The descending cascade is so prevalent in Eric’s style that it becomes a kind of sonic backdrop against which his other stylistic elements stand out. And on the comparatively rare occasion that he turns around to come back up the fretboard, the results are nothing short of glorious:

This glittering rocket ship of ascending virtuosity is an immediately recognizable Eric Johnson trademark, and a concentrated distillation of his mastery in painting ethereal soundscapes. A key ingredient of its sonic effect is its harmonic color — or, more appropriately, its lack of it.

The lick broadly traces the outline of a minor seventh arpeggio, a chord type that has the unique property of being a subset of the minor pentatonic scale. In fact, flipping that around, one way to look at the minor pentatonic scale is that it essentially is a minor seventh arpeggio, with an extra note — the fourth degree of the scale — thrown in to produce the full five-note sequence. Simply eliminating this fourth scale degree creates the minor seventh sound, and reduces the number of notes in the scale from five to four.

And when we eliminate that fourth degree from the second position of the pentatonic scale, it produces exactly the fingering Eric uses in this lick. It always starts here on the first note of pentatonic position II, on the 6th string, fretted with the middle finger. We then skip the second note on that string — the fourth degree — and instead move directly to the index finger on the 5th string. That’s our first sweep. We finish this mini-chunk with an upstroke on the second note of the A string.

This two-string sweep can also be handled by bounce, with two separate downstrokes. The slight pause between the first and second downstroke introduces a little rubato at the beginning of the phrase. The initial note is also almost always a slide, from lower down on the 6th string. So these two elements — the slide and the rubato — work together to enhance the drama of the phrase’s beginning. This is exactly how Eric handles the first two strings of the ascending pentatonic pickups we’ve already seen, and it’s notable that these are also ascending phrases.

The 5th and 4th strings of the pattern are each two notes per string, and terminate on an upstroke. Because this sequence terminates on an upstroke, this means that the transition to the 3rd string is done via alternate picking.

Once again, skipping the fourth degree of the scale requires moving immediately to the next string. If we start on a downstroke, and follow the dwps rules, we’ll need a sweep to get there, and this is precisely what Eric does. By now the lick has reached its full speed, so bouncing is no longer present — this time, it’s a bona fide sweep. Once the downstroke arrives on the second string, it initiates another two-note down-up sequence.

The Shift

At this point, after traveling five strings of pentatonic position II, the lick takes a turn and moves even higher up the fretboard.

This is a straight shift to the third position, with no audible sliding. Instead, the index finger simply steps over to the third string to fret the note the middle finger previously played, and this shifts the entire hand up on position. As we’ve seen, the top two strings of pentatonic position III have special significance in Eric’s style as the location of a number of recurring melodic motifs. And Eric frequently plays them at the top of this arpeggio figure. In this instance, though, we’re not going to do that — we’re going to continue our skyward arpeggiated journey.

This is simply the third and second strings of pentatonic position III, played ascending. But because of the surrounding musical context, we now hear it not just as pentatonic, but also as part of the continuing ascending minor seventh arpeggio. And this again highlights the sonic overlap of these two sets of notes. To see only the tablature for this portion of the lick would only tell part of the story, and the phrase might appear to be purely pentatonic. Its arpeggiated character becomes explicit once again as we move to the top string.

The Harmonic

We skipped the first note on the top string — the fourth degree — and moved directly to the fifth. This is an important scale tone in both major and minor, as it is essentially the counterpart to the tonic. In other words, it is scale degree five, and more importantly, the V chord that takes its name from it, that leads directly to the resolution of the phrase. And when that resolution arrives, it does so in the most striking possible way.

Now that’s how you end a phrase! The final note of the arpeggio, the root of the minor seventh chord, is a glistening phantom tone activated by way of an impossibly-precise right-hand harmonic. This type of harmonic had become de rigeur in hard rock guitar by this point, most notably through the influence of Eddie Van Halen, whose ability to launch soaring squeals, seemingly at will, turbocharged the popularity of this technique in ’80s rock. But the actual pitch of those dog-whistle tones was a result of the picking hand’s position, and it was not usually tightly controlled by the player. Instead, by simply allowing a portion of the right hand thumb to contact the string during picking, a random harmonic could be generated that acted as a textural or special effect. Because these tones sprang from the harmonic series of the underlying fretted note, there was a good chance they’d at least have some relation to the surrounding chord or key. But they sounded cool even if they didn’t, especially with heavy vibrato and bending.

