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.

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.

Pentatonic Position V

 

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.

But this was mechanical practice, and Eric’s playing was always relentlessly musical. One reason for this was meter — or, more appropriately, the lack thereof. Though these patterns were undoubtedly chunked into units of five and six in his mind, the way they overlayed the tempo of his compositions was almost always free- time. By intentionally avoiding rhythmic cues in the underlying song, the free-fall of Eric’s descending lead lines was conceptually distant from the almost mathematical structure of Yngwie’s single-string baroque patterning, and a world away from the rigidly metronomic triplet feel of the late ’80s shred players.

Another reason was phrasing. Eric rarely played the fives pattern unadorned. Instead, he drew upon a collection of short pickups, used as lead-ins to the fives pattern:

Classic Fives

 

This ascending burst of pentatonic fanfare is like the sonic equivalent of Superman rocketing away from the phone booth. And it’s an instantly recognizable component of the lyrical Eric Johnson lead style. The initial downstroke on the D string root can be connected to the G string via sweep, or simply played as an independent downstroke with a tiny pause for dramatic effect. The next two strings of the motif, down-up on the G, and down-up on the B, lean on dwps for their efficiency. Dwps also powers the dramatic intervallic jump from the B string to the high E string. By effectively skipping one note on the way up — the index finger on the top string — Eric intensifies the upward movement of the phrase as it launches into the stratosphere.

This also means that the physical connection to the lick’s apex on the top string reuses the ring finger, by way of a barre from the final note on the B string. Separate fingers could be used, but it would be crowded. The barre is the most economical way of playing the same fret on adjacent strings, and it is almost always Eric’s fingering choice for this type of connection.

The descending side of the lick is then principally the fives pattern, exactly as we’ve seen it so far. Three repetitions of the pattern take the cycle to the D string, where Eric dispenses with the fives sequence altogether, and simply plays one repetition of the lower-octave pentatonic sextuplet chunk. Just as in the initial straight-line pentatonic scale solution, this chunk begins with a downstroke on the D string and finishes six notes later with an upstroke on the low E string. Following the chunk, Eric plants a definitive downstroke back again on the D string — skipping the A string in the process — to cap the phrase.

And thus, we have the classic fives lick. Its distinctive combination of ingredients — the pickup, the pattern, the chunk, and the cap — recurs so often in Eric’s improvisation that it is perhaps the single most representative example of his musical intentions. The lick’s trademark flow, darting quickly upward, then sequencing downward, is like climbing up a mountain, tumbling down the other side, and somehow — impossibly — landing surefooted at the bottom. Perhaps more so than any other single phrase in his lexicon, the classic fives lick perfectly encapsulates the drama and precision of the soaring Eric Johnson lead style.

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?