’s a little embarrassing that as recently as a year or two ago, we were filming this stuff and not really appreciating what was actually happening.
You have mentioned that your approach can sometimes feel “subtle”, or “neutral”, but that is not really what’s happening. We have been overly focused on the appearance of forearm rotation in determining when “2wps” is happening. Instead, what matters are the motion paths. If you use different escape motions depending on the string change, that is really what the “two-way” in “two-way pickslanting” is all about. When you think things feel or look “neutral” I’m guessing it’s because you don’t feel arm involvement, and that’s how you interpret it. But that’s just what wrist movement feels like.
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Since you say he is Supinated the whole time doesn’t that’s make his Descending Outside String Cross String Hopping because of repeating the Extension Movement since the UWPS motion is the 2 o clock wrist movement?
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In “902” family of movements, or any similarly supinated arrangement, the downstroke escape is 2:00 and the upstroke escape is 9:00. It doesn’t really matter which direction the string change is happening. Now if he’s using 10:00 for upstroke escapes at any point then yes that would be stringhopping — if it happens right before or after a 2:00. But I don’t think he’s doing that.
The forearm is providing an assist on certain notes and possibly even taking the place of the 9 on upstroke escapes. But at most that’s all that I think is going on here.
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Grazie Troy, troppo buono 
I didn’t think that I was already doing the 9-02 movement, good to know thank you! This is encouraging and I hope I’ll be able to adapt some of these movements for 1nps lines in the future.
By the way, I decided a more appropriate title for my thread is “upstroke VS downstroke”, as “inside VS outside picking” was somehow misleading. The biggest difference I feel is between “upstroke on the beat” and “downstroke on the beat”: for some reason the former option feels much better (e.g. this is what I did in the latest clip).
I’m sure that won’t be a problem. In fact, when you get a moment, can you try filming another example? A simple repeating sequence, ascending sixes, starting on a downstroke, two adjacent strings, single position. Any two strings that feel comfortable for you would be fine. Just do a handful of repetitions at whatever fast-ish speed feels clean to you.
Also, try using the “landcape” phone orientation, aka “vertical video”, as we do in our examples. This way you’ll capture more of what’s going in the wrist / arm interaction.
The idea here is to simplify the sequence to one that you are most likely going to be able to do with only wrist movement, so we can get a simplified look at what’s going on. If your movement is similar to what Andy does or what I’ve been doing in the tutorials then you should be able to adapt this to 1nps type playing. If not, maybe we can understand why.
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Hi @Troy, you picked one of the examples that always felt hit and miss for me, especially when I try to avoid swiping!
I tried this with my two main picking modes: in the first one I glide my unused fingers on the pickguard - I feel that this makes the “outside” string changes a bit harder, so my clean speed on this lick is not that high. It seems I can’t avoid forearm rotations here.
In the second mode I anchor 3rd and 4th finger on the pickguard - this allows me to go faster and reduce the forearm involvement, but it feels like I may be swiping on the descending string change on occasion. Looking forward to any comments! 
PS: I realised my phone does max 60FPS, and perhaps the lighting wasn’t the best here. Let me know if I should try again to get better videos, and I can try in the next few days.
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This is awesome! Thanks for doing this. Of these approaches, take 2 is what I was expecting. What you’re doing here is two-way pickslanting, mostly via the wrist. If you look at the motion path of the downstroke that moves to the higher string, it’s a different path than the upstroke that comes back to the lower string. If you can’t feel that difference, that’s what I would expect. I really can’t when I do this either. Because wrist motions don’t really “feel” like much. But that’s what happening, i.e. you’re using alternating wrist motions to get over the string, like Andy does here:
https://troygrady.com/interviews/andy-wood-workshop/electric-clips/ascending-sixes/
Is it 902 or 1003? Well, we can test this. When you get into this setup, and you take your left hand and do the “ski slope” test (from the broadcast) on your forearm, does your hand slide down toward the guitar body? If so, then it’s 902. And that answers some questions.
If the result of the ski slope test says 902, then I’m going to suggest that the reason take 1 “needs” forearm is because you are trying to use 902, but from an arm position that is too supinated. So each time you move to switch strings, you need to use the forearm to reorient so the wrist motion escapes. In other words, you’re using the same wrist movements from take 2, but they no longer escape because they don’t match the arm position. Ergo, forearm helps out.
So basically, what I am suggesting is that what is happening in take 2 is that you’re still using a supinated arm position. It’s just flatter. The fact of the fingers anchoring is just what you’re doing to achieve that, but what is operative about the difference is the arm position.
Edit: If the result of the ski slope test says 1003 for take 2, then that’s a different story. Then I’d say simply that you’ve learned to do 1003 with no arm involvement, and again your arm position matches the wrist movements you’re making. Take 1 is up for grabs, maybe it’s 902 with a forearm help for the reasons I’m guessing above. Or maybe it’s something else. The upstroke string changes in take 1 are definitely wrist, and there’s a slight wrist flex so they could even be a shade less than 9, like 830.