But here was an example of a specific harmonic tone being chosen, with sniper-like precision, as the melodic destination of a phrase. To do this would require an exact awareness of where on the string the harmonic node point existed. And this would be different for every fretted note, not to mention every harmonic node point for each of those notes. Once you did the geography, you’d then to move the picking hand to exactly that spot, at the exact moment when the final pickstroke crossed the string.

The fact that this was all happening at light speed only made it that much more improbable. The slightest misplacement of the picking hand, and the harmonic wouldn’t sound — you’d hear the dull thud of the pick against the string, or nothing at all. This became harder to do on the upper strings as the string vibration became more delicate, and especially as you got higher up the fretboard. And Eric’s perfectly placed harmonic overtones were so high as to be well off the fretboard in most cases. That meant you’d need even more gain from the amplifier to capture these tiny vibrations. But Eric wasn’t playing over- the-top modern metal amps. He was playing vintage guitars, with low-output pickups, through vintage amps from the seventies, running through a collection of ancient overdrive pedals from the same era.

Hitting the Note

The sonic effect of all of this was so space-age, that it was hard to acknowledge that it was even happening. In actual practice, it turns out to be not quite as impossible of a mission. Memorizing the location of specific harmonics for specific fretted notes in common guitar keys eliminates most of the pre-planning. And the specific layout of this lick made that easy to do. He always played it in exactly the same pentatonic position, and always activated the harmonic on exactly the same note. All you’d need to do is figure out what landmark on your guitar was closest to the right spot — for example, the edge of a pickup, or maybe a certain distance away from it.

Most players utilize a rolling motion of the right hand to promote thumb-string contact. It’s highly effective, but it can sometimes make it tricky to target specific node points if it’s not clear precisely which part of the thumb will eventually touch the string. Eric solves this with a distinctive thumb bend that he appears to use exclusively for harmonic activation. This is not a pinch. In fact, there is never any actual “pinching” in a right-hand harmonic. It’s a term that does not usefully describe the more common rolling motion, or Eric’s thumb bend technique. Instead, this quick, temporary bend brings the thumb knuckle almost flush with the string, just in time for the pickstroke on the given note. And this gives him a consistent reference point for targeting node points on the string.

Even still, a certain number of these attempts in Eric’s playing are whiffs. Usually, when this happens, some amount of the fundamental fretted note still pokes through, and the phrase still has a proper apex. Which is fine. We can hardly blame a guy who’s consistently sinking three-pointers with Bird-like accuracy for not swishing every single one of them. It’s more like the opposite: it’s cool to see him take the shot, time after time, with no fear. That he did this repeatedly on live TV, in a make-or-break performance that turned out to be career-defining, is truly impressive.

Unshifted and Fully-Loaded

Eric plays a couple variations of the ascending minor seventh arpeggio. Here’s one with several bells and whistles added:

In this variation, he’s added a half-step figure to the bottom of the phrase, which introduces a minor ninth sound. He throws in an additional sweep on the 5th and 4th strings of the pattern. And on the top string, he brings back the fourth degree of the scale. This gives more of a stepwise melodic feel to the apex of the phrase. And it actually simplifies the picking because now the top string has two notes, and terminates on an upstroke — down-up. The transition to the final harmonic is now up-down rather than a repeated downstroke, as it is in the shift version of the arpeggio.
But we can also go the other way, and strip out all the extra features:

In this variation, we’ve eliminated the position shift at the top of phrase, and changed the fingering on the top string to accommodate that change. This allows us to play the entire lick in one position without traveling further up the fretboard. The span is still the same — we’re just eliminating the repetition caused by the position shift. This alternate fingering is more overtly linear, more like an exclamation point. And it can work well in situations when you might not be able to travel quite as far up the fretboard — for example, if you have an iPhone stuck to the neck!

