If you want my advice, I’m telling you what to do.
Do a tremolo on a single note, and film it close up. Then observe — is it USX? Second test, play a two-string 2nps phrase, DU on each string, and loop it. Film that close up — is it USX?
For both tests, film in a true slow motion mode with 120fps or better, with good lighting. Otherwise it’s tough to see what you need to see. If what you see is not USX, then it could be that the core motion isn’t really USX, and that would explain what we’re seeing in your clip. If both tests pass, excellent — then we’ll just test a few more phrases.
I agree with these guys if you desire to play along with this at tempo and have fun, and you can just shift it like this, this is the better route to take as long as your guitar has a nice intonation across the fretboard. i would bet even eric johnson might agree, unless he has some sort of phrase that he connects this to, otherwise as long as you can shift things on the top 3 strings that aren’t wound there will be no slick noise from the finger slide during position shifts that occur during phrasing. so ask yourself this who in the heck would even notice or care? learning how to re engineer licks is a key step in understand deeper what usx and dsx are capable and not capable of being able to do with specific phrasing. it will also help you to know how to tackle flip flopping between them scouting out a path on paper, and playing the same lick the other way if you desire to go further learning more picking techniques to play phrasing that requires it.
i tend to differ a bit from troys philosophy on the tremolo. to some degree i can agree with it, but practically any motion can get you to a tremolo, some might take work to build up the strength, other motions will be more free that use less tension (and no not free like this will be easy to do, this one is very tricky to learn as an adult as i have found out, i tend to think this would be easier to do if i was a kid), and some might use nothing but tension (i tend to frown upon this but really it’s up to the person). but trying to apply a tremolo motion to all phrasing is likely not what he meant, but it is a good baseline to assess if you are breaking the plane of the string with usx or dsx with your natural body mechanics that occur when you find a motion that can go fast. now how fast is considered fast, i still don’t know if there is some scale on this site of what is considered the fast baseline? and what if the player doesn’t hit it even with trying to do it, as i am skeptical that not every player is capable of playing fast. i only have one technique that can hit 12 notes per second for descended and ascending crossing the full range of all the strings phrasing, the thumb thing. and honestly the older i have gotten i just try to go at 75% speed of most of the stuff i try to learn which is already incredibly fast which i find i am pleased with my results. sure i can get it faster than 75% the more i play through it on the regular, if i don’t, i lose it. i can regain it quite quickly months down the road, but you can’t remember it all.
Yea for me it’s not as much about fun and more about utility. I’m 100% a career musician so my goal is to gain capability in every facet possible. And I’m also 100% a wrist picker. My tremolo picking is more of a wrist rotation (EVH style), not side to side motion, so I can’t really see the value in applying that concept to my standard alternate picking, unless I want to start over with my picking style. I’m 32 and have been playing since I was 7, so that side to side motion will be tough to retrain. Just trying to break down my playing and see where things get a little screwy. And yea I’m super stubborn when it comes to things I can’t achieve lol
You would be quite suprised to find out that probably if you are more usx if you can do this kind of tremolo they are quite close to using the same mechanics. You just gotta try to understand how they differ, the best way to explain what i feel, i have been studying and learning rest stroke, is like the evh tremolo i like to call it the gypsy jazz/manouche tremolo is it feels like if you burn your hands and you start shaking your hands (like ooo ahhh oucheee and shaking them) that flopping feeling from the forearm, completely free of tension and just flowing free of any kind of strict rhythmical pronounciation. now when i play rest stroke phrasing i still use this same kind of motion, but it has some tension to it like slinging to get it going more to a precise rhythm to chunk a fragment might be a good way to describe what i am trying to say. and if you already are doing the downstroke sweep across two strings, and breaking the plane with the upstroke which is very clear in that phrase above there is some hints of that tremolo motion during that phrase.
but again to play that phrase ultra fast and at tempo just re engineer it that way your audience gets it clean and clear every time and your hands thank you.
because think of it like this the re engineered path will always be faster no matter what so you are beating a dead horse. well if you desire tension free playing anyways, who knows there are some crazy tensed up gunners out there, it’s just not my style. scratch that actually i tend to think swybrid would be even faster, but it likely will sound a bit off cause of the rhythmical picking using double ups, double downs, and plucks. but this kind of all depends on how well one can get proficient at a new technique later in life. you can mask this kind of with good compression systems or pedals probably some compression systems will work better at this than others.
Learning something new doesn’t require you to unlearn the way you did it previously. You can add without subtracting. You can continue to use your existing motion for what it’s good for, and learn a new one for stuff where the old one doesn’t work.
