Gypsy Picking

Gypsy picking is the style associated with Django Reinhardt, combining USX alternate picking, downstroke sweeping, legato, and downpicking into a recognizable mechanical system.

These ingredients are not exclusive to jazz manouche. Players such as Joe Pass and George Benson use essentially the same mechanics in different musical settings.

Downpicking is particularly common in USX economy styles played on acoustic instruments, where volume and projection are prized. It figures prominently in Greek bouzouki and Puerto Rican cuatro technique, while its best-known guitar application is the Gypsy picking style associated with Django Reinhardt.

In this rare footage of Django recorded with synchronized sound, Django plays a diminished line with a structure very similar to the one we looked at on George Benson’s instructional video:

The E and A strings of the phrase are pure alternate, using USX and switching on upstrokes. From there, Django uses stacked instances of DDU to simplify the complexity of the upper string changes. He plays the first triad on the D and G string pair, and the second on the B and E string pair, before finishing with a position shift and single downstroke:

We know from our interview with historian Ben Givan that Django’s signature style emerged soon after his hospital stay from the caravan fire that burned his fretting hand. It’s tempting to speculate that a picking style based on downstrokes and downstroke sweeping that uses Django’s flexed wrist position might have developed while recovering in bed with a picking arm draped over the body of an acoustic guitar. So it is fitting that some of the only known footage of Django’s live playing features him cradling a guitar while reclining on a couch, a playing posture that is not particularly common among guitarists of other picked styles.

Although it seems likely that Django discovered his mechanics on his own, it’s worth noting that popular players of the period like Eddie Lang and Nick Lucas also appeared to use the USX economy style. Both players had already found stardom in music and film by the 1920s, before Django developed his mature technique, and would likely have been known to him. Eddie Lang died young, so better footage exists of Nick’s technique, like this television performance on the Lawrence Welk show:

It appears that Nick used almost exclusively downstrokes, for both single note lines and swept phrases, but the blazing arpeggios at the end of the solo are no less impressive for it. It’s not clear what opportunities Django would have had to physically observe the techniques of even very popular players like Nick, but the similarities between his form and Nick’s are obvious, from the supinated arm position, to the wrist flex and downward pickslant. But it’s just as likely that all these approaches flowed from a common popular musical style that emphasized bass-chord downstroke rhythms with downstroke arpeggiation, and Django simply elaborated that style more specifically for lead playing.

Thanks to the efforts of the Gypsy community to systematically teach Django’s mechanics, modern Gypsy virtuosos like Joscho Stephan are remarkably consistent in the application of what we have come to know as “Gypsy Picking”. At its core is USX motion applied to even-numbered note groupings for rapid alternate picking, like this fluid two-note-per-string example from Gypsy virtuoso Joscho Stephan:

And just as in Yngwie and George Benson’s techniques, downstroke sweeping is applied in sonically stealthy fashion even for scalar playing, such as this three-note-per-string example:

Finally, downpicking is used for descending lines whenever USX escaped upstrokes are not available:

In this common Gypsy application, the third note on each string is played with a downpicking cycle whose return phase avoids sounding the string:

At a given joint-motion speed, downpicking produces half as many notes as alternate picking, so it imposes a real speed ceiling. Joscho generally avoids it in his fastest passages, but short bursts remain useful at a broad range of tempos and preserve the characteristic Gypsy picking sequence.