Haha thank you for your reassuring words, and I’ve been practicing DSX mainly with universal mind but also with 4nps sometimes.
Keep in mind that many players don’t necessarily learn dsx and usx. What seems to be more common is to learn a secondary motion that enables you to switch strings after an upstroke.
In the primer, it’s described as primary plus secondary motion. There is also the option of systematic swiping.
If I were you, I’d work on milking your primary first. Get good at applying your dsx motion to different licks and sequences etc. Once you are comfortable with this at speed, then have a look at adding in the occasional upstroke string change to learn what you need to do for this.
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What is universal mind?
If you’re going to focus on DSX, one thing I found in my Van halen obsession was using the three finger grip gives you a lot of control over the pick when doing down ward pick slanting. The two fingers give a lot of surface area to work with, and two fingers to change pick orientation in many ways. Might help if thats the angle that feels natural to you? I found myself using a lot of dsx movements when doing the three finger grip. It’s like writing with a pen.
Thats something to think about, how you use a pen. You learnt it without thinking about it. It just turned into this automatic movement, and you just think how to spell the words to describe the concepts In your mind. You don’t even think about how you’re doing it.
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Wow I thought its just usx and dsx but there are so many possible combinations and hahaha yeah I’m milking my dsx currently, somehow my hand is slowly going into a more refined position, the downstrokes are become more precise, etc etc, and once I’ve got it good enough to hit 150bpm with it, I will look into what I should develop next, whether dsx+secondary motion, or dsx+usx
Universal mind by John Petrucci
Although the song is purely alternatively picked, tommo showed me a version with just dsx picking and I’m working on that currently, it took one day to go from 60 bpm to 100 bpm (unlike with shit habits, which made me take a week). Although the bpm ladder gets harder to climb in the later stages, it took me one whole day to get from 100 to 110, and 110 still isn’t completely clean.
And the pen analogy is great haha, right now my goal is to just have a rough understanding of the ideal habits, like pickslanting, and just repeat the over and over, and speeding it up, so movement get slowly refined and burnt into my psyche. Also thank you for the 3 fingers tip, I will give it a try.
I’d take @tommo advice and not change your grip unless you need to some reason. Stick to what is working and build from there.
A three finger grip will change your arm position completely which means the wrist motions are completely different.
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Ahhh I was thinking maybe I could use that to help with upstroke stuff once I’m good with DSX, but if it changes my arm position completely maybe I’ll need some other way out, anyway that’s a problem for way later, rn I just somehow gotta reach 150bpm with dsx 🥲
You can experiment with it for a variety of things. I’d just not change grip for the fast dsx tremolo you discovered recently. If it ain’t broke…
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It sounds like you are exclusively practicing with the “slowly increasing bpms” approach.
Try also the “play it sloppy at 150bpm and clean it up gradually” approach, because it will immediately show you if there any problems with the motions.
You could even try 160bpm straight away, then bring it down to 150 or 140 and see if it feels easier.
A must watch Shawn Lane lesson on the topic:
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Ah yeah not making any changes to my dsx, other than the ones that are coming in naturally with higher speed and more practice.
Ayyy I saw that video in an old post by you yesterday. I have been sort of following this approach, if I can’t play 100 clean, I jump to 110 and play like garbage, then come back to 100 and it feels easier, haven’t tried jumping straight to high numbers but I’ll do that. Lately I’m kind of struggling with wrapping my head around the tempo so hopefully that will help.
Also I was chunking the song into groups of four, but that became hard to follow with the metronome, so i changed that to chunks of 8 notes and it helped a little. I’ve also cropped the initial part of the song and jump between the tempos, with the goal of identifying every note at original speed, because I feel like being able to imagine the music correctly should help, that’s doable for me with other songs but I don’t why the notes in universal mind just sort of blend in for me.
Man thanks for that advice, I found out I can play the first 8 notes at 160 bpm max, and the last 8 at 140, this is weird because I was struggling like hell with 110 and it felt like 150 is impossible, my fingers just can’t go that fast. Now it feels possible, I need to just speed up the last 8 notes, then connect the whole thing.
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Can you explain what you mean? My arm position doesn’t change.
Most players who use a middle or three finger grip will have a more supinated arm position. It’s what gives the wrist motion that sort of “writing” feeling when playing.
If you use a trigger grip, switch to a middle or three finger grip, the arm will likely become more supinated.
It’s explained in more detail later in the primer also
If you’re doing DSX that won’t be an issue. It comes about cus the fingers are holding the pick a longer distance from the palm than an index grip. I’ve done it for years and its worked well for me. I think its a valid thing to try. If nothing else it increases options and finesse with a pick.
Three finger or middle finger grip is great for a lot of things for sure. Crosspicking in particular I found it easier than index finger grips.
I am thinking I use an upward pickslant with escape out the bottom side for moving from high strings to low or from 1st string to sixth. Sometimes though Ill alternate pick or up sweep pick…
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Tommo I’m still only able to play 110 clean with the metronome :’)
150/160 on the metronome feels too difficult to keep up with if I divide those 16 notes into groups of 4, so I divided them into groups of 8, and even though I could play fast like that, it makes my tempo go up and down, and even with that approach, I can’t even do the riff two times clean with the metronome at 120 bpm.
According to what I could gather from the older posts on here, the best approach seems to be to just let go of the metronome and play as fast as I can, I may have put on a mental block with playing at low speeds too much, is that what I should do? Just use the song as guidance and try my best to replicate it?
Also naturally my mind reverts to hearing the song in a chunk of 6-10. 8-8 or 4-4-4-4 is something that takes effort for me to do, and I cant do that with the song at 100% speed.
Hi @Thornus , it’s all ok 
Once you are past the first hurdle (finding a fast picking motion — which you have if I remember correctly your DSX video example), you have other hurdles like hand sync, timing etc. which can take a bit longer to smooth out.
One recommendation I’d have is to not get stuck repeating things 1000 times hoping for different results (ask me how I know 
). Try to precisely find out what the problems are so you can try to come up with solutions. Keep trying different tempos to work on different aspects of this.
Of course, we can help you with all this! When you feel like it you can post a footage showing us where you are at with the Universal mind lick and we’ll take it from there.
Just as an example you could post 3 videos (say 10-15sec each): 110~120bpm, 130~140-ish bpm and a 150~160bpm version.
Don’t worry about mistakes, just show us what happens in all these cases and we’ll see!
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