From what I understand, Marty doesn’t play upward sweeps (high to low). With this in mind, how do you think he would have played this lick in Valley of Eternity?
I found a video on Youtube with some tab and it was transcribed like this:
The tab sounds reasonably accurate to me. Perhaps he would have played it with an upward sweep, or would he have played some other kind of fingering?
The lick happens around 3:19
There is a similar lick in Symphony of Destruction -
Well, here’s a clear shot of what he does in Symphony from a '92 performance:
He uses some double downstrokes to get from a higher string to a lower one, accomplished by having some push and pull with the rhythm.
Even better, here he is playing a 4 string “sweep” in Hangar 18:
And finally that same Hangar 18 bit, isolated from the studio recording:
He’s definitely using all downstrokes for the descending parts, which of course causes them to lag slightly, and then he rushes the ascending sweeps to catch up. So, he’s almost definitely doing that in your original example, though perhaps with a different fingering.
To be honest, I never thought of checking live footage 
. It’s impressive that he can do descending sweeps with all downstrokes. I wonder if he did the same for any Cacophony passages that required descending sweeps? I’m not that familiar with Cacophony’s music, but I do know that Jason Becker played a lot of sweeps, so I’m sure there are some doubled descending runs in there.
You’re right about the ascending sweeps being rushed to catch up - I had never noticed that detail about his playing, or even thought about it!
Can you expound upon this? Why do they have to lag?
Consecutive downstrokes going in the “wrong” direction, descending rather than ascending, require a constant motion of reversal so that they’ll even work. For example, you play a downstroke on high E, you need to reposition to play a downstroke on B, play the downstroke on B, you need to reposition to play a downstroke on G, et cetera. This is opposed to using all downstrokes to ascend, in Marty’s case with a downward pickslant, which consistently puts the pick in an advantageous position. The ascending portion flows easily, the descending portion is “hoppy”.
Just listen to him play the isolated Hangar 18 arpeggio I linked, at reduced playback speed. What is typically transcribed as 16th notes is imbalanced, the ascending part faster than the descending. This isn’t on purpose for musical reasons, this is because of how his technique functions: he couldn’t play it perfectly evenly. And I mean that as no slight against him, Marty is awesome.