Skip Fives

So that was it. The bounce technique was stringhopping, and it was a convenient solution for certain kinds of medium-speed playing. Eric’s formula for using it, broadly, was downstrokes when ascending across the strings, and upstrokes when descending. This is actually a strategy that is used by many players — perhaps most famously by Al Di Meola, who also employs it in arpeggiated contexts where bluegrass players might instead choose a two-way pickslanting alternate picked strategy.

But Eric’s solution was also idiosyncratic and sometimes employed alternate picked stringhopping passages when multiple notes occurred on a single string. That there was any system of rules for this at all was kind of amazing, considering how clearly subsconscious the whole enterprise was for him. For my purposes, it didn’t really matter what the exact sequence of pickstrokes happened to be. If I was forced to use stringhopping at all, I was happy to do so with alternate picking for whatever boost in efficiency that may have provided.

Neither of these solutions were truly efficient. And that’s why, whenever he started playing fast, the bounce morphed into sweeping — even if he wasn’t aware of it. And that made sense, because bouncing all over the place simply wasn’t efficient. But after poking around some more on the Austin City Limits tape, I discovered that there was at least one situation in Eric’s higher speed playing where the bounce technique actually didn’t go away at all:

Here’s an interesting lick that occurs in the Austin City Limits performance. And what’s interesting about it is that I originally thought it was a whole different lick. I assumed it was the six-note pentatonic chunk, and was just about to hit the fast-forward button, when I looked a little more closely. And there was the surprise: one of the notes, the last one, was simply missing. This lick was actually a repeating unit of fives. In fact, it was just like the ubiquitous sequential version of fives, but with a string skip in the middle.

The last pickstroke of the sequence was a downstroke, and that ownstroke simply hopped over the middle string to begin the pattern again on the same pickstroke.

If the repetition of that fifth pickstroke had seemed so superfluous in the standard incarnation of the fives sequence, it was far less so here. In classic fives, a single sweep was clearly the optimal solution, and Eric himself chose it at higher speeds, even if he was potentially unaware of doing so. But this lick was a different animal. There was a string in between, and there was simply no other way to get over it. Choosing pure alternate picking would flip the picking structure so that the next repetition started on an upstroke. And this could only lead back to the stringhopping inefficiency of my first attempts. Choosing sweeping would slam the pick through the intervening string. Even if it was muted, that didn’t sound like what I was hearing here. It seemed like the only remaining solution, implausible as it sounded, was to jump it.

But how do you do that at these kind of speeds? Or better yet, are we really sure that’s what he was doing? Whether or not he was actually clearing that middle string in its entirety was hard to tell. I thought I could hear a small amount of noise on at least one of the repetitions, but it was slight enough that it could have come from anywhere.

Rest Stroke Fives

One possibility was that Eric was using a rest stroke, which is what happens when the pick uses the next higher string as a brake. In a rest stroke, the pick hits the next string forcefully, coming to an immediate halt, but not actually playing it. This makes no sound — or so little sound that it’s negligible. The rest stroke would kill the previous downstroke, but you wouldn’t have to use any force to do it. You could instead just focus all your energy on the next downstroke. This is like the way drummers use drumhead rebound to take care of the ascending portion of the stick hit, so they only have to supply energy to force the stick back down again.

The rest stroke technique works surprisingly well, and is possibly the fastest fully-picked method for playing the skip fives lick. Although the pick makes contact with the “rest” string, it doesn’t actually play it, and doesn’t make any substantial amount of sound when doing so. On a high-gain amp, simply rest stroking against a string will produce a very small amount of pick / string contact noise. But during actual playing, this is masked by the surrounding played notes, and completely inaudible.

More importantly, because the rest stroke stops the pick, the next downstroke lifts over the top of the string, and doesn’t actually play it. Even at elevated speeds, where the rest stroke may tend to slide rather than lift, it still shouldn’t slide forcefully enough to trigger an actual plucking of the note.

If the rest stroke does pluck the rest string, you’ve crossed the line into “sweeping through a muted string”. This is a technique that can work, but it does produce actual unwanted sound, and the challenge of doing this is to get so little of it that it is masked by the surrounding notes. With this method, the sweep pickstroke feels like one continuous downstroke that happens to push through a string on its way to the target.

