Yeah, most traditionalists avoid the pinky, for all the reasons you and @tommo are discussing. The independence is a huge issue (if you need to play fast) and it’ shortness makes it tough to reach things without compromising the right hand form that’s typically used. That said, I’ve heard of small subset of traditionalists who have made use of it. Still, I’d go with your approach of just pick m and a. The only place I could see you running into issues is if you were doing fast arpeggios that are approximating a rolling sextuplet that in traditional classical would be played p i m a m i; p i m a m i etc. If the i, m and a fingers are always playing on the three treble strings and the thumb picks any of the bass strings you’d probably have some challenges. Since your pick (plectrum) stroke would take the place of both p and i, you’d have some nasty string skipping. You’d end up in a world where you’d have to do some brief DBX combined with hybrid.
But maybe you wouldn’t even encounter this, as you mention here:
I think that’s largely true. But, there are enough pieces in the repertoire that do require it. It’s almost always going to be on those rolling arpeggios I outlined above. For example the passage here:
Particularly when the speed really kicks in around 2:30…Granted that’s different than the example I mentioned because it looks like the only bass notes played are always on the D string. But there is definitely stuff in the repertoire where the right hand pattern is identical to this but all three bass notes get used while i m and a just hang out on the treble strings the entire time.
I guess if you don’t want to play stuff that requires it, who cares, right?
TL;DR
I think if you’re just trying to add some classical flavor to electric, pick + m and a will cover you nearly 100%.
P.S. @tommo, you monster, you! You’ve inspired me. Don’t do that!!! I need to be working on my DSX right now and I’ll never make progress there if I’m distracted by playing a classical tremolo on the electric lol! Seriously though, that sounds really really good. Did you have any nails on your right hand when you played that? The tone is nice and even between the pick and fingers and that’s tough to do.