No, I haven’t tried Elixir strings though I have heard them mentioned. My acoustic is due for a string change after New Year’s and I’ll give Elixir’s a try. Thanks!
They’re a bit pricey but they last much longer than regular strings.
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Thanks. I look forward to seeing that. Tommo and I have spent a lot of quality time together online lately—he tells me what’s wrong with my picking! (Great guy and anyone who has not yet submitted a Technique Critique, I highly recommend the process.)
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Descending, you can economy pick the string switches with two upstrokes. Ascending, you can hammer-on the last note on every string with three notes.
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Barney Kessel said that “Playing scales is like a boxer skipping rope or punching a bag. It’s not the thing itself; its preparatory to the activity.”
I learned many scales long ago. Knowing scales is not an issue. But since realizing I’m a DSX player, I want to focus on the ways I can play scales (and from scales, scale patterns and sequences) most efficiently. And I want to STOP playing them in ways that give me trouble because the fingering I learned is at odds with my picking mechanics. (Back when I learned scales, I didn’t know there was such a thing as picking mechanics. Doh!)
Gotcha. In that case, one of the friendliest ways to play it would be to “Gilbert-ify” a major scale in sequentially ascending 6s
-------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------10-12-13--
-----------------------------------------9-10-12-9-10-12-----------
-------------------------9-10-12-9-10-12---------------------------
---------8-10-12-8-10-12-------------------------------------------
-8-10-12-----------------------------------------------------------
Descending would be the same concept, 3 notes on the first string then 6 notes on all the others and you’ll always change strings after an upstroke.
Which ones have you tried already? We probably should’ve asked that first so we aren’t helping you reinvent the wheel 
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@Milkweed I think what’s tricky is that the fingerings/locations will change depending on the sequence. In my mind, when it comes to one-way escape, I have more so a bag of tricks depending on the average interval size, basically. But honestly, I’ve arranged a ton of stuff for one way escape, and it really just depends too much on the individual passage; you change one note or one interval, change the rhythmic placement of something, and the whole set up then has to change.
I made a complicated tool where you can input tab for anything and it will produce best one-way escape solutions (but the number of notes is limited, and it takes forever to load, as I’m not a programmer and it has to cycle through like 10,000 fingerings to find the ones that fit the appropriate criteria)…I change one note and it has to go through all the formulas and possibilities again, sometimes moving the entire passage to a different part of the fretboard.
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And here it is a few weeks later.
I am trying to develop DBX picking (double escape) to facilitate playing major scales the old-fashioned way (-a mix of 2NPS and 3NPS). It’s not a question of being able to play them very fast; I want to play them clean. I find the fingerings useful for general fretboard knowledge and for their compatibility with the chord voicings I prefer. 3 NPS fingerings are faster, but speed is not the only, or even primary, factor here for me.
Dude I was thinking this is how they should make notation software to work. As you place a note on the music staff, it should then give you all the locations of the note on the fretboard so you can choose which one in the tablature. Does any notation software do this kind of thing?
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You’re way ahead of me, but I usually will only look at moving notes around if the typical “escape hatches” don’t work. In your case (DSX) the escape hatches include HO/PO to get to an even number of notes per string, and that’s pretty powerful—you can get away with murder just using that. But do share whatever you conclude at the end.
You’re right, they’re the best. When I was playing 8’s my only regret was Elixir didn’t make any. But note that the really quiet ones are probably the original formulation.
You can do this and move the TAB around exactly as you suggest with GP8, use Option-UpArrow or Option-DownArrow, and I’ll bet it works in other tools as well (but I don’t know how).
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I have Guitar Pro 8 and its wonderful software.
I mainly use it for things I come up with myself where the note groupings are of various lengths, and I need to meticulously sort out the timing.
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That coating that is on the Elixir strings dulls the tone.
The nanoweb coated Elixirs are a bit duller than new uncoated strings, but I think they’re much less dull sounding than uncoated strings that have been played for a while.
The polyweb coated Elixirs did sound dull to me when I tried them.
For the wound strings they somehow wrap a teflon tube around them. At first (late 1990’s?) they had only one type of tube, but then they added a second type, and then, a third. I get confused about the names, but I think it was Polyweb, then Nanoweb, then Optiweb. Each tube has less impact on the tone, they seem to get thinner/tighter. I’d love to see a factory tour.
I agree with @Tom_Gilroy that unless one loves to change strings regularly the Elixir strings will rapidly start to sound much better.
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I came to this conclusion too. odd number of notes on the first string, followed by evens on subsequent strings. is this one of those “it just works” situations or has he ever spoken about this as an intentional design?
There was an old audio interview on YouTube posted by Bill Hall with Yngwie around the time he left Alcatrazz where he briefly mentioned that he doesn’t pick everything, saying that he doesn’t play “right”.
The interviewer doesn’t investigate much further but it definitely shows that he is aware of his technique to some degree, maybe more then he lets on nowadays. Sadly the video got taken down by Yngwie/his management but I did share it at the time here:
Unfortunately that video is gone. DMCA by yngwie
He was like learning how to speed read, but with musical audiation, because he might have already had perfect pitch during this speed development anomaly that was going on. So he wasn’t really able to understand what was going on other than maybe the recording equipment from the studio or the guitar was going out of tune because of the cold weather.
Funny enough I hope the next response is that I derailed the thread, because I have offered phrasing fingerings for major on this thread. But when the thread shifted my riffs went into that thread, not my fault.
Personally, I don’t really believe Yngwie in that clip because that has not been my experience. For 10 years of my life I tried to start slow and speed up with no results. Whereas now I learnt my current motion within 6 months and I’ve almost learnt DSX wrist in a couple of weeks (starting with speed) 
In the interview from 1983, he comes across to me like he is being a lot more candid, mentioning players like Al Di Meola and Uli Jon Roth as his biggest influences, something I haven’t heard him mention since. While in that later interview to me, he seems to be telling what makes a better story - this might not be on purpose though as he is trying to recall what he did a lifetime ago as a young teenager!
Sorry to derail the thread there! Hopefully I should be able to contribute in a more meaningful way when my new motion is completely learned 
I’m using Elixir strings now and love them!