Wait heres another video, it feels much better in this one. I think im getting a feel for it
I think you have a decent start. It isn’t quite fast enough to rule out string hopping/inefficiency but nothing about it looks like string hopping to me.
2 big recommendations:
Plug in. Pick attack is critical with all motions and you can’t necessarily monitor that on an unplugged electric.
Ditch the moving left hand and start with something where you are just holding down chords. It’s a very challenging motion to learn and worrying about fretting notes can distract you.
I found a motion that could go above 16ths at 120 bpm in about a week’s time using that approach. I wrote a lot about it here.
As you get faster with it, keep in mind you are going to have some swipes. It isn’t a bad thing it’s just what’s bound to happen when you get into the 150’s - 160’s using a wrist based dbx motion like you are doing. I have watched TONS of footage on the platform of crosspicking at those speeds and everyone who does the wrist based approach similar to yours swipes some (or even a lot). Watch Andy Wood or Steve Morse play Tumeni notes in their interviews and you’ll see plenty of swiping. Yet they both sound…AWESOME. I think it’s much better to
have some swipes than to be stuck in string hopping land though 
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@murphy_5150 looks like crosspicking, I’d say you’re on the right track.
I’m gonna disagree with this, from my experience. Part of cleaning up crosspicking IMO is timing the muting of strings, which is a combination of both hands.
My recommendation would be isolating groups of 2 notes / strings and do “bursts” at the highest speed you can that is decently clean / with good technique. Practice different groupings of a phrase, and as you get more comfortable, try to make the bursts longer / with more strings.
Here’s an example:
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I was about to say “but Univeral Mind is not a crosspicking tune, it’s mixed escape, which is very different”. The way you play that tag at then is indeed a crosspicking candidate though. Pretty sure Petrucci plays that part with stretches on the E/B string.
I guess this depends on if we’re talking about crosspicking or mixed escape. I agree mixed escape is more of a “coordination” and maybe that makes sense to include fretting, since as you mentioned muting is critical. He asked about crosspicking though and to me that’s more the bluegrass technique where the pick strokes are all slightly curved. If that’s the goal, I think fretting is a distraction.
I know we may be splitting hairs but I don’t think I’ve seen you do much crosspicking (dbx) by that definition. I think you are a (very good!) mixed escape player who plays a lot of things that could be played with dbx.
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This actually does work better for me! Im glad i found someone that agrees with me. I have noticed (atleast with the way i learn) is going full speed right away hasnt seemed to work all that well for me. I have been practicing this motion the past hour while picking the Serrana arpeggios and have been increasing my speed 5bpm every so often and it is feeling so much cleaner and less awkward than what i was doing. Going full speed right off the bat sometimes seems to really get me frustrated, and i tend to lose focus. (ADHD) lol but i appreciate anyones advice on practicing its always nice to try different methods.
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Thank you! Yes its nice noticing now what motions i am using and how to apply. Thanks for the tips!
hahaha Awesome job to the original poster. Looks and sounds pretty good, BUT…
If you really want to know if it’s hopping or successful string escapes, here’s what I learned;
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Higher framerate on the video (Trust me on this - It helps a ton to be able to see what’s going on in high-fi…)
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Faster tempo. For me, the hopping threshold starts crossing over around 16ths @ 120bpm. And if I CAN hop, I WILL! lol It works perfectly at that lower tempo and that’s exactly the problem. So it has to be 130-140bpm for it to cross OUT of that hopping threshold for me!) Ask me how I know…
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Plug in. Play loud.
One last tip, and this is important - if anything you play feels fatigue inducing, it’s wrong. Don’t keep working on it hoping it will morph into something efficient. Start intentionally altering things about the technique until you stumble upon something that feels easy.
Yup, I don’t like the stretch for that part, so the reworked fingering is crosspicked.
This is definitely a bit beyond me, so I’ll defer to you as to how this applies to the different mechanics.
Good to know, I don’t think I’ve seen other people work on chunking this way on the forum (or anywhere else).
I think this is sometimes lost on the forum. Everyone is different; not only anatomically, but technique, mental bandwidth, etc. Not only will everyone’s practice approach be unique, but being able to rotate beween different modalities will keep things stimulating.
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Yeah - this. Well said.
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Funny just a few days ago I started working on Universal Mind, for the express purpose of improving my mixed escape technique. That ending stretch definitely sucks. Maybe I’ll steal your approach there 
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This looks pretty good!
General comment, it sounds like you’re asking if you’re making a double escape picking motion. I try not to use the term “crosspicking” to describe joint motion any more to avoid confusion with the bluegrass usage of the term. Any phrase with one note on a string is a crosspicking phrase. You’re probably asking more about the joint motions you are using to play it and whether they are double escape. I know we’ve used crosspicking as mechanical term in the past — that’s our fault. We’re pretty consistent on the term “double escape” to describe the joint motion nowadays.
