Here’s the thing @Troy. Arpeggios. Yes, overall my alternate picking is better now that I’ve started watching your videos. But there’s still this thing nagging at me. If we think about some of the more common chord inversions,…say for a G7 chord on the top 4 strings. So we get one note per string. And what an improvisor can do is turn those inversions into arpeggios. Rather than always just playing 1, 3, 5, 7 up and down, we kinda mix em up. The problem I run into is trying to play them a little bit faster without sweep picking and without getting into somewhat of a string hopping motion. I haven’t really seen a video that addresses this yet so I figured I’d post here and try to get some thoughts on it. I tend to be more of a USX player I think, but it gets a little more mixed up depending on the line and the speed.
The short answer is that very few players have a motion that can alternate pick EVERYTHING. So most players that have a vocabulary playing the shapes you mention rely on workarounds like legato (possibly with string skips) and/or sweep picking or economy.
Being stubborn enough to alternate pick everything puts you on a long road. Ask me how I know 
I’ve always heard Troy recommend people first get good at the single escape playing before embarking on the motions that can escape both directions. For that, check the RDT section of the primer. Andy Wood is the one Troy’s interviewed that uses a form of that for his mixed and double escape patterns. Oh also, Steve Morse. Not everyone wants to commit to his grip though.
It’s not that you’re wrong it’s just that I know there are players who make it work. The guy who came to mind for me was Shawn Lane. But I don’t know enough about the science of picking to break down his technique, therefore here I am. Meantime maybe I should check out the Andy Wood stuff. Yeah.
But these guys are in the minority. If I named well known players on my fingers, I wouldn’t run out of fingers before I had to stop and think really hard lol! Most players have a “primary” escape, and if you asked them to do something else that was outside of what their core motion does, they couldn’t do it. They’d either not play the lick, or they’d have to come up with a workaround.
That’s actually incorrect. Shawn has been studied at length on here (the forum, not Troy’s platform of than some passing comments in some videos). He has a different grip, but his motion has the same implications as Yngwie and EJ. It only is capable of changing strings after upstrokes. If you saw/heard Shawn do complex arpeggios, it was a mixture of legato and economy, with some alternate picking. If you find otherwise, let us know! Everything we’ve seen him play that we’ve discussed, he’s a textbook USX player only.
Just like certain joint motions only escape after up (OR) downstrokes, Troy’s identified motions that continuously escape both directions (DBX). With the exception of players like Martin Miller (who uses his fingers to make this happen), these are nearly always wrist players. They do clever things with the joint motion to make the pickstrokes all curved.
He’s also identified players who prefer the upstroke OR downstroke escape, but occasionally do things to make the notes that require whatever isn’t the primary escape possible. This is accomplished by recruiting some other joint. A common example could be a player than can appear to only do DSX and for the occasional places where they need a USX stroke here and there, they’ll add a tiny bit of forearm rotation just on those strokes.
That’s most of the science that’s been covered on here. Cliff notes version 
EDIT:
And sorry I misread that as a more general comment on the picking motions that can do what you’re after. Shawn is one of the rare players that did a Dart Thrower motion. It traces the path that it sounds like it would if you mime throwing a dart in the air. He had a trailing edge grip and pronated, and in that position the Dart Thrower motion makes downstrokes go toward the guitar body, upstrokes in the air, out of the plane of the strings. That’s why the only thing his motion was capable of was escaping after upstrokes. He, Yngwie and EJ would have no problem playing each other’s phrases. None of them could alternate pick Tumeni Notes with their motion. None of them could play John McLaughlin’s pattern, note for note, with his fingerings (and he couldn’t play theirs either).
Well in that case I’ll have to find it.
I did see a bunch of stuff about the Dart Thrower motion. I’ll have to check that out. The thing I remember seeing about Shawn Lane is that…the kinds of licks that we might think of as most conducive to sweep picking, he could nail with either sweep OR alternate picking. That’s some scary stuff. I’m not talking necessarily about breakneck tempos that he would play,…just that little bit extra. I do tend to be somewhat of a wrist player so maybe that’s where it’s at. My feeling is that,…if you’re gonna improvise you have to maximize the potential to play any particular idea comfortably. If that means learning a different technique, so be it. I’d rather struggle with it and say that I tried than to just forget about it.
