I never watched his instructional before but there are some great shots in here of his finger-driven alternate picking motion:
Technically, this looks like a solid DSX motion and sticking with DSX phrase organization would clean this right up. This alone would have placed Craig near the very top of the heap of picking techniques in the '80s, because the basic mechanics here are solid as anyone’s.
Not a knock on Craig’s playing — his work in Dio was interesting and tasty. There were just things we didn’t know back then about which phrases could be played cleanly with which motions at speed. By that reckoning it’s a bit of a miracle that players like Yngwie somehow knew what lines to avoid.
Craig also has a killer elbow hyperpicking mode, again likely DSX:
This is basically John Sykes’ picking technique. The challenge, again, is knowing it’s DSX, organizing phrases accordingly, and of course, hand synchronization via chunking. All eminently doable but again, things that weren’t common knowledge at the time.
He used this one in his live solo spot to terrifying effect:
Awesome stuff.
