Andy G Jones examines how Eric Johnson likes to combine economy picking with legato Pentatonics to create beautiful streams of notes.
This month’s column continues our investigation of the use of sextuplet rhythms. This time we explore economy picking and position shifting. Both of these techniques constitute a huge part of the great Eric Johnson’s technique. Don’t worry! We won’t go for the blazing speed that Eric is known for, plus many of these lines rely on the Minor Pentatonic scale.
However, I thought I’d push the envelope a little by being a bit more adventurous with the last two examples. In these I’ll combine classic Blues scale and Minor Pentatonic ideas with the Half-Whole Diminished scale over a D7 chord. The notes of this scale are D-Eb-F-F#-G#-A-B. Notably, this scale gives us the flat AND sharp 9ths with the Major 3rd and the #11. With experimentation, you will note that any pattern of notes within this scale can be moved up or down by Minor 3rd intervals (three frets at a time) and it will still be within the scale.
This sound is more evocative of players like John Scofield and Scott Henderson. And this scale if used over a D7 chord would be really useful if you want to create tension before resolving to a rather more consonant G or G Major 7th.
Economy picking is simply where you can choose to stroke the pick from one string to the next (See Fundamental Changes article). This can work with an upstroke or a downstroke, and this approach can make crossing from one string to another much easier. Most devotees of this approach tend to freely mix it with alternate picking and sweep picking (where you ‘sweep’ the pick over more than two adjacent strings).
Much has been written about pick slanting. This is where you angle the pick up slightly. This can be very effective with economy picking, but aim to avoid letting the pick move wi