If the tempo is low enough, that makes sense. You can get away with things that aren’t maximally efficient. I’ve never heard that claim about Shawn regardless of speed. It sounds more like Steve Morse who does alt pick what most have to rely on sweeping for. He has a different motion though (reverse dart thrower) and that one is capable of escape in either direction.
If I’m wrong that’s cool. That’s how we learn things. We do occasionally get surprises where we having a player sort If “type cast” and then we find anomalies. When this happens, it’s normally some “other motion” a player has that they use in rare cases. The Bill Hall and Brandon Ellis interview both had moments like this. So it’s not impossible Shawn had something like this too. But like I said he has been covered extensively here and that unusual grip of his sort of backed him into a corner where we know what to expect. Which is near 100% USX.
I forgot to address this. Another thing I’ve learned here is that when even the best players improvise, they aren’t just pulling notes out of thin air. It probably sounds like that, but what they’re really doing is deploying patterns that are already rehearsed. Material that supports (short read) is here Tackling Bebop With John McLaughlin’s Picking Motion – Cracking the Code
John is great improvisor but you can see here how he plays patterns that always work with his motion (escapes after downstrokes). He couldn’t be making that up on the fly.
Another one (I haven’t gotten through this myself lol) but this is a peek under the hood at who I consider the best improvisor (possibly ever, but certainly on guitar) https://youtu.be/ChL9R2r0N9Y
He was a legato guy obviously, so numbers of notes per string and escape motion don’t really apply. But you can see in this that even he wasn’t just pulling notes out of thin air.
We put ourselves at a great disadvantage by thinking all these amazing players can do “anything” and that we’re just so inferior because we can’t. But the reality is most of the best players ever are just great at working within their own limitations. They have massive vocabularies so it can seem like they do it all, but it’s all within a framework that’s sane. If we can accept that, we can save ourselves a lot of time chasing ghosts.
DBX techniques are designed to handle 1nps situations, but they don’t seem to be as fast as single-escaped techniques (USX or DSX). If you choose USX or DSX, there will be some 1nps situations that you can easily manage (perhaps with sweeping), and others that will become more complex/demanding (hybrid picking, swiping, etc.). So, can you share a TAB example that illustrates a case that you’re thinking about?
What I’d love to be able to do is to share a video. Maybe I can and I just haven’t figured out how to do it. Let me try.
Just wanted to chime in to say that this is not what you see when you analyze closely the best improvisers — say Joe Pass, George Benson, even Shawn Lane or Frank Gambale.
Usually, what they do is build an enormous vocabulary of licks that is compatible with their specific technique. Because of their vast experience, they built enough variety to make it seem like they can play “anything”, but in reality they just have a very large database of technique-specific licks to pick from
*Ahem.
There’s me getting my dose of narcissism for the day (I’m allowed 1 per day). But truth be told, I type way too much. I fault no one for not reading my posts lol!
Presumably these are the top studio musicians? They have to adopt to the piece and work very quickly, e.g., Steve Lukather, and they play on hundreds of albums.
These people sound like themselves, hence their techniques are surely sufficient to support their “improvisation.”
Oh sure. The thing is,…I’m not one of the best improvisers. I’m a lost soul who has some terrible habits with my picking hand and until recently couldn’t really play much past 110bpm cleanly. So I need a little more help than those guys. And A LOT more practice.
Studio musicians are a weird bunch though. They may or may not be heard, they weren’t always seen until more recent times, and they may or may not be utilizing 100% of their capabilities. Heck, some might just be really good rhythm players and maybe don’t use the kinds of picking techniques you can really analyze. They’re just playing to serve the songs and make hits (Steve Cropper comes to mind). Then you go to Nashville and you just know. They’re all trying to sound like Brent Mason,…and Brent is still alive and kicking a**.