In the Primer we tried to focus on the most common motions. The ones we profiled are the ones we see all the time here on the forum when players post clips of their techniques.
Finger joints are commonly used for for making small adjustments, where you will see those joints moving on specific notes or phrases and not others. And they’re common for small adjustments in pick attack, like changing the edge picking on a particular note. But from clips that players post here, we don’t usually see it as the primary source of the motion, i.e. where you see the finger joints moving on every note. When we ask players to just play a single note fast, and they’re actually able to do it, finger motion is rarely the joint motion we see. Since all our teaching is based on tests like that, i.e. asking people to go fast and observing what they do, that’s why you don’t see more about finger joint motion.
Along those lines, the reason we profiled those motions in the Primer is not because we want you to try to methodically learn them. It’s because we want you to be able to recognize the joint motion you see when you try to pick fast without thinking too much about it. That’s the approach that seems to produce the quickest results.
As far as Yngwie, he uses all sorts of motions depending on the phrase he’s playing. This even includes joints like elbow motion which we don’t normally think of Yngwie as using. So I wouldn’t say that even he is primarily a user of finger joint motion, or that his fingers are always moving when he’s alternate picking. Not only that, but his motions have changed over the years, so whatever he was doing in 1984 may not be what he’s doing now.
Personally, I don’t really know how to do finger motions. In that old video I mentioned that it was a thing I would like to work on but, in the six or seven years since that time I haven’t had the time or inclination.
It’s very difficult to take whatever your core motion is and learn a completely different one. If the Primer makes it appear like learning various motions is something players should be working on, then that’s a mistake and we’ll try to correct that in future updates. More likely most people will learn to leverage the motion or motions they already can do, and simply expand the phrases they can play with it. Over time this may include (subconsciously) mixing in different joints to play certain phrases, that’s totally fine.
