Sorry for the confusion! When I say wrist-forearm, I mean wrist and forearm working at the same time, not just the wrist by itself. This is the motion we cover in the forearm motion section, where we look at Doug Aldrich as an example. The two motions are similar but the form for the blended wrist-forearm motion means that is essentially only capable of USX motion.
Here’s what they look like up close:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzLxsIknV9r/
This type of wrist-forearm blended motion creates a slightly curved path where the trapped portion of the motion flattens out and stays trapped. It’s very common and players like Doug, Teemu Mäntysaari, Ben Eller, and lots of other great players use it. It’s also what I used for most of the Volcano, Cascade, and Antigravity examples. Although there’s probably some idiosyncratic variation in those clips because we hadn’t done the homework on the motions that we’ve done since then, and I didn’t think much about what motions I was using then.
When you do the Aldrich motion, you can get a downstroke escape by straightening out the wrist and doing the DSX form from the wrist motion chapters. This results in a motorcycle-style pump action of the wrist and forearm on individual notes right around the string change and is what we have somewhat erroneously called “two-way pickslanting”, because the arm and the pick appear to be flip-flopping around when you do this. If you were to do this on every single note you play, you’d see the arm wiggling around non-stop, and you’d end up with a Jimmy Herring-style motion capable of both upstrokes and downstroke string changes. That’s the motion we teach right here:
http://troygrady.com/channels/talking-the-code/crosspicking-with-the-wrist-and-forearm/
So… I’ve probably confused you. I know I’ve confused myself. To cut through the confusion I’d encourage you to look at the motions the joints are making and what type of pickstroke results from that. You have a bunch of options:
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If only your wrist is moving and nothing else, and you have the right form, you can get upstroke and downstroke string changes from that. Our new wrist chapters are about showing you what that form is and how to do it.
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If you want to make only upstroke string changes, you can use the slightly different “Gypsy lite” form that gives you the Aldrich motion. When you do that, you can play lines that work in that style and never really need downstroke string changes, by mixing in downstroke sweeping and pulloffs. You can get some truly terrifying stuff that way. Here are two examples - no downstroke string changes at all in these examples:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzJe3f9nCXt/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzbPtUAH3rK/
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You can do more or less the Aldrich form but use occasional flattening out of the forearm to do occasional downstroke string changes. That will get your Gilbert-style scale phrases if that’s your thing.
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Finally, you can do the continual arm flattening / un-flattening of the motorcycle motion on every note, and that will get your Jimmy Herring-style motion, which can do both downstroke and upstroke escapes. You can use that to play cool stuff where you have occasional bits of 1nps and other things all thrown in. But note that you can also do this with pure wrist motion, and no arm wiggling at all, using the form we teach in the new wrist chapters. That’s the point where you come full circle. Achieving the same effect with two different types of picking motion. So either one works for this, and will get you lines like this with pure alternate picking:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BkvE-Sdl8Q6/
Let me know if this helps clarify — or just further confuses!