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.
Between the sextuplet chunking, sweep fives, bounce fives, rolling threes, and legato figures, the sheer variety of sounds that Eric could extract from a single pentatonic position was tremendous. But Eric’s explorations were only rarely constrained to a single position. More often, they fell end over end, cascading down the fretboard. It was this effortless free fall, seemingly unpredictable and yet always executed with unwavering picking accuracy, that was perhaps the most wondrous and baffling of all his feats.
Most guitar players lean nearly exclusively on the box fingering for pentatonic playing. And if you play in E, like most everyone does, this means that a vast swath of the fretboard between the 12th fret and the 4th fret goes untouched, like some kind of uncharted Mad Max wasteland. But Eric’s playing knew no such limits. His descending phrases managed a sonically invisible transition between every pentatonic position. His lines flowed from the 12th fret all the way down to the open string if he wanted, with no visible seams.
All of which is to say: there is life outside the box. And if we’re going to replicate Eric’s famous pentatonic cascade, now would be a good time to experience it.
The fifth position is notable as perhaps the one pentatonic position other than the standard box position that casual players might be familiar with. It is constructed of adjacent pairs of fretboard shapes, so it’s easy to visualize and remember. And it shares its upper notes with the box position. So it’s a convenient occasional detour for box position phrases that need to stretch their legs. In cascade phrases, the fifth position is the very first step outside the box, and it plays this critical role — especially on the middle two strings — in nearly every descending phrase Eric plays.
Position IV’s fingering shapes on the A, D, and G strings are actually the same ones found on the lowest strings of the traditional box position, just shifted over one set of strings. Like the box position, this coincides with the power chord shape in the same spot. So it’s sort of a “home away from home” for familiar box fingerings, right in the most heavily trafficked chording section of the neck. These box-like fingerings are also the direct connection to the ring-finger pentatonic root in position III. This makes the middle strings of position IV a kind of Panama Canal to the destination. Almost all cascade phrases pass directly through here.
Position III shares a comfortable mid-neck location with position IV:
Residing in the comfortable middle frets of the neck, Position III is perhaps the most important cascade destination among the five positions. The minor pentatonic root is found here, and it’s played with a ring finger fretting that makes it convenient for bending and vibrato. It is this single note that is very often the express target of phases arriving from the upper positions.
Position II of the pentatonic scale is of course important because of its physical connection to the box. In E, it’s the last stop before the open string, and it’s called upon as part of every full-fretboard cascade in that key. But it turns out to be even more critical in Eric’s vocabulary for an entirely different, and highly specific reason: it’s the one pentatonic position where many of his ascending lines happen, and we’ll see how this is done later on.
The 3-1 cascade finishes by way of ingredients we’ve now seen several times: a three-finger legato shift to the box position, a sequence of fives, and the familiar sextuplet sequence — with root note cap, of course — to finish it off.
But this isn’t Eric’s most famous 3-1 cascading phrase. That honor of course goes to the one that powers the intro to his breakout hit, Cliffs of Dover:
Like the 3-1 that we just examined, this is really two licks in one. The first half is a self-contained box position phrase at the twelfth fret that kicks off with the famous thunderous open E:
He follows the open string with the world’s juciest 15th fret bend, as well as a few melodic devices we’ve already seen: the top-string melodic sequence from the pickups, the three-note stretch on the second string that powers the legato turnaround, and some more juicy bends.
From there, the action moves down to the third position of the pentatonic scale, skipping the fifth and fourth positions entirely. The 3-1 cascade then begins with the chromatic version of the third position motif, which ends just as we’ve come to expect, with the V-I anchor notes. But rather than pause for dramatic effect, this time the lick keeps moving — and picking up speed as it goes. In fact, the anchor notes themselves become the connection between the third position and the second.
But how exactly this happens is up for debate. Whether the middle finger — the final anchor note — actually slides down the B string to the third fret, or whether the index finger simply steps in behind it, is unclear. Sliding would of course be the more Johnson-esque solution, and there is indeed a tiny change in articulation on the recording that could support a slide to the third fret:
There are also several other examples on the Austin City Limits performance which support sliding away from the “motif” on the B string, albeit not at this kind of speed. So let’s call it… inconclusive!
Regardless, once at the second position, the home stretch is fairly straightforward: two sequences of five and one sequence of four cycle the pattern down to the D string. Then the nearly universal box- position sextuplet chunk drives the phrase to its finish on the open E string. Here’s what the whole sequence looks like fretted rather than sliding:
By themselves, the components of long, sophisticated phrases like this are relatively straightforward to execute. The picking patterns are already designed to be fast and efficient. And guitar fingerings don’t get much simpler than two pentatonic notes on a string. But burning these building blocks into long-term memory, so they can be linked like this on the fly, will take time. The broad similarity of most of Eric’s descending playing is the hint: these lines are simply not that different from one another. And many contain entire chains of identical phrases. What this means is that, while these lines appear spontaneous, it’s a bit of an illusion. The linking is, for the most part, memorized — burned in by rote as a result of years of repetition. This is how habits are formed, and how styles are built. Simply incorporating these fundamental patterns into everyday playing and composition, with no particular emphasis on speed, and no particular deadline for mastery, is how that burn-in happens.