Developing secondary motion

Playing Technique
#1

I have a pretty solid primary motion now, but I can’t get the hang of secondary motion. I tried “just doing it” , but it doesn’t work for me. It feels string hoppy and awkward.
How should I approach this?
How did you develop your secondary motion?

#2

Can you show some examples of your primary motion?

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#3

Here is some non cherry-picked noodling of various Gilbert patterns and sixes. Some require swiping while descending but that isn’t a problem for me. The real struggle happens when I want to switch to a higher (in pitch) string after an upstroke.

#4

As I can see you have a DSX motion too. Welcome to the caveman club :sweat_smile: That’s how I call my elbow motion :stuck_out_tongue: Anyways, I use my forearm and do some kind of twich when doing upstroke string changes. It works best for descending string changes, on the ascending ones I’m swiping like hell.

#5

How would you approach a phrase like this?:
psychosocial
I am trying to learn the fast alternate picking run from the start of psychosocial solo and this pattern seems like it’s what is being played in the track. It is a total nightmare and I can’t really get it smooth.
Maybe the transcription is just wrong and it is played otherwise?

#6

This run is played as sextuplets at 135 bpm, not 16th notes, and yes, it’s very fast. I’d swipe the note on the top string, no matter how horrible it sounds.

I gave it a try at 130 bpm, I can’t play any faster on this guitar, it has crazy high action, I need to set it up properly. Also, I’m in C standard.

#7

An alternative way would be to play it like this, with more position shifts:

Personally, I’d go for the swiping, this is way too much shifting with the left hand.

OR, you can just put some awful effect on your guitar so nobody hears anything of the run, like he did here at 2:00. Horrible, really.

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#8

Thanks for your responses!
To me your first take (with swiping) sound nice. I am pretty sure that it is played that way on the album. I’ll give it a go and try to make it work for me.
The position shifts don’t look that bad to me either, but I haven’t yet tried them on a guitar. I’ll definitely give them a go too.
And that solo from the the video you posted is just awful. The contrast from Mike to Jim is actually pretty funny. Mike sounds like a kid that just discovered some whacky effects and has put them all to 10.
Jim is clean and on point.

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