Pickslanting is the practice of orienting the pick perpendicular to its direction of motion, so that pick attack is smooth.

By now we’re starting to become comfortable with the amazing fact that picking motions don’t only move back and forth. Most picking motions actually move diagonally or in a semicircle. When this happens, the process of pickslanting produces a corresponding angled orientation of the pick so that its attack can remain symmetrical between downstrokes and upstrokes despite the angled nature of the motion path.

In this section we’ll see what pickslanting looks like and how it’s achieved with different types of picking motion.