I’m just spitballing here, but those are some guesses as to what’s going on. Try the ski slope test and let me know what you feel.
Again, great work here.
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Once again I should thank you for helping me making sense of my own mechanics - from knowledge comes power 
I agree that wrist movements feel almost like doing “nothing” to avoid the strings. In contrast, forearm rotation always felt like “work” to me, and in my own playing it also seems to be a less reliable movement at high speed (interfering with timing, string tracking and so on) - this may not be obvious when looking at my playing from the outside.
So I’m starting to think that forearm involvement may explain the subtle difference in feel we have discussed several times in my technique critique topics (ascending vs descending and so on). I am now confident that I can try to go wrist-only in my “mode 2”, which would feel great!
On the other hand, only “mode 1” allows me to do a comfortable “chug-chug” palm muting, but in this mode I have more of a DWPS bias, and I find the “outside ascending” changes to be cumbersome (as one could maybe tell from the video). I guess for now I’ll just try to rearrange things to avoid this type of string change when heavy palm muting is required.
I think I haven’t understood very well how to do the test - and the almost-neutral anchored position makes it tricky for me to assess the orientation of the two bones. I am going to look again at the broadcast one of these evenings to revise the test and try again! What I can tell you is that if I try the clockface thing in the air, 9-02 feels more natural than 10-03, but I am not sure if that translates to the guitar, you never know!
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Yeah that’s tricky, it’s hard to be precisely sure that your orientation in the air is the same as it is on the instrument.
When you’re set up in “mode 2”, just place your hand or any flat object on the top of your forearm so that it contacts both bones, and see what its orientation is compared to the strings. Which way is it tilted? It shouldn’t really be that subtle, because these techniques don’t really work unless there is a tilt of some kind.
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My preliminary result from such a measurement is… supinated as you suspected! That’s kind of surprising, given my preference for UWPS licks.
I’m reasonably confident that this is accurate but might try to involve an… external examiner to confirm the measurements or get some sort of picture when I get the chance 
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Well, again, that’s our fault. Nobody had any impression of these things until we started telling people pronated = uwps. But that turned out to be wrong. The supinated orientation is equally capable of both, and may very well even be the more commonplace orientation for both. That’s what I suspect anyway.
Let us know if your independent examiner confirms the test results!
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Or more positively, the fact that you are willing/able to revise your theories based on new evidence shows you are a great guitar-scientist 
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We spent some time yesterday trying to redo the test and trying to get some clear pictures. Turns out I may have been wrong about my picking mode 2! While my forearm in “mode 1” is clearly supinated, in “mode 2” the inclination of the bones is very subtle, but it seems closer to pronated when I play the ascending 6s pattern in particular.
Note: I also have noticed examples of “mode 2 picking” in which I may rotate the forearm to a clearly supinated orientation for a brief period of time. EDIT: and also examples where I’m sure I am pronated, like a 2nps pentatonic scale starting on an upstroke. In the 6s examples, instead, I find it harder to tell.
In any case, here are the clearest pictures we managed to get. I tried to recreate as closely as possible the postures I used for the ascending 6s lick.
MODE 1 (supinated)
MODE 2 (probably pronated?)
Just for convenience (as this is a long thread by now!) I’m attaching again my video of the ascending 6s played with the two postures:
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I like the ruler! Very clear.
It is indeed hard to tell, because the arm position by itself doesn’t tell us the whole picture. It’s a question of what is the wrist doing in comparison to the arm orientation that tells us which muscles are being used. The only real way to know for sure is measuring the muscle activation when you play these lines.
What is clear is that your playing is great, and regardless of what is happening, these lines sound fine. From a purely practical perspective, what is missing? 1nps stuff? And certain scalar type phrases, like fours, feeling like there is too much arm adjustment?
If that’s the case then I’d just try the forward roll. You now have the two arm positions you can test this with. Based on feedback from others here, you may have to trial and error the arm position a little (either more supinated, or more pronated) for each of your modes, to find what works. Do a few tries of that, and see if you can make it click. Given what you’re already doing, you’re pretty close and you should be able to get this given that you know all the variables already.
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I’m just throwing it out there @tommo, careful as you try switching, dramatic switches may lead to injury, or so I’ve learned the hard way. 
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Really solid, good tone as well!
I also had a lot of problems with outside picking, slowly getting better at it. For me, the concept of two way pickslanting was the key. You seem to have that down allready though!
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Hey Tommo, just found this cool thread of yours and I am curious. Just wondering how come for your ascending 3NPS stuff like above, you choose to alternate and not economy/sweep it like Yngwie?
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