Why Doesn't 2 Way Pickslanting Make Techniques Specifically Made For Cross Picking Unnecessary?

Playing Technique
#13

I’ll take the blame for this confusion! The world is a complicated place, and as @tomatitito correctly points out, we came up with these ideas based on what we saw out there. When I came up with the ‘2wps’ concept, I didn’t even know there were players like Steve Morse and Carl Miner and so on.

Anyway they’re not “different techniques”, per se. When you talk about alternate picking technique specifically, it’s a system of layers, each one built on top of the lower one:

  1. Physical Movements
    shoulder, arm, elbow, etc.

  2. Pickstrokes
    single escaped (the ‘linear’ ones), fully escaped (the ‘curved’ ones)

  3. Picking Style
    pickslanting, two-way pickslanting, crosspicking

Pickslanting is when a player plays only single-escaped pickstrokes most of the time. A Two-Way Pickslanting player is one who plays sequences of single-escaped pickstrokes, with occasionally, one or two fully escaped pickstrokes thrown in. And a Crosspicking player is one who makes continuous sequences of fully escaped pickstrokes.

The key here is any movement can be used for the pickstrokes - elbow, forearm, wrist, fingers, etc. Doesn’t matter. That is the lowest level of building block, and the other two are above it. However, out there in the world we have noticed some correlations:

2wps players tend to use forearm for their fully escaped pickstrokes while using wrist or elbow for the singles. This is why you think of the 2wps player as someone one whose arm remains stationary most of the time, but occasionally flicks rapidly on certain pickstrokes. That’s just the fully-escaped pickstroke being played. If you only make one fully escaped pickstroke and then make singles again, you just switched from one pickslant to another. If you make two fully escaped pickstrokes back to back, and then play singles, you just switched, and switched back rapidly. That’s the “primary pickslant” approach we see in players like Batio, Andy Wood, and so on.

In the crosspicking world we have players who use some amount of their forearm on every pickstroke, like Martin Miller and maybe Carl Miner. And we also have those who do not, like Steve Morse and Molly Tuttle. Again the movement doesn’t matter, that’s below the pickstroke level. Use what you like. What matters is that crosspicking players are doing this on every note. A “crosspicking” player and a “two-way pickslanting” can both choose to make their fully escaped pickstrokes with the same physical movement. But 2wps is a style where you only choose to do this in units of one or two notes before going back to the linear movements. And crosspicking players can just keep doing this.

It’s worth noting that most 2wps players aren’t good at continuous sequences of fully escaped pickstrokes. That’s why you don’t see lots of 1nps arpeggio playing or pedal tone type playing in rock. It’s why most players simply can’t play Van Halen’s “Hang Em High” or Yngwie’s pedal tone lick.

It’s also worth noting that the wrist-only type of fully escaped pickstroke is much more common in bluegrass than in rock, and seems well suited to roll type playing as we’ve seen in Molly and David Grier’s case. Could you do that with continuous forearm movement? Sure, absolutely. But again, trends and correlations. Line up 100 bluegrass players and you will not see too many Jimmy Herring style forearm players, though you will probably see bits of it here and there.

So, what happens when a player makes the single-escaped pickstroke, the forearm type curved pickstroke and the “wrist-only” curved pickstroke? In other words, all type of pickstrokes, in several different physical methods? What do you call them? Andy Wood is a great example of this. When he plays scales, he uses forearm fully escaped pickstrokes for ascending inside string changes and a wrist-only fully escaped pickstroke for descending outside string changes. In between he plays singles. By our definition above, that still fits “two way pickslanting”.

Anyway, chew on that for a while and see if you think this makes sense! I think it holds up. For the moment, anyway.

16 Likes
Are DWPS, UWPS, 2WPS truncated Crosspicking?
#14

That one will definitely need some chewing! Many thanks for the detailed reply!!!

#15

Thanks Troy for that very detailed, well thought out post. I appreciate it!

#16

I can’t resist to give my 1.2 cents :grin:
To me there’s 2 things in difference:

One is just the needed time, in scale playing you have 3 strokes to change the slant direction, so there the need to have a economical technique to chenge the slant. So basically you can look at the directional swap apart from the repetetive motion, in the end whatever you use to get from one slant to another should be fine.

