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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