Just noticing you have the terms switched up in this post and in your first video at 0:13. When the the tip of the pick points upwards and the wide part of the pick DOWNwards, you are downward pickslanting, this facilitates the UPstroke escape path (USX). Where the pick is burried in the strings on a downstroke and lifted out of the strings after an upstroke.
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K, thanks! So, the slanting refers to the wide part of the pick, right? I get confused with the UPX, DPS, etc. Downward slant = upward escape, correct?
That’s right. You got it now.
UPX is not the abbreviation though. It’s USX (upstroke escape). And DWPS (downward pickslanting).
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Haha, told ya I was confused! 
Thanks for straightening me out! 
ok, so here’s another video of me trying to use only wrist motion…and clearly struggling. I’m not exactly clear what I’m doing wrong, tho. Could someone please point out my problem…or problems? TIA!
Great playing, and thanks for posting. I believe I just replied to your previous post with some clarification on the terms, but I didn’t realize you were working on bluegrass stuff. Sorry again for the delay.
Basically, in the world of wrist motion, you’ve got three options for picking motion. Two are diagonal, and one is semicircular. The two diagonal ones are USX and DSX, and they refer to motions where the pick only goes up in the air at one end of the motion, either upstroke or downstroke. Those are your “pickslanting” motions, for lack of a better term.
The semicircular one is DBX, which stands for double escape. This is where the pick goes up in the air at both ends of the pickstroke. This is the one you want for bluegrass.
The caveat is that some players, like David Grier, switch systems when they speed up, where instead of the DBX motion, they actually do use the two pickslanting motions, flipping between them as the phrase requires. They’re usually not aware they’re doing this, so at some level they start doing it automatically. For our purposes, let’s just ignore that this happens, and instead start off by trying to learn the DBX motion which is I think how most bluegrass players start.
The good news is that thanks to your tests, we already know that you have plenty of physical capability to do what you want at tempos that are fast enough to sound great. Speed is not the issue. The issue is that when you try to do these multi-string phrases, you’re stringhopping, which is that small vertical, bouncy motion of the picking hand.
As part of this, as @Tommo points out, your picking motion on a single string is very small and the pick is cutting off the sound of the notes before they have a chance to ring out. To give them that chance we need to make a bigger motion. Or more appropriately, a smoother more fluid motion with less bounce which will probably take care of both these issues.
The way I learned to do this technique is via roll patterns, because they move across three strings in distance. This will address the distance problem Tommo is talking about. The key is that the only way to know if you’re in the ballpark of doing the motion correctly is if you can do it smoothly at medium-fast tempos or better, let’s say 120bpm sixteenths or so. That’s the only reliable test for avoiding stringhopping motion.
When done correctly, DBX motion in the Molly Tuttle style is very flat. This is why it’s fast. So what I’d like you to do is fret a three string chord on the top three strings and try a forward roll pattern. However, instead of super focusing on playing the three individual notes in the roll pattern, focus on making a three-string-sized picking motion that is almost flat to the strings. Don’t worry about hitting the wrong strings. Only make a low effort at accuracy. Put the emphasis on feeling flat, fluid, and fast.
As you do this, you can rest the heel of your palm lightly on the bridge. In the interest of learning wrist motion, all motion should come from the hand. You should still easily be able to reach a three-string distance, even with only wrist motion. If you notice the guitar shaking, or your upper arm or shoulder moving around, then you’re moving something other than the wrist. Experiment and see if you can zero in on the feeling of the hand itself moving. It’s a low-effort feeling, where muscles in your forearm and upper arm don’t do much, and the actual weight of the hand moving around is minimal. Finding this feeling can be a little like learning to raise one eyebrow, i.e. learning to target a thing you haven’t learned to target before.
Can you do that in way that feels smooth and at least 120bpm sixteenths?
As for what kind of motion to make, I’ll make a bluegrass-appropriate analogy: You can almost imagine your hand is a bird flying low over the top of a lake, trying not to hit the water, but trying to get as close as you can to it where you can almost dip a toe in as necessary. That’s the flatness we’re looking for.
Also, I’ve heard it suggested that players start out by strumming three strings, and while I haven’t tested that suggestion, I’m a little skeptical. A strum intentionally dips the toe in the water all the time, keeping it below the water level. And since many people already know how to do this, doing it repetitively might not really be teaching you anything new. Instead, we want the ability to dip in and out of the water as necessary. Again, I can’t say for sure that the strum method won’t work, it’s just my guess that it might not. If you try it and it works, then we learn something!
Don’t worry about pickslanting as you do this. DBX motion uses no pickslant. It does use escape motion, just not any change in the pick’s orientation.
Try this and see how far you get!
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Again, thank you, very much! This gives me hope! One question, tho…by roll pattern, do you mean an alternating crosspicking pattern?(i.e. ds/us/ds/us, etc.)
Sorry, I’m in deep with this bluegrass stuff! The forward roll is when you play a three note arpeggio, but only ascending:
Sometimes players will add a couple notes onto the end to make it fit neatly into one or two bars, like this:
For more musical examples, the tune “Beaumont Rag” has a ragtime-flavored roll pattern in it which I think of as a famous example of how rolls are used in bluegrass:
You can also create little variations on the pattern, like doing the roll descending, or back and forth (low note, middle note, high note, middle note, etc.). But just the three strings, ascending, is probably the most basic thing you can do. You just want to have something you can play to get the hand motion moving.