The trickier part is string tracking. In the crosspicking world you cannot rely on json strings anymore while the world of OneWaySlant in 99% you move ‘simply’ to the next string.
My personal experience is that after some time using slanting the distance from one string to another becomes part of the motion and is not noticed anymore.
My impression of the hardcore crosspickers is that they simply define the endpoint of a pickstroke to their needs on the fly.

I personally reached a point in crosspicking where i can play from one string to another (and simply ignore that sweeping exists) and feel comfortable with it, but it’s not that I can play every pattern, string skips and double strokes makes the thing fall apart.
Actually I think that’s just the way it is, you build a vocubulary of patterns that are queued together to your needs, at least I hope so. When I started playing I experienced something similar with patterns for fingerpicking, after a while you have enough tools in the box to be at least able to play something similar to what you hear.

1 Like
#17

Troy’s already given you a lot to chew on, but I’ll chime in as well:

For me, I’m still figuring this stuff out, but it seems that my natural picking motion is essentially crosspicking. Not just as a way of playing one note per string arpeggios… but, as a way of picking notes. Two notes per string, three notes per string, sustained tremolo picking (which I very rarely do, which may be part of the reason that I didn’t develop a more conventional pick-slanting approach).

So, this could be my imperfect understanding… But for me, “two way pickslanting” and “crosspicking” are both just two ways of soving the same problem, namely picking lines with odd numbers of notes per string. Sure, one is an odd number, and crosspicking lends itself well to one-note-per-string playing (and perhaps a bit better than 2WPS since it takes the slant change out of the picture mentally and makes it an instinctive part of the motion)… but also 3 notes per string, 5 notes, whatever, and as an added bonus handles even notes just as well, too.

If you’re already a proficcient 2WPS player and don’t do much one note per string picking, then there’s relly no pressing need to develop a crosspicking mechanic. But, aside from that special case, it seems the two can be used pretty interchangably.

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#18

Ok, disclaimer, I really don’t want to seem pedantic here in fussing over the terms of things. But I think the idea here is that we’re trying to talk about some really complicated stuff and we need to be clear on what the terms mean, at least as we plan to use them, so that we’re not talking in circles around each other in threads like this.

So with that in mind, the way I see this is that “two way pickslanting” and “crosspicking” are not different techniques. And one is not “better” at playing 1nps phrases than another.

Instead, the very act of playing a continuous 1nps phrase is, by definition, crosspicking, since it involves making a continuous sequence of curved pickstrokes. In other words, if someone plays a whole phrase with a continuous sequence of fully escaped pickstrokes, that is a crosspicking approach.

On the other hand, if someone plays a phrase that has a mix of fully escaped pickstrokes and single escaped pickstrokes, that is two-way pickslanting. It’s a more complicated definition of two-way pickslanting than we set out with, because it defines the picking style from the perspective of the kind of pickstrokes involved. But it holds for more scenarios, and allows us a way of describing someone like Andy Wood, whose style is a complex stew of movements.

In either one of these scenarios, whether it is “crosspicking” or “two way pickslanting”, the actual movement you make does not matter. Whether you use a forearm movement or a wrist movement does not matter. You can have a “crosspicking” phrase that it is entirely forearm, and a crosspicking phrase that is entirely wrist with no visible arm movement. On the flipside, you could in theory also have a two-way pickslanting phrase that is entirely wrist with no visible arm movement at all - so long as that phrase is composed of a mix of single-escaped pickstrokes and fully-escaped pickstrokes.

And finally, you can have a phrase that contains only single escaped pickstrokes, regardless of whether those are executed with elbow, forearm, wrist, whatever. And that is the style we call “pickslanting”, or more specifically “one-way pickslanting”.

So, three levels: movements, pickstrokes, and styles.

Mix and match!

2 Likes
Still trying to figure out what's going on with my picking mechanic - odd swooping motion (EDIT - crosspicking progress thread)
#19

Please, be as pedantic as you need - part of the reason I’m in this conversation in the first place is I’m trying to wrap my own head around these concepts by talking through them, and feedback on that is very helpful!

