What's the downside/limitation of crosspicking?

Playing Technique
#1

I’m a rock/blues/country guitar player and I’m mostly interested in the crosspicking lessons/interviews. I still think it’s a good idea to learn all movements and I plan on doing that as well.

To me, it seems that crosspicking is the “holy grail” for the styles I want to play. It’s already starting to work for me and I’m excited.

My question is: what is the downside of crosspicking? On paper, being a double escaped movement with alternate muscles involved, it should be ideal for any style - but I’m sure it isn’t! Is there a speed limit that can only be overcome with single escaped movements? Or some particular string/note combinations that it’s no good for?

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#2

As far as I know we don’t have a definitive theory to fully answer this - but what we do have is a decent amount of anecdotal evidence of double escape players that revert back to single escape for certain lines (typically, very fast lines!).

This is a random Andy Wood example (of course he is well known for his great double escape playing) where he plays a fast pentatonic line with mostly DSX: you can clearly see several rest-strokes in there as he speeds it up:

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#3

PS: and of course there are several examples (for example involving the combination of alternate picking and downstroke sweeping) that are just much much easier to play with a single-escape technique: e.g. the Eric Johnson fives, the Volcano pattern and so on!

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#4

Thanks! That’s exactly the information I needed. Now, a related question: I’ve read that you are moving away from the “crosspicking” term. What is “crosspicking” called now in the Pickslanting Primer and where is the info?

#5

The problem was that “crosspicking” refers to “what” is being played (e.g. a one-note-per-string arpeggio), not “how” (efficiently/inefficiently?)

Nowadays we prefer the term DBX (=“double escape”): it refers to the trajectory of the pick that allows to change strings both after upstrokes and downstrokes.

When we say DBX we also implicitly assume that the movement is efficient, i.e. that upstroke and downstroke use different muscles -> it is a true alternate picking movement.

When instead there is some muscle reuse, hence the motion is inefficient, we tend to still call it “stringhopping”.

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#6

Got it. And is there a section on DBX in the Pickslanting Primer? Or is it in the works now? I’ll still work the Primer from start to finish anyway!

#7

This is a good one based on wrist motion only:

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Top Speed for DBX picking
#8

Fripp gets to 130 or 140 range solid sixteenth notes. The fast part in “Frame By Frame” is about 150.
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