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.

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:

Mixolydian Box

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:

Mixolydian 3oct Sequence - Asc

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:

Mixolydian 3oct Sequence - Desc

And like the fives pattern, we can connect them both together:

Mixolydian 3oct Sequence - Asc-Desc

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:

Mixolydian Medley

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:

Bounce Fives

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:

Bounce Fives Chunk

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?