Tommo’s approach is always the same. His primary picking motion is DSX, done with the wrist. This is what we used to call “upward pickslanting”. This is unclear though, because his pick isn’t really “slanted”, and moreover, doesn’t really tell someone who is learning about what they would need to do to replicate this. In actuality it’s just the wrist moving on a diagonal that is most relevant here. This type of motion will handle any string change where the downstroke is the final note, so those are taken care of automatically.
When he needs to do an upstroke string change, he doesn’t really “change the slant” — again, whatever that would even mean. He just changes the direction his wrist is moving. Here’s what that looks like in slow motion:
Edit: It looks like Instagram embeds are broken on the forum for the moment. In the mean time, you can click here https://www.instagram.com/p/B_EAzmLHVvq/ and that should work.
You’ll notice that right at the moment when the arrow switches to the semicircle, Tommo switches from the DSX motion to the double escape. That upstroke starts in the air, comes down and hits the string, then goes back up in the air again, creating a semicircle. That’s how he gets over the string on the upstroke. That’s the same thing he’s doing in the example you’ve tabbed out here, when he plays the 11th fret on the G string. That upstroke also starts in the air, comes down, hits the string, then goes back up in the air again. This is done entirely with wrist motion. The pick’s orientation doesn’t appear to change when he does this, because wrist motion doesn’t rotate. So if we were only looking at the “slant”, we might be like, hey, how is he doing that?
One other element to this is that when Tommo plays an upstroke that goes to a higher string, you’ll see the tiniest bit of forearm motion in addition to the wrist motion. This only happens in that one instance, where you have the ascending upstroke string change. Like the descending upstroke string change, it creates the semicircle motion, but it just does it with a little help from an additional joint. Andy Wood and many other wrist players also do this. This is probably what we would have called “changing the slant” in years past. But again, if you’re trying to learn, this would be pretty confusing because it only appears to happen some of the time. All the descending string changes aren’t working that way. So nowadays, for clarity, I try to just describe what he’s actually doing, i.e. Tommo engages a little forearm for upstroke string changes when they’re ascending.
I get why the old terminology was sticky and a lot of people watched those videos, but it doesn’t really do a good job of explaining what’s really going on in cases like this where you have great wrist players like Paul Gilbert, Andy Wood, Tommo, and others, who can mix and match different wrist motions on the fly. And more importantly, it doesn’t really help anyone know what to do to learn how to do these motions.
In dead simple terms, if you just learn how to do a DSX motion of any kind, whether that’s wrist or elbow, and pair that with great hand synchronization, and ignore any of the subtlties of whatever else is supposed to happen, you can get almost all the way to these kinds of scalar lines. The smoothness of the motion and the hand sync are the top priorities. The rest, whether it’s swiping or whatever, is way down the list.
That sounded great.