So, is your motion double escape? Yes, it’s easily visible in these clips. Is it efficient? I don’t know, you need to test by going faster. If you physically can’t move your joint faster, then it’s probably not efficient. If you can, then it’s got potential. Note that we don’t care as much about correct notes or whether you feel absolute lack of resistance from the strings. If you hit wrong notes you may indeed feel resistance. So obviously, within reason, I’m just saying, go fast enough so that we know it actually can speed up, not go fast and get every note right with perfect smoothness.
The other thing we want to avoid wasting time on are motions that won’t maintain their form when speeding up, and instead revert to simpler motions as you get faster — like two-way pickslanting motions that end up missing certain notes because the arm is trying to turn the phrase into a flip-flopped sequence of DSX and USX joint motions. There may always be some of this, but for someone with wrist technique like yourself there still needs to be DBX pickstrokes happening or some notes will likely get missed.
Basically, we don’t need to do this all day. We just want to film the motion close up a couple times once in a while to see what it’s doing. If the escape is correct, but it’s just aimed wrong and hitting the strings, and feels weird, then you’re good to slow down a little and make it feel easier, smoother, more accurate, etc. If you’ve already done that step and that’s why you’ve reverted to a slower speed already, then that’s fine too. Keep on keeping on.
To put this another way, it’s hard to fix a problem that’s not happening. To know how to avoid the issue when it occurs, you have to actually experience it, and then do something that makes it go away. That’s the only way I’ve found to know, by feel, that what I’m doing is the technique I want versus the one I don’t.
Note, again, that you can’t always tell by listening whether the motion is actually correct. Without looking at the motions themselves in the speed range where you ultimately want to be, you’re kind of flying blind.
The only thing I’ll say about the bursts is that we get videos of people doing this, where they do little phrase nuggets over and over. And the 10th “bursted” attempt very typically looks the same as the first when you slow it down and look at the motions. If there was a problem happening on the first attempt, it’s usually still there. Why? Not sure, but my guess is it’s hard to feel what’s going on when the playing is so short. If you can’t tell any different between the attempts, then you can’t zero in on new and better motions.
A better result is when you see actual motion change across the bursts, where some of the bursts make a different motion than others. The problem there is when the player can’t tell this is happening, so there is no movement toward the more correct motions over time. They just keep “bursting” randomly and never converging on the new / better motion.
The way to know is to film and look. If all the bursts look the same, then no learning is happening. If the bursts all look randomly different and don’t converge on the desired motion over time, then no learning is happening. BUT, maybe you can see the bursts with the better motions and somehow encourage more of those — maybe be doing a slightly longer phrase, where you can make a more sustained attempt to get the motion to be the one you want.
Generally, for a thing to BE different, it has to FEEL different in some way. That’s the only way your motor system can tell it’s right. If it doesn’t feel different, it probably isn’t different!
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Thanks Troy for the great response and advice! After working at this for quite a bit today I seem to be able to get some smooth lines where it feels great and then ones where it doesnt feel so good. But man when I get it right its pretty special to be able to hit one note per string and feel no awkwardness after being a “even note phrase” single escape player for a long time. However I cant seem to find too much information on this motion and best ways to go about practicing it before I just get discouraged. Do you think you will do a more in depth analysis on this or am I missing something on the website? Do you recommend I keep up with 5 string arpeggios? Thanks for all you do here and for your response!
FWIW, when I started trying to do the DBX motion, I think I had sort of a burst/forward chaining approach. I knew that I didn’t know how to do the motion yet, but I figured I could probably do just 2 strings of it pretty fast. Once that felt good I added a 3rd string, then a 4th, then started coming back down (it was a four string chord I was just playing ascending/descending like you do in your Crosspicking Etude). Now, I was definitely mindful of a feedback loop though. I wasn’t just repping out, hoping things would get better. Each rep I tried to think about how it felt and I was looking for a smoothness. Right or wrong, I found the motion in just about a week. We’ve all seen our share of “frustrated DBX attempts” threads over the years. Some people really do get stuck on it for months/years. So I had to have done something that worked , right?
Curious to see what Troy says on this. I intentionally kept to 3 or 4 strings when I was learning the motion. A huge part of DBX is the tracking element and the fewer strings you have to worry about adjusting tracking, the easier it is to focus on the motion itself. And in wrist DBX like you’re doing, 3 or 4 strings should be accessible without having to move to some other “notch” in the tracking. Maybe I’m wrong and this is a crutch?
E & G:
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Oops sorry I did actually mean E and G. That’s how I’ve been playing it. Thanks for pointing that out.
