What's the deal with string skipping?

Do most of you shredders use string skipping?
Is this a way of playing fast like sweep picking? It seems to me that it would be harder
to play fast while string skipping. Can someone shed some light on this subject?

Thanks.

Yeah it is harder to play fast using string skipping, but if you're just going for speed then play nothing but C major up and down. If you want to make music, then trying to introduce string skipping ideas can add wider interval interval jumps and hopefully make your lines mores interesting. Being able to play string skipping lines (especially ones that aren't just simple pedal tone things) can add a different flavor, and if you are going to be playing shred, where it's more about the overall sound that a guitar part creates, rather than traditional melodies, well wide interval lines sound different from scalar runs, and different from sweeped lines, make sense?

I use a lot of string skipping when I shred. However, I also employ a hybrid style of picking in conjunction with that so that it makes really wide interval leaps possible with very little effort. Now hybrid style shredding is pretty odd I'll admit but the results are pretty cool if I say so myself ;) You can check out some stuff on this at

http://shredlikehell.com

look in the blueprints section

String skipping is nothing new, its use varies depending on the type of music it is applied in. In the shred realm, I use it as more of a flashy way to break up the scalular up and down whole-step tonality of a scale. The ony thing hard about it (as with all shredding concepts) is doing it CLEANLY. If its not done cleanly, dont do it.

Ok, guys. Thanks. That was very helpful.