Hi ,
I’m new to this can anyone help?
Would it be mechanically correct to play this section of a solo using upward p/s starting with a downstroke?..
Thanks
Dom
You’re going from strings of 11 notes → 3 notes → 4 notes → 1 note.
Your options include:
-
sweep
- start with upstroke and pick 11 notes, sweeping to
- pick three notes, sweeping to
- pick four notes
- upstroke to final note
-
“legato”
- start with upstroke and pick 10 notes, hammer one
- pick 2 notes, hammer one
- pick 4 notes
- pick 1 note
-
mixture of sweep and legato (what you suggest, above).
anyway I’m sure that you get the idea.
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If you are going picking as many notes as possible and want to avoid sweeping , the simplest way I see it with UWPS, is to start on downstroke and pick first 13 notes with alternate picking 
pull off on note 14 to keep your pick in an escaped position pick the rest starting on an upstroke.
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Thank you both, I’m toning to work on both approaches and see which one works for me… thanks
Although one of the above will do the job, if you can do them all, you will be a picking ninja! Try all of them and pick the best one for you, there is no one ‘correct’ way.
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I’m finding downward completely alien to me, esp since I hybrid pick a lot … gona watch the downward vids again and preserver with it…
- your plan (version 1)
- start with downstroke and pick 11 notes
- pick three notes, sweeping to
- pick four notes
- upstroke to final note
- your plan (version 2)
- start with downstroke and pick 11 notes
- pick two notes, hammer one
- pick four notes
- upstroke to final note
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Honestly the very first step before you even start thinking of questions like this is getting your picking motions sorted. The “slant” is not really what’s important about pickslanting, it’s more the result and not the cause. The way the pick is moving, which is along an angled path, is where the magic happens. And of course that very often results in the pick “looking slanted”. But the main thing is that the angled path of motion comes from your picking motion first and foremost.
Have you had a chance to run through the picking motion parts of the Pickslanting Primer yet, and do you have at least one motion which is fast and fluid? It can be either a downstroke escape (DSX / UWPS) or an upstroke escape (USX / DWPS )motion, and even just one of them is enough to start. A single note on a single string, played at least 150bpm sixteenth notes. Have you done it and what does the motion look like?
Again, welcome aboard.
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I’m going to go through the vids over the weekend and hopefully post a video of myself trying to use the techniques on Monday … I want to make a few vids to look back on to see if I’m improving…
I think that the above statement is true, but it takes a lot of education and practice to be able to infer that one is playing 10 notes/second, given that people can’t count that fast, so they might be counting at 2.5 beat/second and playing 4 notes/beat, something not obvious (at first), particularly at high speeds.
I wonder, did anybody write a “strobe” app for phones, where people could try to find their picking speed in a dark room?! 
150 isn’t important as a number, and it’s definitely not necessary that some play at exactly that tempo. In fact I would suggest that someone not try and hit a specific tempo at all when they do this type of work. I’m more trying to communicate a ballpark. We’ve seen clips recently of players posting clips testing out a new motion by going much more slowly, like 100 or 110, and that’s nowhere near fast enough to know whether it’s right or not. A fifty bpm difference should be pretty clear to almost anyone what range we’re talking about.
On a related note, you’ll notice I almost never use “notes per second” as a speed reference. I have a much more intuitive sense of what “150bpm” sounds like, because it’s a super common musical tempo. Ten notes per second, I have no idea what that even is until I do the math conversion.
Right, it is because your bias is too deep, you’ve already learned to reason about subdividing at high speed.