What you are trying to learn here is not really a single motion, and it’s not even how to play arpeggios or do crosspicking. I get that it can seem that way if you were a single escape player before.
Instead, what you are trying to learn is what we, for lack of a better name, are calling double escape wrist technique. This is a technique where mostly only the hand moves, and plays whatever notes you are trying to play with only occasional involvement from other joints.
The way this works is that there is not a single type of motion that you will always make all the time. What we see when we film wrist players is that the exact motions the wrist (i.e. hand) makes may be slightly different based on the phrase you’re trying to play. For example, in one common recipe it is often a mix of DSX and DBX pickstrokes, in somewhat idiosyncratic combinations. When all these combinations are eventually memorized, the technique then works for playing any kind of phrase with pure alternate picking with no modiciation of the overall form. You may see bits of two way pickslanting as in @Pepepicks66 's awesome technique, so it can get complicated and this is an oversimplification. But we can go with that since it accurately describes what you will be trying to do, regardless of what it ends up looking like in the end result.
The differences in all the motion combinations will be slight and not easily discernible by feel especially at first. So for example if you watch Andy Wood play ascending sixes, you can see that at slow speeds the motion is double escape, but as he speeds up he eventually arrives at a 5+1 type mix of DSX + DBX pickstrokes:
Can he tell that this is what is happening? Probably not. But when you do this fast and film it, this is one of the common combinations you will see. And you can only learn it by playing the phrase.
If you were to try this and film yourself, and you see all dbx pickstrokes at medium speed and 5+1 when going fast, then you know it’s one of the ways that will work. It doesn’t matter at first if the accuracy is a little off because you aimed at the wrong string. And it doesn’t matter how smooth it feels because of hitting wrong notes. You just want to be making the right escape motions at the right speed.
By comparison if you film this, speeding up like Andy is doing, and you see the motion go from dbx to only dsx, with displacement or swiping, where no dbx pickstrokes are present in the line when going fast, then aha - you know it’s not exactly what you want. No amount of “working up to speed” or “bursting” is going to fix that. The solution is to keep trying slight variations in your overall form and motion at the target speed until your hand does the desired escape combination even if the notes are wrong because your aim is a little off. Once you get correct escapes, you can slow down a little and aim more correctly.
As you can see this is very brass tacks and I don’t like to overthink things. I’m a testing and filming person. Play the line, film it, and look. Is the escape correct? If so, move to the next step.
Don’t only do arpeggios unless you only want to learn to play arpeggios. You can’t learn all these weird combinations by playing one type of phrase. Personally I think the sixes line is a good starting point since it’s outside picking and almost everyone can do it immediately on the first set of attempts. Or if they can’t, they will see obviously why — because it’s just single escape and they’re not doing the motion combinations thing.
A lot of the hand-wringing and magical thinking about “finding a motion” I think just comes from not playing basic phrases and looking to see what is actually happening with the motions. If you just play random stuff and hear what sounds like mistakes and get upset, then you’re not really doing the work.
In your case, @murphy_5150 your motions look good. I would just try playing a bunch of different phrases — and not just arpeggio phrases — at the target speed and looking at the escapes. Are they ones that would get over the strings as you intended if aimed correctly, i.e. whether or not the aiming is currently correct? If so, you’re good! No more worrying about whether you’re doing the correct technique, you can just working on cleaning it up.
You may get different results on different phrases because again, the motion combinations are all different. That’s why pure alternate wrist takes longer to learn than other styles, becauase you have to learn more motion combinations. But at least with a camera you have a way of knowing, categorically without doubt, whether you are doing things right or not.
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Troy thank you! After reading over that ive decided to give the 6’s pattern a shot. Here is some of the ascending 6’s pattern. Feels and looks i think pretty good here. If i try some arpeggios i see what you mean about different phrases requiring different motions, they feel much different/harder than the ascending 6’s pattern. Back to work on it i guess. Also not sure why my Iphone is uploading these videos in horrible quality. My apologies.
Thanks for filming! In general this looks solid in the bigger picture — looks like reverse dart form, and looks fast. However it looks like there are some occasional fits and starts in the motion. Maybe due to pick attack and getting hung on up certain strings. Edit: I think there are some hand sync or displacement type issues where the DUD-UDU structure is not being maintained on each try, and that’s why it sounds uneven. This should be easy to see with slow motion video and good lighting. It should also be relatively easy to fix.
We also can’t tell from this vantage point what the escapes are or whether they are the ones you want for double escape moving forward. Again, something the well-lit slow motion video will reveal in short order.
If you want to do a platform TC on this, we’re happy to take a closer look. If so, follow the instructions here for getting the best footage, Magnet or not:
Nice work so far!
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