That’s correct but it can be even more vertical. 7:00 - 1:00 still counts as RDT and for whatever reason, the more ‘vertical’ this motion becomes, the faster I can do it. If I balance my arm on my thigh, let my hand overlap my knee and do a door knocking motion as fast as I can, all I need to do is supinate a tad and try to get it a little more diagonal. I can get this crazy fast. My hand and wrist just look like they are made of rubber. I can’t necessarily apply those big uncontrolled movements to guitar playing but just feeling that freedom and elasticity of the motion is valuable.
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For sure. I really don’t expect casual users to need a super technical understanding of exactly how all the joints work. All the recent Primer updates have split up most of the “how to do it” from the “how it works” stuff, and labeled the “how it works” stuff completely separately as “reference”. Not only that, but the lessons include specific instructions to skip over the reference sections and only come back later if you want to learn the technical.
The more we can converge on “do this” type teaching, as, in the recent posts in this thread, the better:
For the power users, if they do understand the terminology and find it useful, great for them.
In this video he does appear to use some rotation, but is picking way slower.
Here’s a better video in terms of some close ups. I definitely see rotation in this one. His whole forearm wiggles.
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Interesting. Yes, definitely some forearm on display here for a good amount of this. Sorry for oversimplifying. I only watched into the 20-second something range of the first video and those motions don’t look wiggly.
In this clip as well, when he does the descending scale stuff in this clip, there’s no significant forearm rotation. 3:38 for example. I would say he’s got more than one motion.
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He’s doing it all from the same setup/posture though, right? If I (try to) use his form, I can get a wrist USX, and I can do a forearm rotation/wiggle USX. I cannot do the DSX he’s doing in the first video of his I posted. The downward slant feels pretty garage spikey to me.
I know it’s not important and I should focus on what I can do and not worry about what he does, in terms of actual application. The nerd in me wonders though: how’s he manage DSX from this setup? Can you think of any other players that have a similar setup and motion to him?
I’m definitely digging his stuff. He’s got a softer, more soulful side too, which is cool considering his blistering chops. Lots of guys like him just wanna shred lol!
Yes, same arm position, different motions. Supinated arm setup makes sense for this.
It’s perfectly fine to be curious. It’s my whole job. Where we give the advice to not worry about what other players do is when players post here and don’t say why they’re asking about a particular player, leaving us (the teachers) guessing. I’ve learned the hard way after writing some very long forum posts that a lot of times, they’re not really looking for a detailed technical explanation of what player ABC is doing. They’re really just having trouble with some basic thing (speed, endurance, tension, accuracy, etc.), but not saying so explicitly. The end result is “Why didn’t you say so? Here are three things you can try…”
My reflexive response now whenever anyone asks about famous player ABC is to try and find out why before writing a novel in response. That’s where we’re coming from on that.
I’m not familiar with the DSX thing you’re referring to that Igor does. I wouldn’t automatically assume from transcribing the fretting that there has to be DSX in there though unless you can actually see DSX motion occurring. There are lots and lots of ways to get around that, including the most obvious: picking even numbers of notes per string (whichever escape fits your picking motion), and simply fretting something completely different. You’d be amazed how often this can pass.
Nuno is a DSX player with a reasonably supinated arm position and index finger grip.
It’s not a question of being able to do the motion using that arm position, it’s just the pick attack. I need to use a three-finger / middle-finger grip to not have garage spikes with EVH / Morse / Lee arm position and DSX wrist motion. There is probably some way to orient the pick with an index grip and a supinated arm position to not have spikes if you fool around with it. For example, you will notice Igor does upstroke sweeps with a downward pickslant. But there’s also a lot of edge picking, and the supination causes the pick to tilt toward the electronics / pots as well. It’s not a strictly pickslant / no pickslant thing.
I would point out that if you’re trying to figure out a way to do mixed escape while having a pronounced DWPS orientation, we haven’t seen that. Olli Soikkelli, Andy Wood, and Albert Lee are about as DWPS as we’ve seen while being mixed escape, which is to say, not a super lot.
Looking at some of the other stuff he plays after I found this video, I would assume that as well. He’s pretty stylistically diverse and seems to play things that seem to require more than just a one directional escape.
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Here’s some Nuno DSX:
Couple very brief closeups in the Boston show. His pick orientation doesn’t look super duper DWPS to me so I suspect that the arm position really isn’t that supinated, maybe a little more than Andy. If we filmed this we would see slight dwps and for outside picking sequences that might be fine so long as he can actually pick the last note on the string without sliding off.
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So, it’s this:
He starts that on a down stroke and I can’t see any economy or pulloffs. I assumed he’s doing DSX because that’s the only way I can play that lick at high speeds. Plus @Fossegrim and @cmcgee11235 mentioned they saw his downstrokes escaping at times. I can play that with DSX (though not from his posture…) I cannot play that at all with USX, regardless of posture. Sure, I could refinger it. But I’m curious how he does it. I already know how I could play (albeit, not quite as fast or as clean has him lol)
I can’t tell anything from that. This could easily be done with USX and just fretting whatever.