I had a ‘natural’ picking motion for over 30 years that was sloppy and inefficient. Then I discovered CTC and learned a new one that worked better for almost everything. Then I learned another one that worked even better for some things but not others. What I found is that every new motion was easier and faster to learn than the previous one, not harder, and all of them were far easier than learning my ‘natural’ motion by trial and error. Becoming more systematic and conscious of what mechanic I was using made it easier to try out variations and keep track of them. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I found that learning new motions didn’t interfere with the old ones. It enhanced them. My options simply increased, and the types of lines and phrases that I can successfully pull off expanded.
I’m not saying you should start collecting new motions, or even giving any specific advice on what motions you should use. I’m just saying I recognize the anxiety that comes from thinking about starting from scratch, and I’m suggesting it’s probably misplaced.
Here’s the transcription I have for this intro. It was shared with me on the (now long shutdown) EJ fan forum in 2006 by another user, named Tom Mann. He was a cool guy and was always willing to share his work, so I imagine he’d be comfortable with me sharing this here.
The lick we’re discussing begins in the middle of the 4th line on the 3rd page.
It might also contextualize this comment if you read this comment I wrote on Eric’s picking mechanics which I wrote in another thread:
I’ve always played these licks much the same as Eric plays it in the original performance. That is, mostly USX, but incorporating a situational crosspicking type escape for the lone downstroke for the C note on the 13th fret of the B string.
Eric actually has a functional medium speed double escape movement. This can be seen in Fig. 3 at 12:53 of Total Electric Guitar. It’s essentially supinated double escape with some of of Eric’s idiosyncratic finger/thumb movement. He doesn’t use it much or for very long and it’s not a very robust DBX technique, but it’s not stringhopping and it works for what he uses it for.
This movement is sometimes briefly incorporated situationally into Eric’s lead lines, and this lick we’re discussing is an example of that. This almost always on an outside change (downstroke on a lower string to an upstroke on a higher string). It’s essentially Eric’s solution for the USX problem situation that Chris Brooks calls “the lone note exception” when discussing Yngwie Malmsteens USX lines.
Your video is very illustrative, and I agree with @Troy’s assessment. You’re clearly switching to a string hopping movement part way through the lick.
There are other solutions. If your fretting hand is up for it, moving the lone D note at the 12th fret on the high E to the 15th fret on the B avoids the problem entirely. I’ve included a suggested fretting sequence.
1 3 1 3 1 2 3 4 1 3 1 3 1 2
e|------------10-12------------------------|
B|------10-13-------13-15-12-13-10-12---10-|
G|-9-12-------------------------------9----|
D|-----------------------------------------|
A|-----------------------------------------|
E|-----------------------------------------|
d u d u d u d u d u d u d d
There are also two ways to incorporate swybrid picking which make the lick silly fast.
Here’s our first option, with the original fingering.
e|------------10-12----10------------------|
B|------10-13-------13----12-13-10-12---10-|
G|-9-12-------------------------------9----|
D|-----------------------------------------|
A|-----------------------------------------|
E|-----------------------------------------|
d u m d d u u m d u d u u m
Here’s another with a slight change in the fingering
e|------------10-12-8-10----8------------|
B|------10-13------------12---10-12---10-|
G|-9-12-----------------------------9----|
D|---------------------------------------|
A|---------------------------------------|
E|---------------------------------------|
d u d u d u d u u m d u u m
I prefer the picking sequence on the first, but the fretting sequence on the second is very nice if you play the E note on the 12th fret of the high E string with your 4th finger, and use the finger combination (1 2 4) for the rest of the lick. This fingering also opens up options to play the last portion of the lick with Shawn Lane style hammer-ons instead of picking.
I hope that helps!
EDIT:
I’d add to this, in my Zoom lessons I’ve had several students begin to overcome a lifetime of habitual tension and develop efficient picking mechanics in a relatively short time.
There is no unlearning, just more learning, and the more learning we do the easier learning becomes. Don’t get discouraged @AndyBGuitar, you can do it.
This might be another way I would choose a fingering. Find one that works for your fretting hand, as either of ours may not be fast enough for your hands. Trying to learn how to compensate for the string hop is great, and you can learn that here. But again I will say you are beating a dead horse because you will always be able to play in pure usx even faster. Yes and try to learn swybrid on the side, it’s the next route to ultra speed.
This is a great option if you’re more comfortable with position shifting than stretching, but I can imagine some people might have trouble avoiding unintentional slides.
Absolutely, all any of us can do is provide suggestions.
Swybrid picking is ridiculously powerful. Even learning to incorporate the middle finger after upstrokes in pure USX or DSX is huge, it solves so many of the bad cases.
