Hello everyone! My name is Aldo and this is my first post on the forum. I’ve been lurking here for a while now, but the reason I’m just making a post now is because just an hour ago, I gained the ability to do a USX tremolo smoothly. I am a natural DSX wrist player and I was happy just being a DSX player so finding out I can now perform USX came as a shock to me. Luckily, I do have an idea on how I ended up learning USX so hopefully this post can help out anyone who wishes to learn USX themselves. To start off Here is a video of my new USX technique (I don’t own a magnet so bear with me here haha):
Here is a better view of it as well:
Here’s a video of my natural DSX picking as well:
And lastly, here’s a comparison of the two:
So how I ended up learning USX tremolo actually came from me wanting to learn Yngwie’s Rising Force, which as we know is entirely USX. But I didn’t want to play it with USX because DSX has always been my main technique, and in the past, whenever I tried to do USX tremolo, it would always feel stiff to me and I could never get it to be as smooth and fast as my DSX technique. So instead, I just decided to use USX for the two-string arpeggios as they were just simple sweeps, and then I’d just translate the rest of the solo to DSX. So I begin practicing the two string arpeggios and I quickly realize just how fast and precise Yngwie actually does these and I wasn’t able to consistently play them anywhere near the original speed. Thankfully, I was scrolling through youtube and ended up finding this video:
The original video is in Japanese, but youtube auto translated it into english. It was made by somebody who was also struggling with the Rising Force arpeggios, but they had ended up finding a solution for it, which was pretty much doing a speed burst, starting quickly with the downstroke to upstroke to pull off on the e string and then hitting the b string and stopping with a rest stroke. This was actually a pretty helpful exercise for me and though I still haven’t mastered Rising Force completely yet, I’m much closer to it than before. Here is a video of me performing this exercise (Note: I am not actually doing the pull-off here and instead making it a pure USX lick)
When I started practicing Rising Force today however, I noticed something felt a little different when I hit the high e string. I started picking it slightly faster until I realized I was performing a full USX tremolo. I was caught off guard because I was just practicing sweeping with USX motion and I never tried practicing a USX tremolo once. It is only now that I realize that practicing the Rising Force lick was actually improving my USX technique without me noticing any change at all. Now that I think about it, it is actually quite an efficient way of practicing USX as well, because you are pretty much just practicing escaping from an upstroke to a downstroke with the pull-off giving you extra time to get ready to hit the next string. I immediately started trying out my new motion and it actually scared me how much progress I got with it in just a few minutes. By the time I was done with it, my max tremolo speed with USX ended up rivaling my max tremolo speed with DSX. I’m actually not sure what to do from here now. I actually wanted to gain a helper motion for my DSX instead, but I suppose USX should be able to help me with that as well. To anyone attempting to learn USX themselves, I hope you find this Rising Force exercise to be as helpful as I found it. Don’t worry, it doesn’t take that long to get a grip on!