The cascading waterfall of sound that is Eric Johnson’s lead playing has captivated players and listeners for thirty years. Achieved through a mechanical approach nearly identical to Yngwie’s, its sonic signature nevertheless couldn’t be more different. In Yngwie’s playing, the unvarnished augmented second of the harmonic minor scale, the hard elbows of the tritone-rich diminished seventh arpeggio, and the imperial dominion of the V7 chord, all conspire to make his harmonic intent as unambiguous as Darth Vader’s red light saber.
By contrast, Eric’s approach was an almost formless wash of sunshine. Was it major? Was it minor? With no strong harmonic cues, it was hard to say. All the edges had been smoothed away. Even the distinction between scales and arpeggios seemed to blur. His patterns tumbled imperceptibly through positions, like falling through clouds. And his limitless supply of sparsely voiced diatonic chord substitutions — and the chiming echo of the alternate signal chain he employed to play them — only enhanced the vertigo.
And it was the seemingly imperturbable precision and fluidity of Eric’s right hand that made it all possible. Armed with our newfound understanding of pickslanting mechanics, it turns out to be relatively straightforward — though no less wondrous — to recreate Eric’s incredible style.
All these forms of the ascending minor arpeggio end confidently on the minor root, but their overall construction is so similar to the pentatonic scale that they can still sound good when played in major keys as well. Similarly, the minor seven chord, and its inversion, the major six chord, have such compatible sounds because they are in fact the same notes, just in a different order. So the ascending minor seven arpeggio essentially becomes a major 6 arpeggio when played over a major chord. Even its flowery alternate, the minor 9 version, can be repurposed this way. In that case, the half-step figure simply becomes a major 7 sound, and the fingering remains identical.
This transparent, ambiguously minor and major quality is a hallmark of Eric Johnson’s lead style, and almost all his cascading and arpeggiated phrases share it. Which is why, on the occasion that he chooses to step away from it, it can be so striking:
Eric’s Hendrix-inspired use of the mixolydian mode adds a boldness and spice to his lead lines, and this has a completely different personality than his pentatonic cascade. That he often plays this lines with truly blistering speed only enhances the effect. Most often, this spicy action takes place here in the box position. This is convenient, because it’s also where you’ll find the most common form of the dominant seventh chord. It’s also where you’ll find most common blues pentatonic licks, like the ones Eric himself plays. This makes it easy to remember and re-use these mixolydian ideas, because it’s an area of the fretboard you’re likely already very familiar with.
To leverage this familiarity, we can turn this mixolydian sound into an exercise with an Eric-style cascading mechanic:
Here we’ve created a cool, dominant-seven sounding ascending cascade based on a simple dominant seven shape. Following the downward pickslanting rules of upstrokes or downsweeps, the picking pattern is like a modified version of the fives sweeping pattern. The slight extra complexity here is provided by the second string of the pattern, which has three notes on it instead of the usual two. This makes the resulting almost a mix of Yngwie and Eric right-hand mechanics. A mixolydian mix, if you will.
By cycling through the same shape in three octaves, we can use strict one-way, downward pickslanting to move across all six strings. We can also do the same thing in reverse:
And like the fives pattern, we can connect them both together:
Fusing Eric’s spicy-hot mixolydian box fingerings with our mixolydian sequence, and throwing in a little bounce melody playing for good measure, results in a pretty cool take on the Johnsonian mixolydian style:
And that was about as much attention as I paid to Eric’s medium- speed stringhopping mode. Until I began to see something very strange while poking around on the Austin City Limits tape. I noticed that while playing fives patterns at speeds slightly less than maximum, the sweeps between the sequences weren’t actually sweeps at all — they were, unbelievably, stringhops:
Now this was totally bizarre. Take the standard iteration of the fives lick. The first sweep occurs on the G string, and the downstroke continues through the B string so that two notes are played with the same pickstroke. But here was Eric using two discrete picking movements to hit those notes:
A downstroke on the G string, the tiniest pause, and then another downstroke on the B string. This was the picture of inefficiency, and it made no sense why he would attempt it.
Yet everywhere I looked on the Austin City Limits performance, sure enough, there were mini-hops where I had previously assumed only sweeps existed. This tendency was more common on the higher strings, and of course, at slightly slower speeds. When the tempo increased, or when he played on the wound strings, the hops disappeared, and were replaced with sweeps. This was crazy. Why would anyone do such a thing?
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.