As it happens, in the years since the Austin City Limits performance, Eric released a pair of successful instructional videos through Hot Licks — Total Guitar, and The Fine Art of Guitar. Apart from Steve Vai or Joe Satriani, Eric was among perhaps the most mass-market names in virtuoso guitar. And so these videos became instant best- sellers on the instructional shelves of music stores everywhere.
In a widely disseminated passage on Total Guitar, Eric discusses his approach to picking technique. And despite his renown as a paragon of speed and fluidity, he begins, ironically, with a description of his use of stringhopping:
“One technique that’s very essential to me, playing with a pick, is what I call the ‘bounce’ technique. It’s where, actually, it improves the tone, I think. It’s achieved by the correct up and downstrokes, rather than playing side-by-side. It’s a question of… You’re actually going from the pickguard up [imitates angled picking motion]. So you’re brushing the string. And the idea of the bounce comes in when you’re playing fast [plays the fives sequence].”
In one nearly impenetrable paragraph, Eric manages to conflate just about every fundamental technique in picking mechanics into one mega-concept, where stringhopping (“the bounce”) equals downward pickslanting (“from the pickguard up”) equals edge picking (“it improves the tone… brushing the string”) equals high-speed string- switching efficiency (“comes in when you’re playing fast”).
Of course none of this was strictly logical — edge picking had nothing to do with downward pickslanting. They were two different pick angles. Edge picking altered the part of the pick that contacted the string, to promote smoother sliding over the string during the pickstroke, and also for tonal control. And pickslanting changed the trajectory of the pickstroke itself, causing it to move out of the plane of the strings — “from the pickguard up”, as Eric correctly put it.
And most paradoxically of all, the bounce technique didn’t “come in when you’re playing fast” — it was actually the exact opposite of that. It went away when he was playing fast. And the lick he played to demonstrate this — the familiar fives sequence — was nothing if not a perfect example of exactly this disappearance in action.
But, in a weird way, things were also starting to make sense. What was the difference between the obvious stringhopping of the “bounce” technique, and the hyper efficiency of sweeping, in Eric’s playing? Well come to think of it, I had never actually heard Eric use the term “sweeping”, or “economy picking”, or anything similar. Not in interviews, or on either of these quite extensive instructional videos, for that matter. Maybe what he was really telling us here is that there was no difference in his mind between the various ways he moved from one string to another.
In fact, for all I knew, Eric might not have even been aware he was using sweeping at all. As far as Eric was concerned, it may very well be that he thinks he’s always using repeated pickstrokes, and doesn’t realize that his trademark light-speed fluidity is attained precisely by eliminating them. This is really the only reason I could think of to explain why anyone would even try to maintain stringhopping at breakneck soloing speeds — especially when the alternative was not only easier, but something you were practically already doing in the first place.
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.
And this was a rather amazing possibility. Even Yngwie, who is famously unconcerned with micromanaging the details of his picking technique, acknowledges that he uses a combination of alternate picking and sweeping to power his more intricate playing. But watching the nearly seamless transition from repeated pickstrokes to sweeping happen right there on the Austin City Limits tape — it was almost like watching dinosaurs learn how to fly. Early feathered lizards may have jumped off trees or cliffs to get airborne. At some point, generations later, they abandoned the concept of launching altogether and just began flapping right off the ground. If the bounce technique was the launch, then sweeping was the flap.
For all the agglomeration of concepts in the now-famous Total Guitar “bounce technique” scene, it is amazing that all the key ingredients were indeed right there. Inscrutable as it may have seemed to a generation of guitarists trying to parse his phrasing, here we had an elite player, on videotape, actually describing his use of downward pickslanting and the power of the upstroke string change.
As if this weren’t enough, on The Fine Art of Guitar, he went even further:
“The type of picking I like to do is where you pick up, away from the pickguard. Now with this technique, I’ve been trying to add… usually my style was to pick up, as you can see here, with the side of the pick, right here picking up [plays exaggerated dwps upstroke], and then I would follow that with any downstrokes, just typical downstrokes that go straight across sideways. So that the kind of, a new version I’m trying to do is to where I can do a mirror image downstroke of the upstroke. So the upstroke picks up, and the downstroke picks up with the opposite side of the pick. This is a technique I’m trying to work on right now so that I can free myself to use either an up or downstroke depending on the passage.”
So let’s get this straight. His picking style, which he reminds us he has already described in the first video, is where he picks up, away from the pickguard. Yes, precisely — downward pickslanting. But he’s currently not free to use any old sequence of downstrokes and upstrokes, because his upstrokes go up, you see, and his downstrokes go sideways. Well, they really don’t — they’re downward pickslanting downstrokes, angled the same way as his upstrokes, just moving in the opposite direction. But we know what he means — he means they’re buried in the strings.
But if he could make his downstrokes be like his upstrokes, so that they also went up, just in the opposite direction, then he could free himself from having to… to do what? To only switch strings after upstrokes, of course. If he could just figure out how to make those downstrokes not go what he perceives as sideways, then his downstrokes could also, just like his upstrokes, break free from the plane of the strings. And if he could do that, well, then he’d have figured out something he knows would be incredibly powerful and liberating: two-way pickslanting.
Amazing. Here Eric is describing, in roundabout fashion but in unmistakable detail, the central limitation of any one-way pickslanting strategy, as well as its actual solution. He plays a demonstration of what two-way pickslanting might look like, with wide swinging downstrokes and wide swinging upstrokes that are essentially, stringhopping. This broadly mirrors the brute-force attempt that most players make when trying to solve this problem. So in other words, this isn’t going to work. And he knows it, because he then notes, again precisely, that he’s still working on the technique and that it’s not yet ready for prime time. You can practically see the gears turning. He’s not sure how to make it work, but he can tell that the swinging approach is not it.
And that is the difference between genius and the rest of us. Eric got it — all of it — including the technique he had, and the technique he had yet to find. Had either of these two passages been stated with just a bit more clarity, the entire enterprise of picking technique could have been revolutionized in 1989.