By contrast, the challenge of the rest stroke technique, is to maintain some feeling of distinct downstrokes, even at really high speed. This is tricky to get it right: it requires a looseness in the forearm so that the second downstrokes feels like a bounce that lifts over the middle string. Ironically, this only works if you deliberately and solidly hit the middle string on the first downstroke. The more you try to avoid doing that, the more the technique wants to simply slide over the top of that middle string, which again, eventually becomes muted sweeping — a totally different sound and feel.

Legato Fives

But if it wasn’t a rest stroke, it was also possible he was slightly grazing the top of the string as he passed over it. It’s amazing how good the camerawork on Austin City Limits was. At least one camera always seemed to be glued to Eric’s right hand action, and this is more than you can say for many guitar instructional videos. Clearly, the guys in Austin knew how to film guitar players. Being Texas, this probably should not have been surprising.

And upon closer inspection, something else amazing became apparent. It really looked like, in at least some instances, the fifth note wasn’t being picked at all. In other words, four picked notes and one hammer — a “hammer from nowhere”, as it is sometimes called. It was unclear whether or not this was intentional, or simply the final stage of the evolution of the bounce. What began as an obvious hop became smoother and smoother until it simply evaporated altogether, and the lick reverted to its ultimate form of efficiency: pure downward pickslanting, even numbers of notes per string, switching after upstrokes.

Despite the camera tracking, the footage really wasn’t close enough to tell if this is indeed what was happening. But practicing the textbook version of the pattern, with the bounce intact, I could do the skip fives lick relatively quickly, though not as seamlessly as either the alternate picked sextuplets or swept fives licks. If that meant that there was a tiny pause before the pattern started over, so be it. The pause would be so small as to be almost unnoticeable. And Eric’s playing was mostly free-time anyway.

What was really interesting is that I was now starting to see the bounce technique the same way Eric did. In a certain kind of Johnsonian alternate reality, as strange as it sounds, the bounce almost was a hybrid between repeated pickstrokes and sweeping. At the one extreme it was a discrete bounce — two totally separate picking movements. And at the other, it was a single unbroken sweep from one string to another. Somewhere in between those points was the skip fives lick — one movement, but with the smallest pause in the middle, almost like a rock skipping on the surface a pond.
I started creating other ideas that utilized the punctuated sweep of the bounce technique:

In highly orchestrated dwps arpeggiated sequences like this, the utility of the bounce is precisely to maintain the pick structure of the surrounding notes undisturbed while still (for the most part) clearing the obstacles in the way. In this respect it does a paradoxically good job.

Another common device that Eric uses for variety in his box position soloing is an ingenious distillation of the sweeping component of the fives pattern:

This is a cool sequence that uses a rolling pattern of threes to quickly ripple the melodic direction of a phrase to a higher string. It’s hard to hear the ripple effect of the pattern when played slowly — it’s almost more felt than heard. But up to speed, and tucked inside a blues lick,it is yet another clever way that Eric subverts the rhythm of phrases to change direction in surprising ways.

Its construction is such that it can be stacked with itself, to roll the direction of the lick as many higher strings as you’d like. Isolated across, say, four strings, it sounds like this:

What’s also interesting about this sequence is that the picking structure is really just three-note-per string sweeping. In fact, as far as the right hand is concerned, it is identical to the strategy that Yngwie uses for ascending 3nps scalar sweeping, just applied to a type of pentatonic trill that is utterly different in sonic effect. Considering the fundamental importance of 3nps picking patterns in lead playing, and the usefulness of applying them to two 2nps fingerings like this, it’s worth converting Eric’s rolling threes pattern into an exercise. If we pair it with fives in the descending direction, again across four strings, we can generate this looping idea:

Cool. And despite the similarity of the picking component of this exercise to what we’ve already seen of Yngwie’s mechanics, Eric’s rolling threes pattern most likely did not evolve from any kind of overt search for scale playing solutions. In fact, if we consider the first note of the sweep to be the first note of the pattern, then the second note would be the second swept note on the next higher string, followed by the index finger that string. This isolates the sweep component of the fives mechanic. It is sonically and conceptually far removed from the linear structure of Yngwie’s scalar lines. And it’s an amazing example of how different players can arrive at identical mechanical solutions to totally different artistic problems.