I stumbled upon an instagram reel that has some up close video of john shredding a bit! Interesting! USX?!?
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John… JOHN. hahaha
A lot of his pet licks are USX, so this makes sense - probably a pretty shallow escape. Really cool footage, though! And I am amused he once played a leopard-print guitar…
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“The UCMD Metal Leopard was only produced in 1989.”
It would have been illegal to make this guitar outside of the 80s, lol
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Only tangentally related, and I’ll try to watch tonight…
But while there was a lot more to Rock Dicipline than this, I remember a lot of 1-2-3-4 chromatics in there, and an arpeggio workout with string skipping which was two notes on the low E, two notes on the octave on the D, two notes on the 5th on the A, two notes on the 3rd on the G, etc etc etc.
And, on one hand if these are Petrucci’s picking exercises, the escaped upstrokes make a LOT of sense… but more broadly I don’t know if there are many technically focused rock guitarists who HAVEN’T practiced those 4nps chromatics, and if that drill isn’t responsible for the prevalence of USX in rock/metal. Or, if maybe I’m putting the cart before the horse and the real culprit is downpicking and palm muting making some sort of USX orientation more of a default, if that isn’t why the 1-2-3-4 drill got so widespread.
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I feel like I saw all footage of this dude from 2005 and back, so I’m surprised I haven’t seen this.
It reminded me to post at some point of how much I tried to make his particular thing work (pinky on pickup, pick on distal phalanx) but it just never progressed like I wanted it to.
I’m not remembering this one, but I do remember the single string skip one. I used to do that one all the time.
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Same here! Im a DSX player naturally and i could never seem to get the Petrucci like USX to work, even after consuming a bunch of content here. I can do DBX though? Hahahah. It feels like my wrist just is not comfortable going the other way, i must get the garage spikes problem or something, anything fast just like converts itself back to DSX at faster speeds.
I do keep my pinky around the pickup like John though.
Also this is my pick grip. Is this a distal phalanx grip?
I notice that it is not comfortable to pick unless the pick sticks out on a bit of an angle like this.
Indeed it is! I’m guessing this is how most people hold the pick when doing leading edge, but I actually hold it at the next bone up. I think Rusty Cooley does this as well?
Pretty sure you’re referring to the pick point, which I bring up all the time lol.
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