We had a thread on here a few years back where a long-time viewer who knows the material well was doing alternate-picked descending fours with his motion, which looked like USX to me. I told him he was likely “displacing” pickstrokes to get evens while fretting something different, i.e. picking / fretting mismatch. It sounded pretty good. He filmed it, sure enough, that was what was happening. He was not picking what he thought he was picking. It’s very common.
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That’s pretty interesting. I know what I noticed when I tried playing that with pure USX is that I’d do a hammer from nowhere on the B string 18th fret, right when my pick got stuck on the E string:
It actually sounded just fine.
I don’t even know why I care about this stuff lol! I guess ever since I found your site and learned about all these amazing ‘rules’ that the different escape trajectories require, I always get really interested at the stuff that isn’t super obvious brainer.
Here’s what I mean by pickstroke displacement:
It’s very easy to do stuff like this without knowing it, while playing fast lines with single-escape motion that are not supposed to be playable with those motions. I’m not saying that’s what Igor is doing. We can’t tell from that clip. I’m just giving you a visual example of why you can’t really assume from fretting that a particular motion is or isn’t happening without some other corroborating evidence.
Ha! That is pretty cool! Thanks for that explanation. I think that’s what I was doing in my ‘hammer from nowhere’ reference. Picking a different string that I’m fretting, but the pick strokes still work out and I ‘hear’ the right note at the right time so my brain accepts it as clean (enough) playing.
Exactly. I think that lots of things we call mistakes aren’t really mistakes. It’s like your motor system coming to you and saying, “Hey, you wanted those notes — I have those notes! Is this ok??” And if you keep doing it, that’s like saying, “Thanks son, yes it is!”
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I think I’m ready to close this thread.
How does Igor Paspalj do it? Great hand sync, and floor it! 
The rest takes care of itself.
And now something to make me feel like crap about my playing:
You forgot to add, “always, without exception, wear a tank top”
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@Troy I just watched your new Pickslanting Primer chapters on RDT. So awesome!
The speed capability you showed reminded me of Igor, since you labeled him as RDT (though I think we saw him do some other motions as well). He posted a video of him playing Flight of the Bumblebee at 240 bpm a few years back
(and if anyone is interested, he was nice enough to play it slow and show us all the parts here)
It seems like a largely USX piece since it’s lots of 4nps chromatic lines, starting on downstrokes. The main theme, as he plays it, confuses me though as you can’t do it with pure USX or DSX
So now for my question - > is RDT capable of mixed escape or DBX at this crazy speed? Or do you suspect he’s just doing single escape with either swiping or pickstroke displacement? I guess this isn’t far off my initial question on how he’s playing some of the licks in his “Full Throttle” tune haha. Same situation where it doesn’t really work out cleanly when playing ‘by the rules’ of single escape. I’m guessing the answer at these speeds is to just floor it and hope for the best?
That’s awesome — 240 for a minute straight is some real efficiency. It’s great to know that’s possible. I suspect that there are still genetic differences at play in this type of thing, but I also suspect they are probably smaller than what we usually think of. We’ll learn more as more people experiment with these types of motions.
The motion in the bumblebee clip looks like wrist forearm because we see wiggle on every note. But yes, the wrist motion in this case, and in just about all cases of wrist-forearm, as far as I can tell, would be RDT. If I recall there was another clip where it didn’t look like as much wiggle, so there may be some variation in his playing.
Absolutely no judgment intended, this is a great performance. Based on the tutorial video where there is no backing track, I don’t think there is double escape happening here. Any of the usual suspects (displacement, swiping, etc.) are probably what is happening in most of these cases.
There is a great example in the motion tutorial where you can see swiping very clearly but can’t hear it at all:
This was a mistake in the sense that I wasn’t even trying to play that note on the A string, I was just trying to go 0-3-0 on the low string, but picked too far on that note and hit the A instead. And it actually sounds really cool. This is a classic example of how picking techniques evolve and become part of someone’s technique in a more systematic way.
In general, when you do see actual double escape during USX playing it only ever occurs during ascending outside string changes, i.e. a downstroke going to a higher string. Notice that even in this example, that pickstroke is a little different than the others, moving more parallel to the strings instead of rest stroking in a more obviously trapped direction. Sometimes you do see these pickstrokes getting over the string. There are examples of this in the Joscho Stephan interview where he plays ascending sixes and sometimes clears the bar, other times swipes. This is why swiping is effective — it’s not a rest stroke that just powers through the string.
The opposite case, a downstroke going to a lower string, is very unlikely without a helper motion just given that the arm is tilted too far to permit the downstroke to escape.
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Very cool, thank you for the explanation!