So, would it be fair to think about this as “crosspicking” is basically the motion that curves between different pickslants, and the primary “difference” between crosspicking and 2wps is sometimes in the latter you just pause the rotation that allows you to fully escape, maintaining the same slant for a little bit, and use single-escaping pickstrokes until you hit a point where you next need to use a fully escaped stroke…?

If that’s dead wrong, of course, let me know. :slight_smile:

#20

I echo Drew’s sentiments. The more detailed, the better! If that means being pedantic I have no problem with that whatsoever.

#21

Yes, pretty much. But again, to be pedantic, because it seems that’s inevitable (!), I wouldn’t think of “two way pickslanting” as a term describing a motion. The pickstroke is the term that describes the pick’s motion relative to the strings - either the angular kind, aka single-escaped, or the curved kind, aka the fully escaped pickstroke. And beneath that you have the actual body movement itself that creates that pickstroke, be it forearm, or wrist, or whatever. Those two lower-level layers are more concerned specifically with motion.

What you’re describing from that point onward though, yes, totally. In a two-way pickslanting type of phrase, you’ll start out making the single-escaped pickstrokes, then reach a point where you’re going to need to throw in a curved pickstroke. You might then make single-escaped pickstrokes again for a while, and then throw in another curved pickstroke. This would be the case if you were to play, for example, a compound type phrase where the ascending part uses one pickslant and the descending part uses another. There would be one fully-escaped pickstroke at the switchover point. The entire compound phrase is something I would describe as a “two way pickslanting” phrase. Either half of it, I would describe as one-way pickslanting.

In the classic “primary pickslant” scenario which we see in scale playing, you start out with single-escaped pickstrokes, and then throw in two curved pickstrokes back to back during certain string changes. Same general formula as the hypothetical “ascending/descending” phrase we just outlined, in the sense that the line still contains a mix of pickstroke types. But in this case you’re clustering the fully escaped strokes together in units of two. And since there are lots of people who appear to play this way, giving this particular “style” of playing a name seems to have some usefulness in describing what we’re seeing.

That’s the concept - naming things so we can refer to them and know what we’re talking about. Hopefully we’re doing more good than harm here!

#22

No that’s totally great!
Indded my imagination of crosspicking came out with your short tutorial video, where you traced the strokes and all of a sudden had a cross.
Probably that’s the best definition, and (in general) it’s not what you get when TWPS.

If I complicated things when trying to describe the different feelings (for me) between them sorry for that.
Finding a precise definition is probably the best aim to have.

#23

Thanks Troy - that’s going to take some digesting, likely with a guitar in hand, to fully make sure I follow you, but I think that makes sense.

Last dumb question of the day from me - purely theoretically, is a single-escape pickstroke likely to allow faster picking than a full-escape pickstroke, along a single string? I honestly have a hard time doing a non-curving, more linear pickstroke since I’ve been playing with at least some curve to my pickstroke (I suspect) most of my entire “career” as a guitarist, but I could see it going both ways - either a single-escape stroke is a more direct motion involving less coordination with other movements, giving it a speed advantage, or on the other hand a pickstroke is a pickstroke and once you have the movements down to muscle memory, if it’s a smooth and flowing movement either should be as fast as the other. The only “evidence” I could think of would be guys like Martin Miller who seem to predominately use a “crosspicking” motion who also switch to more of a traditional “pickslant” linear movement for faster stuff.

Reason I’m asking, I guess, is that if a curved “crosspick” mechanic feels pretty natural to me and doesn’t coome with a speed disadvantage, the fact a linear movement feels unnatural to me isn’t really worth worrying abbout, and I should continue to focus on developing the curved stroke and just use it for everything. But, if a more linear single-escape movement does come with a slight speed advantage, then while I should absolutely continue working on improving my full-escape mechanic, it also makes sense to spend some time woodshedding on a single-escape mechanic as another tool for situations where it’s a little more optimized.

Thanks either way! \m/

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#24

Take it with a grain a salt from a newbie here who is not really advanced in the concepts used on this site. So don’t hesitate to correct me ( I’m sure you will …)

Anyway … the way I see it, there’s a difference between crosspicking and 2way pickslanting in that in a ‘pure’ CP scenario, the pick would hit the string with no angle, and then will get an angle with the curve trajectory in between strings. With 2WPS (and again : the way I understand it) the pick would hit the string at an angle and change direction in the curve with the neutral pick position (no angle) in-between strings. So it would be a similar pick movement/trajectory, but with a different momentum wrt to string being hit. I’m referring to ‘pure’ CP/PS scenario, as in reality players tend to mix things.

