Between the chunks, turnarounds, shifts, cascades, and more, we’ve built an entire arsenal of Eric-style weaponry. Let’s see how many of them we can squeeze into one passage:
Ok that was more like three or four passages. But still. It’s remarkable how much of Eric’s persona we can evoke with a few core techniques, and no more than a couple of his stock phrases. And this is not a knock on his creativity. It’s the proof of it. When a thing can be distilled to the sparest collection of its parts, and still be instantly recognizable, that tells you something. Think of Yngwie’s arpeggios. Or Eddie’s tapping. Or for that matter, think of Michael Jackson’s white glove, and Elvis’ sideburns. If the most influential voices throughout musical history have always been so easily imitated, it’s only because of their incredible uniqueness.
We can recall Jimi Hendrix’s musical persona so vividly with nothing more than the first six notes of the Star Spangled Banner. And we can recall Eric’s ethereal soundscapes with one thunderous open E-string. But it doesn’t mean he had only that little to say to us. It simply means that embedded within that one characterful note, like a kind of musical DNA, was the complete power of his creativity. And that’s pretty amazing.
The foundational skill of the Eric Johnson lead style is the ability to play two-note per string passages at high speed. The archetypal example of this in modern guitar playing, and also the cornerstone of Eric’s sound, is the pentatonic scale. Starting at the top of the box position, on a downstroke, produces the classic down-up sequence on each string.
And of course, the ideal mechanical system for playing this is downward pickslanting. Eric is almost exclusively a one-way pickslanter, maintaining a pronounced downward pickslant at nearly all times. This pickslant is more aggressive than Yngwie’s, such that it is easily visible even on standard definition concert footage like the classic 1988 Austin City Limits performance that forms the crux of our investigation.
Just as in Yngwie’s playing, the downward slant of the pick causes it to break free of the plane of the strings on every upstroke, so that moving to the next string of the pattern incurs functionally zero loss in efficiency or speed. But because Eric’s style emphasizes two-note- per-string patterns, string changes happen more rapidly than they do in three-note-per-string diatonic sequences. And it’s probably because of the perceived difficulty of switching strings so frequently that players have historically tended to avoid the pentatonic scale for straight-line scale playing.
And as Eric’s style so clearly demonstrates, this is a huge missed opportunity. The pentatonic scale is, by its very two-note-per-string design, perfectly efficient. That most guitarists instead focused their time on the vastly more sophisticated problem of three three-note-per- string fingerings is of course highly ironic. This is especially true considering how few players have ever succeeded in solving it.
So if the principal challenge of high-speed 2nps picking isn’t speed per se, then what is it? It’s hand synchronization. And the answer is the same one we’ve seen in Yngwie’s playing: chunking. In this case, building chunks of metrically divisible units with so few notes per string entails chunking across the strings. If we imagine a simple straight-line pentatonic scale as sixteenth note triplets, then a sensible six-note chunk is the simply the first three strings. And repeating this six-note pentatonic chunk yields a sextuplet figure that is common in Eric’s playing:
The fact that the chunk itself encompasses string changes is incidental. Don’t think about it. Downward pickslanting has already solved the problem of unnecessary stringhopping to maneuver between the strings. The primary challenge here is simply synchronizing the start time of the chunk, so that the initial downstroke and fretted note coincide.
Matching this upper sextuplet is its lower-octave counterpart:
The landmark notes in both sequences are the initial downstroke. In the upper sextuplet that’s the first note on the high E string, commonly fretted with either the pinky or, in Eric’s case, the ring finger. And in the lower octave sextuplet, it’s first note on the D string, which is the tonic or root if we’re thinking in natural minor as Eric often does. Linking the two sequences, while focusing principally on the landmark notes, produces the full six-string box position pentatonic straight-line scale with the triplet feel intact.
Are we playing a six-string scale? Yes. Are we thinking about six- string scale playing in the process? Not really. We’re simply connecting two units together, like images in a flipbook, to produce the illusion of unbroken movement. Practicing the chunks separately, until they’re repeatable without overt concentration, is how that fluidity is achieved.
Of course this entire process also works in reverse, for ascending pentatonic scales:
In this orientation, the sextuplet landmarks are the initial downstroke on the low E string, the initial downstroke on the G string, and if you like, a final landmark downstroke on the first string index finger at the end of the scale.