Also, when you post YT links, make sure the link is on its own line by itself, and not at the end of an existing sentence. That way the forum will embed the video and we can just click to play it. Not a big deal, I edited the ones you’ve already posted.
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Got it! Thanks again! I can see my wrist motion getting flatter, already! 
ok, I’ve been doing the forward roll exercise for a couple days now and it feels smoother but do I still have too much bounce? Am I doing it right, as far as wrist motion?
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It does seem a bit bouncy but it’s difficult to tell at that speed. The true test is whether you can speed it up significantly without tensing up. Around 120 bpm 16th notes or faster.
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Hey @blackie69, for future reference I edited your post so that the YouTube video is embedded. In future posts you can do it like this:
Text
Video link
Text
The embedded video will make it more likely that other users won’t miss it 
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Thanks for taking a stab at this! Yes agree with @Johannes, this is stringhopping. However the arm position and wrist postion and grip all look good! So that’s a good step.
Sorry, I meant to reply to you earlier that I don’t want you to put “time” into this like an exercise. It’s not an exercise. You don’t want to “work” on this for a period of days. You’re just using it as a test to see if your guess about the motion is right. Do it a few times and film it and post it here. If it’s bouncy then it’s wrong, you can try another way. This cuts out a lot of wasted time. You just keep trying something until you sort of get it right.
Go sideways with your wrist, and don’t turn your arm at all when you do this. Make no attempt to get over the strings by lifting the hand up in the air. If this means you hit wrong strings, hit them. Do the strum thing if need be. I’d rather see that than see the bouncing. Try that and see what you get.
Don’t be afraid to over-post here, we can take it!
Edit: Also, have you watched our lesson on this subject? Here’s the link:
This goes over the two arm positions you can use for this, either the Andy Wood style or the Molly Tuttle / David Grier style, in a little more detail. Sorry for not bringing this up earlier if you haven’t seen this yet.
Edit again: You’re using the Andy Wood style, and it looks correct. So no need to change this specifically. If however you try the Molly one and you can get the motion quicker that way, then totally fine, use that way. Options are just there to give you more chances to do it right.
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Troy, thanks for clarifying and for the reference clips. I’m on it!
La mejor que puedes hacer es ser consciente de todo movimiento que realiza tu mano derecha, con la técnica correcta que aquí se enseña, la velocidad vendrá por añadidura.
Sorry, no comprende! I wish I spoke Spanish. 
K, I’ve been working on my right hand wrist motion and even though it seems to be improving, ever so slightly, I can feel much tension in my hand, elbow and shoulder, which I know is bad.
I’ve also been experimenting with the elbow technique ( see second video) but as you’ll hear, I lose volume and tone, even though there’s no tension at all. I’m sure you’ll tell me to persue the elbow technique because of the lack of tension but I just can’t seem to play very accurately and it only works on strictly alternate picking. Will this improve with time?
My frustrations continue! Help, please!!!
Thanks for the update! No tension is good! That means something is working with what you’re calling the “elbow” motion. The angles you’re filming at are perfect but the camera is a little far away to see clearly what’s actually going on in that mode. Also does your phone have a 120fps “slow motion” mode? That will make the video much sharper too, because there will be less motion blur. If you have that mode, and film the exact same “elbow” clip again, from closer up, that might provide some answers as to what’s going on there.
As for the wrist stuff, you feel tension because it’s still stringhopping. Also, you’re doing repeated downstrokes in there at various points. In other words, instead of DUDUD as in alternate picking, you’re actually going DDUDU DDUDU here and there. I don’t know if you can feel that. But if you’d like to build up tension quickly, repeating the same pickstroke is a good way to do it.
Anyhoo, the homework assignment was not to play a whole tune like this. Even thought it sounds pretty decent, the motion isn’t right and doesn’t feel right. The homework was very simply to take a few minutes and do the roll pattern fast and flat with mistakes if necessary. If that didn’t work, then the homework was to downgrade to a three-string wrist strum that’s also flat, and at least 110-120bpm sixteenths.
So in other words, what I’m looking for you is a quick test where you try to make the wrist motion flat and have no tension. I don’t care if there are mistakes or if it’s quiet. The idea is to learn what it feels like when you move from the wrist with no tension. Once you have that in your mind, you can then try to reproduce that feeling of easyness while playing more accurately.
Given that a shot when you get a moment, and we’ll take a lookt!
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There isn’t much I can add to the (excellent) analysis that’s already going on in here, and I apologize for being a little late to the party here…
…but the one thing that jumped out at me, precicely becase this is something I also atruggled with when I first joined here, is yout single-string alternate picking in your first video isn’t especially even. What you describe as an “upwards slanting” technique (actually downwards slanting/escaped upstrokes as others have pointed out) is actually a lot smoother and more even than your escaped downstroke technique you start with, which I suspect is what your “normal” approach is, and looking at the videos elserwhere here when you’re not doing one-note-per-string stuff it seems you do gravitate to this a little more.
But, something that helped my picking a disproportionate, unexpected amount, as a guy used to leaning on his fretting hand to get by, was just working on single-string picking drills for a while, to really build up some groove to my picking hand. It’s crazy, but that really helped my picking while changing strings, too.
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Thanks Troy and Drew! I will try to put your good advice to use! Thanks for watching and for your input!