DSX wrist player here. My forearm keeps getting some tension when I play in the 6th or 1st string, even after watching the mouse video about holding a pick. How to proceed ? It keeps my string change heavy/difficult.
Can you post a video? It’s hard to give good advice without seeing exactly what you’re doing. For example, it sounds to me like you’re saying the other strings feel good but the 2 outermost strings don’t feel good. That could indicate you’re not tracking to get to those strings and reaching for them instead. That could be putting you at/beyond comfortable range of motion and causing tension. I could be totally misunderstanding though, so a video would clarify it.
Oh I’m not sure if we’re mixing issues, but that’s not a DSX lick, that requires escapes in both directions.
Does it feel better or worse if you play this one instead?
I know Andy Wood has mentioned the 4 inner strings are more comfy and E’s require a little change to reach. I noticed when playing through the above example it’s a little harder on the low E string compared to all the others too.
Here’s me trying from the A string, feels ok. Then the last pass I try spanning all 6 strings…doesn’t feel as good.
But like many things, familiarity could come into play. I just don’t practice much on the low E string for…whatever reason lol!
Any way it’s hard to see what’s wrong from your video, so sorry I may not have been helpful at all. It doesn’t look tense to me. It if feels tense, I’d go back to square one with the tremolo test at a fast-ish speed to confirm the motion is smooth and effortless feeling. Unless it’s just the fact that you’re trying a non-DSX compatible phrase and that’s the issues. Still, I’d think that would feel tense/weird on all strings, not just the outermost pair.
You said it wasn’t a DSX lick, but let’s say that I want to do the same thing but very fast, DSX would be the way right?
And the criteria to determine which escape motion I should use is the speed I pretend to play right ?
And about the tab, I think it felt comfortable playing the tab that you sent.
And I’m almost sure that I have a problem with hand synchronization too haha
Yeah doing straight 3 notes per string like your video, you’d need that ‘helper motion’ thing on every ‘6th’ note since that would escape on an upstroke. You can stay DSX for the majority of the whole thing, it’s just that one note where something has to change. In that other thread I was sort of theorizing that if we precede that note with a downward rest stroke it may help encourage the upstroke escape. I’d cited a clip of Andy Wood doing this even at a very fast speed. I was almost thinking of it as “training” wheels, but the fact that he did it at speed made me think there’s maybe something to it. Still, I’m sure there are times he does it without the downward rest stroke. So it’s probably not required.
Not sure I understand that question. There’s 2 parts though
- what can we currently play efficiently, at a fast speed
- what do we want to play
Sometimes there’s a mismatch, then we need to adapt what we want to play to fit the thing we’re already good at. OR we can try to learn the new motion we need to play the thing we cannot yet play. OR we can just stop wanting to play the thing we want to play but cannot do lol! I know Troy recommends people get proficient with 1 motion before trying to be more adventurous with the helper motions. If we can play strict single escape, and do it very fast, we have this great baseline to measure everything else against.
Great! I’d say floor it and see what happens! Also, if you haven’t checked it out yet, do try the new DSX seminar. It’s so much fun!
Re: hand sync, yeah me too. It’s getting better but I had no idea how bad mine was until recently. I was totally reliant upon stuff that started on the index finger. I wrote this little drill to correct this (as if we need one more drill lol) but it really helped me.