The ability to play 2nps sequences while ascending through the strings is critical in Eric’s vocabulary. The downward pickslant itself doesn’t care whether the pick is moving to the next higher or next lower string. Just as with Yngwie’s six-note pattern, the difference of a quarter inch in either direction does not detract from the base efficiency that dwps provides.
But even with proper chunking, the speed with which the straight-line pentatonic scale changes strings still means that the picking hand must track those string changes, like the tone arm on a turntable, pretty quickly as the lick makes its way across the neck. The feeling of needing to overtly execute this movement can be unfamiliar — again, because most patterns simply do not traverse the fretboard so fast.
We can slow down this tracking, while still maintaining high picking speed, by organizing the sextuplet chunks into overlapping units:
This cascading sextuplet pattern is a common pentatonic sequence among downward pickslanters, and occurs frequently in the vocabularies of many players who lean on one-way dwps as a core strategy. And it is a totally apt illustration of the difference between three different, yet simultaneous kinds of speed: finger speed, string-switch speed, and string-tracking speed.
The tempo of the pattern is unchanged from the straight-line pentatonic scale, so its finger speed — and of course, its picking speed — is identical. Likewise, the lick still changes strings just as frequently as the straight-line scale, so the frequency of the string changes is also identical.
But because the lick resets its travel across the fretboard every three strings, the speed of its string tracking is effectively reduced by a third. As a result, it’s easier to tackle this sequence without needing to pay overt attention to string tracking, instead letting the hand adjust subconsciously every one or two repetitions. This makes the overlapping sextuplets lick a great practice vehicle for mastering the fast parts of the fundamental pentatonic chunk — picking speed, finger speed, and string change speed — with minimal unfamiliar distraction.
Like the straight box, this process also works ascending as well:
The second foundational skill in the Eric Johnson universe turns out to be the solution to a mystery we set up long ago, in Season 1 of Cracking the Code. In Episode 6, watching Eric’s seminal Austin City limits performance for the first time, his pentatonic predilection was immediately clear. And he was certainly using two-note-per-string fingerings to satisfy it — that much was also clear from the videotape. Fingerings like these were already a challenge to execute with picking, thanks to the high rate of string change. But at least I could play them via legato, with an initial pickstroke and a pulloff on each string:
But within moments of training the SK-1 on the the licks in the performance, it became clear that something was different about Eric’s pentatonic phrasing. His sequences often contained an unusual alteration: an extra note, on a string by itself. This extra note was arbitrarily tacked on the end of an otherwise typical descending pentatonic sequence, instantly transforming an even-numbered sequence into an odd one.
Most often this was a fifth note, tacked onto the end of a sequence of four:
Repeating this five-note sequence fully picked, as it sounded like Eric was doing, was immediately problematic. The odd number of notes caused the order of the pickstrokes to flip, so that the initial pickstroke of each sequence was precisely the opposite of the one that came before it. The whole rolling sequence was a disaster of stringhopping unpredictability:
The bizarre, off-kilter feeling of attempting to navigate the flow of pickstrokes and string changes was like running an obstacle course with one bare foot and one high-heeled boot. And despite spending weeks with this, I experienced absolutely zero improvement in fluidity or accuracy.
Fast forward to the Volcano Lick. This bit of VHS spelunking revealed Yngwie’s solution for navigating the string changes of this unorthodox fretboard pattern. One of the many baffling challenges of the Volcano Lick was its inclusion of a single note, on a string by itself. This was a perplexing speed bump, and it was exactly like the challenge of the fives sequence.
As much of a mess as the Volcano Lick was to navigate with pure alternate picking, its solution was equally ingenious: sweeping. By using a downward sweep, in line with his downward pickslant, Yngwie could connect that single note effortlessly to the next higher string, and begin the pattern anew. The addition of sweeping to the downward pickslanting toolbox made possible an array of sophisticated string-switching sequences that would be challenging even for elite alternate pickers.
In this new world of Pop Tarts and downward pickslanting, it was immediately apparent that sweeping was also Eric’s solution to the fives pattern. In fact, this connection was so obvious, that I can no longer remember if I even referenced the Austin City Limits tape directly, or if I simply began instinctively translating Yngwie’s approach — which was quickly becoming second nature — straight over to Eric’s:
By simply utilizing a downward sweep to play both the fifth note of the pattern and the initial note of the next one, the final string change of the fives sequence was solved elegantly and efficiently, just like the repetitions of the Volcano Pattern. As an extrapolation of this solution, I quickly began practicing this solution across all six strings, in both directions, by linking the ascending and descending halves of the lick with a sweep at the turnaround point:
