I’ve been a fan of the Zenith Passage for quite some time, and their new album is worth a spin if you’re into the likes of Necrophagist or the Faceless. What I like about Justin (aside from the cleanliness and riffs) is how relaxed he always looks. Anything from 200bpm - 240bpm+ and he makes it look incredibly easy.
I guess my question is around what is going on, as often the notes he’s producing seem to belie what looks to be happening visually. Maybe that’s just the forearm component and relaxation. From what I can tell he’s primarily a USX RDT/forearm style player. Thoughts?
Watching the first vid I can see that he’s doing a decent amount of thumb movement as well. I’m not sure if that’s “critical” to his technique, or it might be just a way of evening out the pick attack.
First of all, I’m so happy others care about this!!! I’ve been trying to understand this motion for a while now. I’ve even chatted about it with Dean from Archspire a few years ago who also gets his wiggle on (he was very generous with his time and extremely kind). I messaged Justin about it but was a bit tight lipped about it, understandablely.
From my understanding it’s a way to aid in escape mechanics’ efficiency. It consists of two motions. 1) Hyperextension of thumb and extending the index (scooping motion) helps escaping on an upstroke. 2) The bent thumb (at the knuckle towards the palm) and bending of the index (same direction) motion to help with downward escape. This is to help “kick” the pic out of the strings. I helps with the relaxation at those 210-250BPM you mentioned.
I think a lot of the tech dudes do this; it’s small community who’s main purpose is to push the limits of technique, and must share ideas with each other. Justin and all these dudes (infamously besides kevin heiderich) use the vocabulary and techniques described by this community.
As you know (but maybe not others in the community) Justin is absolutely top of the death metal game. The dude has massive chops and an amazing harmonic vocabulary (RIP Holdsworth), a total alien. I’m so glad he’s getting brought up on the forum.
He has two lessons on “Riffhard” that go over this scooping mechanics as well as his application of sweeping to rythem playing. I think you can get access to them for a dollar at the moment.
P.s. any tech death recommendations? Obv Datalysium is one of my faves of the year.
Justin has explicitly said it is a critical motion he very intentionally worked at. With that being said it seems insane the wiggles work. Haha. So a very valid point.
I’m in the camp that Justin is one of these Post-cracking the code guitarists that can now work on technique with a level of self awareness/consciousness that before was absent. “The secrets of Yngwie were also the secrets for Yngwie himself.” Lol but he didn’t really seem to be curious.
Yes, I’m a URM Enhanced so I’ve watched his riff-hard stuff. The thumb movement aspect of his playing is pretty clear to me, it’s used by many and is a way to help with string changes (inside vs outside)
What blows my mind with Justins playing is the relaxation and almost ‘two movements in one’ that he gets when he’s just playing fast 16th’s/16th note triplets. His wrist moves, his forearm moves, and yet he doesn’t look like a typical USX/Gypsy/Jazz player. It’s almost like there’s some contrary motion between the wrist and forearm. Potentially it’s just a visual illusion due to his longer limbs. (Like PG).
Recommendations - not all ‘tech death’ but technical and cool (repeating some obvious ones for newcomers):
Necrophagist - Epitaph (still the gold standard IMO)
The Faceless - Planetary Duality
Spawn Of Possession - Noctambulant
Psycroptic - all albums are great
Wormed - Krigshu (more grind than tech)
Aborted - The Necrotic Manifesto
Alluvial - Death is but a door
Revocation - Netherheaven
Atrae Bilis - Apexapien
Suffocation - all albums
Yes, he just did an interesting Q&A on the riffhard podcast and talks about how everything is very deliberate. Unfortunately, despite being a ‘post CTC’ guitarist he still can’t explain his motions or what’s he’s doing that well.
If you didn’t know, Justin streams on Twitch, looks like currently Mondays and Wednesdays, and has a Discord. Beyond being a great guitar player, his community is pretty cool!
The footage is quality, and what he’s doing is consistent with the lines we’re hearing. When you say the sound belies the visuals that gets me worried that we’re seeing highly edited playing, but this doesn’t appear that way at first glance. What do you mean exactly?
From the first video, this player is a USX player, so the motion doesn’t need any help escaping on upstrokes. As the OP suggests this is definitely an rdt USX technique, with a little forearm here and there — but mostly wrist.
If you watch around the 41 second mark at 25% speed, this is a good shot of the USX technique in action. It’s pretty textbook. Downward pickslant, USX escape trajectory — no finger movement because it’s not necessary.
Note that when he uses this motion, bending the thumb wouldn’t do anything to change the escape, since the motion originates at the wrist and to a lesser extent the forearm. Bending the thumb would just change the pick attack. The only way the escape would change is if the source of the picking motion changed, and potentially the arm position as well. That does happen — we’ll look at that in a second.
This technique requires all-evens / upstroke-switching construction and most of the fast stuff here fits that. So it all checks out.
On finger motion:
The motion you see around the 1:19 mark, where the thumb bends on every note — this is a double escape technique. John Taylor does the exact same technique, we have some good footage of it, I don’t remember offhand in which clip. But there are two things to note about this technique:
It’s not always necessary, even when you see it fire up. For example, the line at 1:19 is all evens / upstroke switching, so there is actually no need for DBX. The wrist motion would be fine to play this line. So some of what you see when you examine players, especially self-taught players, is idiosyncratic and there isn’t always a mechanical reason for it. Sometimes it’s just, when I play medium speed, I use this technique, when I go faster, I use this other one.
Two, I think this technique is speed-limited. At least in John’s case, it doesn’t really go beyond low to mid 100s sixteenths. In the case of this player, I haven’t looked at other examples of his playing, but just based on what we’re seeing in this clip, I would guess that his fastest playing will be the wrist rdt motion, and not the finger DBX technique.
Finally, the other use for the thumb bend is to create more edge picking for upstroke sweeping, like Frank Gambale. Several examples of that in the first video as well.
Long story short I think the crux of this technique is USX wrist with a little forearm. At medium speeds a completely different technique fires up which is the finger DBX technique. But if I were starting from scratch, and I were already doing the reverse dart wrist motion anyway, then I might as well learn double escape reverse dart too since there’s less of an obvious speed limit.
But as always, there are only so many hours in a day to learn picking techniques before you run out of time to make music. If you can get these two techniques quickly and they work, then, by all means use them!
Thanks for the breakdown @Troy glad I was on the right track.
In terms of what I meant, I guess I just noticed quite a lot of extra movement in his forearm rather than just the more wrist based RDT motions I have seen. My understanding is that USX RDT is effectively a combination forearm movement so maybe that’s what I’m noticing
Sorry for the confusion! You don’t need forearm motion to do upstroke escape technique with the wrist. You can just move the wrist along a diagonal. Here’s what reverse dart USX technique looks like:
There isn’t substantial forearm wiggle and yet the escape path here is plenty vertical enough to escape and do clean string changes. From what I can tell, this is roughly similar to Emil Werstler’s technique.
In general, that’s what I mean when I say a technique “looks like” a particular joint motion. If I see a lot of wrist motion, and the pick appears to be following a path that the wrist can create, then the fact that other joints might be moving slightly doesn’t really matter as much to me. I still think of that as wrist technique.
On other hand, you have some technique where a particular joint moves on every note, and it moves substantially enough that if you remove it, the escape wouldn’t be the same, that’s when I will usually say, hm, that “looks like” some other technique.
So yes, we some forearm in Justin’s technique, and this is common when you look at highly supinated death metal players — especially during all-downstroke playing. But in most of these cases for alternate picking I don’t know that it subtantially alters the picture of what is happening. The component of the motion coming from the wrist is creating this relatively large easily visible motion. The component coming from the forearm might tweak that a little, but if the wrist is already moving in a way that will cause the escape we are seeing, that’s when I will probably say it “looks like” wrist motion to me.
Why does this matter? Well, it doesn’t if someone’s technique is already working, as Justin’s obviously is. However for technique critique when you have players who are flip-flopping, it can help to simplify. For anyone interested in metal, getting an alternate picking motion on a single string that goes very fast and is easy is the most important first step. Whether or not there is forearm in there is not something I’d worry too much about. Just get what is easy and goes fast!
That Instagram post is very helpful so thank you very much. Do you find any speed issues comparing your RDT USX vs your more neutral DSX RDT? I think you could hit around 230bpm with your RDT DSX (non-trailing edge) form?
It sounds like you’ve watched the instructional stuff and understand it well so you probably know more or less what I know. I think the DSX motion might be faster because it’s closer to a flex-extend motion than this motion is.
The clip you have on the platform btw is this motion. So you already play this way. If your interest in this subject is because you’re not getting the speed or ease that you want with it, then there may be some experimenting you can do. But I don’t think adding forearm is going to make it any faster, if that’s what you’re wondering.
The other thing you can do is try to get the DSX motion to work. I started just by screwing around with the trailing edge grip motions then went backwards into the others. Learning what very fast 220+ bpm wrist motion feels like was a big learning experience for understanding what it’s supposed to feel like when wrist motion is working well in general.
Yes, my main area of interest is getting beyond certain speed ‘walls’ that I seem to hit irrespective of escape or technique variations. The DSX variant is still a work in progress, but I have not noticed any major difference vs my standard USX/RDT form. Hitting around 210-220bpm for a bar or so, but nothing close to what you (or Justin etc.) can do
In general unless it performs / feels notably different, it’s probably not really different. That’s what I’ve learned. To me this is a good thing because it didn’t mean I was failing to get faster or hitting my genetic limits, it just meant I was getting the expected results with the expected motion.
Experimenting with the super obviously different feeling tapping-on-the-string motion can be a fun break in that routine. You don’t have to want to play that way forever or even at all, but at least it confirms the ability is there:
The key is to really, obviously, tap down on the strings. Don’t allow the motion to look or feel anything like what you normally do. Its whole purpose is a deliberate change of pace.
Otherwise, if you want to drop a clip in TC happy to take a look.