This is why I try to explain to people doing shifting on the top 3 strings is a good tactic as they aren’t wound and won’t create slick sound. So try to alter all the shifting to get into position to descend and ascend up a scale/chord shape for the phrase you are trying to get to before going to it so you dont get any unnecessary string scratching. If you have to keep saying in your mind, “pure usx will be faster. what am I doing?”. and make no mistake swybrid is even better enhanced pure usx, we are lucky because the middle finger gets even closer, with dsx it would appear that it gets further away. but i dont do dsx often enough so i am not sure how swybrid may or may not be useful. maybe its more useful for them dsx players on ascended phrasing who knows. i tend to think it was kind of utilized to go faster for descended phrasing for usx players, but they also found out you can also use it to go faster with ascended phrasing using partial swybrid only up pluck, no swept double up.
and i can take the pure usx further by saying the rest stroke is completely pure usx however it requires always changing strings to a downstroke utilizing half rest strokes. So actually this isn’t faster, but this is just getting into technicalities of it all. Because technically swybrid with the double ups doesn’t really alter the upstroke escape per say since it is just one extra string to get a double up sweep, but it might throw off consistency during subconscious play. Since with rest stroke playing you always change strings to a down stroke. I am not skilled enough in swybrid to see if this occurs. But from what I have practiced with it, the phrases/fragments have to be pretty scouted out prior to executing the lick in the moment. So this probably wouldn’t occur, but you never know. I have done the yngwie 3 string arpeggio picking pathway so long, I learned this as a young teenager, that a double up for me feels natural (meaning i know to keep my wrist angle the same but just flick through the upstroke to catch a second string), but it might not for someone newer to guitar. As even these are picked differently in the gypsy jazz genre, you can see this with Troy Grady’s video with Joscho Stephan.
So maybe the correct wording shouldve been using elements of pure usx, with a picked upstroke escape musically descended string change, and catching the 2nd string during an upstroke for a double upstroke for swybrid maneuvers.
And no openai didn’t help write this wall of text, it likely wouldn’t understand what we were talking about, if so call me shocked and frightened.
and this is for the layman’s terms of it all as long as you know the basics of what Troy has taught on here, otherwise you will need to get help from Tom as he seems to have a very firm grasp of the anatomical aspect of what is going on with the body mechanics involved.
I read your EJ comment from the other thread. Can you provide any examples of EJ when he uses hammer ons, slides or pull offs to move through extended pentatonic phrases? I think you had mentioned he rarely picks long pentatonic passages and I would love to see how he moves through that terrain so to speak if not picking everything.
Edit: Here is what you said: “Eric rarely plays many notes on a single string before changing strings. The fast pentatonic picking patterns are woven into lines, and his lines are rarely all picked. The gaps are connected with the occasional well placed slide, hammer or pull-off.”
Sure. The important think to realise here is that Eric isn’t usually picking every note, he’s picking almost every note. Very similar in principle to how Yngwie uses slides, hammers and pull-offs.
The descending line from the Trademark solo is a great example. I’m quite sure that it’s played as I’ve tabbed here:
I don’t have a tab, but it happens a lot in the Desert Rose solos. If you track all the picking and fretting hand movements in this video, you’ll find some examples here too.
I actually can’t believe that this footage is available in this quality. I had nothing as good as this when I was analyzing EJ’s technique. Here’s Cliffs Of Dover and Zap from the same uploader:
Eric also discusses using pull-offs in Total Electric Guitar and The Fine Art of Guitar and gives some examples. See 11:26 in TEG. As he’s gotten older, he’s been picking less and using the pull-offs more.
Also, it’s been a while sionce I watched the Cascade seminar, but I distinctly remember there being a section on erics using of legato on turnarounds.
EDIT:
While I’m sharing EJ videos, this Desert Rose solo is a personal favourite.
I’ve also always preferred the performance of Cliffs of Dover at the Bottomline.
It’s worth mentioning too that even Eric took some time to get everything sorted out technically. The performance of Cliffs of Dover from Austin City Limits in '84 isn’t up to the standard of his later playing.
I wonder if this is from the same concert. If so…bad night for EJ???
I don’t even know what happened but that’s one of the worst train wrecks I’ve seen. Stopping a performance entirely and starting over is the 2nd worst thing you can do as a performer. Second only to taking a bow and ending the entire show
Though neither are aware, Eric Johnson and Brad Paisley are constantly fighting each other for my “favorite electric player ever” so it’s not with any schadenfreude that I share that video. Still, it’s a nice reminder that he’s human too.
my take on it if you need to go ultra fast and this will likely sound strange (not like eric johnsons tone or sound), but it might be a way i would play this with my picking style to get it as fast as possible. and honestly let me readjust some things i will edit this further that ending is wonky as heck!
i like to put parenthesis around alternative fingerings. this way you can kind of choose where you want to go next after you play this lick and use choose the fingering according that that idea floating in your mind where you might hear what should come next. so if you choose to use the middle finger barre at the end you kind of get an advantage because you can preset that fingering as you are doing the beginning two notes of that beat grouping to those last 2 downstroke 2 string swept notes.
Has anyone here figured out a way to overcome the speed barrier on this EJ lick here?
wow, thats insane. so clear and his upstrokes hardly even get “under” the string. they just kinda brush the string, which makes sense, since we dont see that wrist rotation we seem to need for that USX movement. this also makes sense when he talks about how he holds the pick pretty softly. you need a decently firm grasp on the pick to make that USX movement work (for me at least) to keep the pick in the right alignment. im gonna have to come back to this version. and for all who are unaware, “Transpose” is a magical browser extension that allows you to slow down videos by SINGLE percent, transpose the key, and its free. thank me later
sorry all, been at a gig all day, off to the next. havent had time to reply or make any vids. will check in tomorrow. cheers!
heres a vid of mine where im not doing EJ stuff really, but its pretty clear im doing that bounce more often than not. need to ween that out for good (2) Facebook
does it go below 25%? i am not a big fan of chrome, but if it’s good it’s good so can’t be biased if no alternative within another browser that i prefer.
I disagree. It depends on how it’s handled. I’ve done it several times. If things aren’t ‘right’, I’m not continuing the piece. We start it over, sometimes ditch it altogether. To me, the music is more important than what the audience thinks is the proper protocol for a presentation. My groups have always known this about me and accepted it. That’s me, though.
Sorry in advance if I’m misunderstanding but this suggests to me that you may be practicing “hard” things over and over hoping that some day they’ll become “easy”.
I and many others can relate because this approach is ingrained in popular guitar culture (“you just need to practice”). The problem is that it does not work. The best players don’t do “hard” things. They find an easier more reliable way to play stuff.
Anyway, in more practical terms, Troy’s advice above remains the best way to go about this. Film a tremolo in slomo, then film some repeating 2nps phrase in slomo. Go from there.
And if you do happen to have a solid USX motion and don’t want to resort to hybrid for that higher note, just hit that muted string (swipe) and you’re good to go!
EDIT: In case you didn’t buy the Primer (not a requirement ) you can still check out these free webpages to get a summary of all there is to know about picking motions, what does/doesn’t work for various phrases etc. etc.
I keep saying no matter what a more pure usx approach with upstroke escape only musically descended changes, using downstroke swept musically ascended string changes when advantageous, and if desirable to learn to further the speed incorporate swybrid during musically descended string changes and half swybrid maneuvers during musically ascended string changes, this will always be faster. but apparently he hasn’t come to this conclusion yet. but of course for him maybe he can go faster, but i see most people ultra speed using a more pure single escape above all else, otherwise you will become a tensed up elbow monster which is something i frown upon. Maybe when he gets the string hopping up to par he will get it, but probably by then his more pure usx utilizing elements of swybrid will be even faster, and the cycle will continue.
i would offer my own advice if you desire to get string hopping faster, you just have to start incorporating it into your playing all the time once you find the correct motion. And not shy away from it as much by retooling licks and fragments if you want it to get faster. Also it’s not the end of the world if you don’t do it, not everybody picks the same, find your way. Sometimes it might be worth it to assess how well something is working, and also how poorly something is working. There are other ways to skin a cat beyond all this talk of single escape. i have a thumb thing lick that literally goes against the grain of all the stuff i play because when i first started back playing i wanted to do a descending 2 octave harmonic minor run as fast as Yngwie. So i retooled it with upstroke swept string changes using a more dsx thumb thing to be able to. And if I didn’t frequent this forum I wouldn’t even know how to describe the motions I use to do it. So every technique can be improved, but if you want it to improve more you have to do it more, and in different facets of your improvisation.
for instance in my playing i look back into the licks that i can play extremely fast, and i try to kinda work with this as an advantage if i am trying to scout out a ultra fast phrase that i want to create. because at the end of the day you won’t be able to play it all, there isn’t any artist that can do it all.
but trying to apply a tremolo motion to all phrasing is likely not what he meant, but it is a good baseline to assess if you are breaking the plane of the string with usx or dsx with your natural body mechanics that occur when you find a motion that can go fast. now how fast is considered fast, i still don’t know if there is some scale on this site of what is considered the fast baseline? and what if the player doesn’t hit it even with trying to do it, as i am skeptical that not every player is capable of playing fast. i only have one technique that can hit 12 notes per second for descended and ascending crossing the full range of all the strings phrasing, the thumb thing. and honestly the older i have gotten i just try to go at 75% speed of most of the stuff i try to learn which is already incredibly fast which i find i am pleased with my results. sure i can get it faster than 75% the more i play through it on the regular, if i don’t, i lose it. i can regain it quite quickly months down the road, but you can’t remember it all. 