#25

There’s theory, and there’s what we observe. In theory, all picking movements are curved, right? Your elbow makes a curve. Your forearm makes a curve. Your wrist makes a curve. You hold a pick, you move that pick, it traces an arc. They just operate in different planes - either parallel to the strings or perpendicular to them. Specifically, wrist and elbow operate parallel, but forearm is perpendicular - more or less.

There’s no reason to assume that any of these movements are necessarily faster than the others just because of the plane they operate in. Andy Wood’s wrist technique is fast, EVH’s tremolo technique is fast. Probably same speed there, give or take. We do have some reason to suspect that elbow might be faster than the others, aka “hyper picking”. But that’s for musculoskeletal reasons, not because of the orientation of the curve per se, or even that it has a curve. Because it’s still a curved movement.

So step back a minute and just realize that a “curved picking motion” may not be as different as you think when you start asking about how these movements are generated. Maybe people just think there are differences because they always use a certain movement to play certain lines. Meaning, maybe it’s the line that’s faster, not the movement. i.e. A single string lick certainly has fewer requirements mechanically than trying to play a “one note per string” arpeggio that moves across several inches of airspace.

Nobody knows! Can you play the line you like? Are they physically smooth? Do they sound good? If so, keep doing it. I mean, this is pretty fast. Fast enough for a wide variety of lines at a wide variety of tempos. Fast enough for EVH tremolo? Maybe, I don’t know, I haven’t worked on it!

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#26

No. The pick has an angled trajectory going into the string because otherwise it is not “fully escaped” on each side of the string. And crosspicking, by definition, is a connected sequence of fully escaped pickstrokes. The visual appearance of the pick itself, in terms of “does it look slanted”, has no bearing on this, or pickslanting itself for that matter. The angle of the motion path is what matters in all these scenarios.

At the level of the actual body movement, there are lots of ways to make a fully escaped pickstroke. Forearm rotational techniques like the one I linked above are essentially the same type of movement used in the most common kind of “two way pickslanting”, and will look pretty similar mechanically.

If you’re thinking of the wrist-only type of fully-escaped pickstrokes like in the little forward roll tutorial, that’s based on a supinated arm position, same setup that Mike Stern uses for his dwps technique. The “above the string” phase of the movement in that video looks similar to Mike’s technique, approaching the strings on an angle. The difference is that the pick also exits the strings on an angle, i.e. to create the full escape.

Again, movements, pickstrokes, and styles.

#27

While the analyst in me hates uncertainty, @Troy, that DOES make sense. :rofl: Thanks for your detailed responses!

#28

So @Troy, are you saying

  1. There are 3 picking trajectories
    a. Upward pick slant
    b. Downward pick slant
    c. curved pendulum

  2. You can use these trajectories in isolation or in combination
    a. Pure upward pick slanting
    b. Pure downward pick slanting
    c. Pure curved pendulum = cross picking
    d. Use all 3 = 2 Way pick slanting

#29

That’s right! I suppose you could also have “fully trapped” pickstrokes as a (edit) third category of pickstroke type, along side fully escaped and single escaped. But it’s not one we concern ourselves with too much in alternate picking because most players don’t seem to use it. But indeed it’s there, as in Jorge Strunz’s technique.

#30

I would look at it the other way around: Crosspicking is amazingly general, and it requires no planning whatsoever, an incredible virtue. However, it does have one weakness, in that it is slower (for most people, I assume) than 2WPS.

So, I will crosspick while learning a new piece of music, etc., and only when it is obvious that I will need to play something faster than my ability with crosspicking, I’ll 2WPS.

#31

Dunno if it’s of any interest, but via the magnet I noticed that I use fully trapped pickstrokes a lot. I used to think that I was a primary uwps player, but in reality I do a lot of the neutral/fully trapped trajectory with occasional escapes, and with a slight preference for downstroke escapes.

#32

If it exists, it’s of interest! So the practical question is does this matter? Does it result in better ability to do some things, worse ability to do some things, or both? And what do you teach?