Hi! Beni here.
I just wanted to check whether this motion I stumbled upon last week is indeed a forearm + wrist blend.
When I did the motion tests, forearm was my second-fastest movement (230–235 bpm), second only to my elbow motion (245 bpm). But as a lefty playing righty, even a slightly supinated setup has always felt a bit alien to me, so I never really tried that hard to get it going.
Hey! I believe it does look like it. Maybe with more wrist and less forearm. I am also a lefty playing righty and have a similar form.
Awesome! Thanks for the insight!
Do you have any advice on developing USX?
I can already do 180+ BPM tremolo, maxing out at 200 BPM for a bar but getting easier and progressively faster every day. I’m just not really sure where to go from here.
I would start working on lines that test your USX motions such as even numbers of notes per string. Working on 2nps lines, like pentatonics or 2 ups 7th arpeggios, are really helpful. Also making sure you can do the 2 string economy motion, both in isolation and within alternate picking lines.
Since you’re a Malmsteen fan (judging by your user name 
) I highly recommend @Chris_Brooks 's Viking Shred course. Its one of the most comprehensive studies in Yngwie’s playing, and thus USX vocabulary, that I’ve ever seen.
I am a lefty playing right handed as well and my fastest motion is pretty close to that. Perhaps there’s a pattern there?
I think the motion is almost entirely rotation as the wrist is basically locked at the flexed position with no extension from what I can see, so the main driver seems to be the rotating arm.
Also, about developing a usx vocabulary, can you play single-string lines with accents on the (trapped) downstroke? If not, I’d start with that.
Great! Thank you for the info!
Interesting. Do you think that left-handedness in this case affects the way the motion manifests itself?
I also feel like the motion has some kind of rotational feel to it, but when recording the movement, the forearm doesn’t wiggle like crazy and seems more like a balance between wrist and forearm.
Definitely gonna try some single-string lines to test it out a little bit.
Joe Stump is left handed and also uses a forearm/wrist driving motion, also with finger motion. Miles Dimitri Baker is the opposite, lefty playing righty, and is also forearm/wrist, so it’s the same, he’s using his non dominant hand to pick.
I’ve posted before that I’ve made the anecdotal observation that I’ve yet to see a player who picks with their non dominant hand use a pure RDT wrist technique. It’s either elbow, forearm, fingers, or even dart thrower wrist (Shawn Lane).
That’s a really interesting hypothesis, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Even though people who play this way (left handed who play right handed guitar) could be considered somewhat ambidextrous, a pure RDT technique probably requires a very specific combination of mechanical movements that may be harder to replicate with the non-dominant hand.
It could be that the hand you’ve trained for fine motor tasks like writing has developed a more refined ability to coordinate those specific movements, while the non-dominant hand simply hasn’t had the same kind of training.
I can’t prove this right now, but I’m lefty playing righty and I use wrist RDT with little to no forearm. However, I think there still may be something to this: it’s possible that wrist-forearm USX is somehow “easier to learn” (scare quotes because that concept is vague and I don’t know exactly how I’d quantify it).
Yeah, keep in mind I just said it was an anecdotal observation. When my wife first picked up guitar she had a RDT motion and was born left handed, but became cross-handed due to an elbow injury when she was a little kid that forced her to use her right hand more. She can actually write with both hands at the same time. So I’m sure that there are tons of exceptions.
To add to my observations that lefties naturally gravitate towards non-RDT picking technique, I’ve had two known lefty playing righty students, and one righty-playing-lefty Ala Dimitri Baker, and the two lefties were wrist/forearm/fingers and elbow, and the righty-playing-lefty was Dart Thrower.
That’s really fascinating! It definitely adds some nuance to the observation.
It would be really cool to have a neurological explanation for why this pattern might occur. Perhaps the way those motor pathways develop can predispose someone toward certain motions that are “easier” to access.
Both of my arms achieved almost equal results in the various motion tests, including both of my wrists in all variations of the movement, maxing out at 190 bpm.
When trying to do a wrist motion, DT is the one that comes naturally from my pronated setup. The only exception is the motion that I play in both videos, where the wrist is flexed and the forearm kicks in.
Strangely enough, I have a pretty good ascending economy-picking motion when changing the anchor points on my palm (enabling DWPS) + some kind of finger movement (or at least it feels like it), all while maintaining pronation. I never really use it, though. Maybe I should upload it to see what’s going on.