After about a year struggling to get USX licks and tremolo to play smoothly, I have realized I am a DSX player. Its taken me a long time to realize that you should use a picking motion which is based on your most comfortable and smoothest tremolo motion. I found this information in the Picking motion Primer based on Andy Woods technique. Already I am finding the DSX motion much smoother and suits the natural motion of my arm and wrist. Trying to play USX motion always seemed awkward and jerky.
I get the feeling that DSX players are in the minority. Is his true?
Personally, I think that if a player is willing to learn any riff that isn’t in their comfort zone, they will eventually develop DSX or some mechanic that would function similarly. I never knew about any of this before diving into CtC lingo, but I developed DSX anyways by trying to play things that felt difficult to me. I’m sure that’s the case for countless guitarists as well.
If so, I suppose you could rephrase your hypothesis as, "I get the feeling that players that challenge themselves playing awkward picking patterns are in the minority.’
I don’t know how we would measure this but my impression is that DSX motion is very common. After all, the elbow joint can do DSX, and lots of players use elbow motion. The wrist can do all types of motion, but Andy Wood, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, Andy James and many other players all use this one very particular wrist motion, which is also DSX.
USX motion isn’t a “motion” itself, so it’s not any more likely to be jerky or smooth because it’s not a single “it”. It’s just a way of describing any picking motion that moves on a certain diagonal compared to the guitar. When you think about these things, try to think about the joint you’re trying to move, and which way you’re trying to move it. Because anything you experience is related to that.
For example, when we tell people here on the forum to put up videos trying to play as fast as they can, one of the most common results we see is elbow motion. The elbow is a simple joint that only moves back and forth, and apparently lots of people already know how to do that quickly. And maybe they aren’t always as familiar with forearm motion or wrist motion. Again, I don’t know, we’d have to take a survey to figure out who’s using what.
But the point is that in your case, whichever joint you’re using for DSX motion, you’re just more familiar with how to do that. If it’s the wrist joint, which can move in multiple directions, than it may very well be that whichever direction you’re moving it is the one you’re most familiar with compared to the others. And these things might be totally arbitrary, just based on other skills you may have already built from other activities.