The classic fives pickup is just one of a handful of interesting variations on the pickup concept. Here’s another that uses a short diatonic melody at the top of the lick:

Maj7 Pickup

 

This brief diatonic melody, neatly embedded with the classic fives lick, is a dash of seasoning that evokes either major seventh or minor ninth flavors, depending on whether the lick is played against a major or minor backdrop. It’s the same fingering either way, of course — it’s simply the surrounding musical context that changes. This tabula rasa quality of Eric’s harmonic sensibility, ambiguously major or natural minor, and nearly always “inside” the key signature, is a hallmark of his improvisational style.

Here’s a similar mechanical sequence in the neighboring pentatonic position just to the left of the box position:

Fifth Position Pickup

 

In this variation, the turnaround at the apex is entirely pentatonic, and requires a larger fretboard stretch to outline the minor third at the top. We can apply the pattern of fives to the lick’s descending side, such that we arrive at the sixth string on a downstroke.

Yet another variation employs legato as part of the diatonic apex melody:

Melodic Legato Pickup

 

Now this is interesting, because at first glance, the pull-off would seem to be redundant. The top string of this variation has four notes, which could very simply be solved with pure alternate picking: down, up, down, up. And yet, the pull-off between the second and third note effectively omits a pickstroke. This requires Eric to return with a single upstroke for the final note on the string, to activate the dwps efficiency. It works. But it also seems like too much work. What’s going on here?

Sometimes, picking patterns exist in a player’s vocabulary not specifically because they are necessary in a given situation, but because they were originally necessary somewhere else. And to find out what the situation was that may have originally required this particular combination of picking and legato, we need to look on a whole different string:

Legato Turnaround

 

Now this makes more sense. Here’s an interesting phrase that recurs frequently in Eric’s box-position soloing that allows him to quickly reverse the melodic flow of lick by using a pulloff. In this instance, the pulloff is necessary because the number of notes on the B string requires it. Starting on a downstroke, and using pure alternate picking to play five notes on the B string would of course terminate on a downstroke. And that’s no good if we’re a downward pickslanter. But a single pulloff fixes all that, forcing the last pickstroke to be an upstroke, creating a solution that works in all cases.

And it also seems somewhat… familiar. Where have we seen this technique of forcing upstrokes with legato before? Of course. We may not be playing the harmonic minor scale, here but the concept is identical. Yngwie uses strategic pulloffs in descending 3nps scale runs to force upstrokes on strings that would otherwise have three picked notes. Eric is simply doing it here with five notes on a string.

Or is he? If we look at the patterning involved, the first two notes on the B string are really just a continuation of the sweep fives sequence. So in reality, it’s only the last three notes on the string that form a unit — a chunk, if you will — that requires the pulloff escape hatch. And the fingering supports this. That longer stretch to reach for a third pentatonic note on the B string is simply not very common in Eric’s playing. It seems clear that this somewhat atypical fingering choice was the original catalyst for the legato escape hatch. The resulting pattern is interesting directional twist that Eric often uses for variety in box-position improvisation.

So the “escape hatch” sequence we’ve come to understand in Yngwie’s playing — down, up, pulloff — turns out to be instrumental in several cases within Eric’s vocabulary as well. In fact, going one step further, it’s not even really an Yngwie or an Eric thing: it’s a downward pickslanting thing. In any primarily one-way downward pickslanting style dependent on upstroke string switching, we are very likely to also see the use of pulloffs to force upstrokes, as a way of expanding the variety of fast string changes that are possible. And very often, those pulloffs will occur at the end of three-note sequences that start on downstrokes.

In fact, given its fundamental role in one-way dwps strategies, it’s worth turning this concept into a bit of an Eric-sounding exercise by repeating it across the strings the same way we did with the fives lick:

Legato Turnaround Exercise

 

I had spent so much time thinking about Yngwie’s technique and unraveling his downward pickslanting secrets, that by the time I turned my attention to Eric, the source of the efficiency in his fastest playing was plain as day. The two-note-per-string organization, the switching strings after upstrokes, the sweeping on downstrokes, the triplet chunking across strings — it was all immediately obvious. But at the same time, what was also immediately obvious, is that Eric wasn’t always concerned with being efficient:

Melodic Mode

 

When Eric wasn’t painting light-speed pentatonic soundscapes, he was playing elegant slow-speed melodies in an almost contrapuntal fashion. In Eric’s “melodic mode”, bass notes on lower strings alternated with melody notes on higher strings to outline hollow chord voicings. These were frequently tenths, like you’d play on a piano, with a perfect fifth in the bass and a major third on top to flesh out the chord color. These tenth fingerings were most often based on the two most common barre chord shapes, on the sixth string:

Bounce Tenth - Amaj 6str

 

…and on the fifth:

Bounce Tenth - Amaj 5str

 

And I could see very clearly, without even freeze-framing the Austin City Limits footage, that he was doing all this with repeated pickstrokes using a decidedly inefficient and all-too-familiar jumping motion from string to string: stringhopping.

And this made some kind of sense. Because these hollow voicings were essentially chord shapes with the notes fretted individually, and a skipped string in between. This meant that none of the efficient high- speed techniques would work. Sure, in the Yngwie system, a single note on a string by itself could be played with an upstroke, landing you quickly on the next string of your choosing. But that was it — you could only use that gambit once. As soon as you landed on a string with a downstroke, you’d have to play at least two notes on that string if you wanted to continue using alternate picking to change strings.

But here, Eric was playing strictly one note on a string for the most part. And this meant that there was simply no way out. Considering he wasn’t playing super fast, the choice of simply repeating pickstrokes was probably just conceptually simpler. Why bother with alternate picking at all if the speed wasn’t likely to be a factor in the first place? The mechanical penalty of stringhopping would hobble any slight efficiency gains anyway. Instead, it was probably easier just to repeat the same pickstrokes, and make sure not to hit the wrong strings while you’re doing it.