I’ve been playing DSX for more than 10 years and I’ve always found it really difficult to work within its limitations, I really need to learn something different to progress. I’m sticking to my usual DSX + hybrid picking chops for now and I’ll just concentrate on writing with these tools.
Have you taken any of our table-top tests? If you can move your wrist pain-free on a table, I can’t see any real reason why doing the same thing on a guitar would be problematic. After all, Al Di Meola / Andy Wood-style wrist motion is the same motion EVH uses for USX just with a different pick grip and slightly different arm position. And of course plain old sideways deviation wrist motion is USX for Eric Johnson and Mike Stern and other players with maybe the most common arm position of all time.
Are you hyperflexible? do you have any joint or connective tissue issues?
I haven’t watched new additions to the primer yet. There’s no doubt that I can move my wrist fast, on the table or on the guitar while PRONATED. If moving your wrist while resting on the guitar in a certain way and generating a certain escape path was as easy as moving it on the table, we would have great pickers around every corner and CtC wouldn’t be needed. I know that I shouldn’t overthink things, but just look at how many people pick up the guitar and how many end up having great or at least decent right hand technique. Not so many from what I’ve seen. The clockface motions tutorial was released in something like 2018 and for now the only person I’ve seen on the forum that figured out DBX to a quite good level was @spirogyro. I’m super jealous of that beaumont rag clip!
I’ve recently reverted to my oldest DSX technique, it’s fast, smooth, sounds really good on clean channel. I can move my wrist really fast, I don’t have a single complaint about this one. And it works on every guitar, electric, acoustic, nylon, it never fails.
However, I have some kind of problem with supinated techniques.
I can actually play faster with this one compared to pronated version but it’s not as smooth, I usually get pain under my forearm after doing it. That recent Paul Gilbert licks video I’ve put in the Show and Tell section sounded good, but I’ve practiced it for something like 2 hours and the next day the pain was still present. I’m having a downward pickslant and a lot of edge picking so it doesn’t sound good on clean, I’m usually using it with palm muting and distorted sound. That’s probably a pickgrip thing, Andy is getting a really nice tone on acoustic with this one. Also, with this technique I have trouble using descending sweep and playing 2nps, I’m using it mostly for scalar patterns.
And with USX it’s a total mess, I’m scraping my index finger on the strings so I supinate less, and then I start doing a trapped pickstroke. When I’m using pronated DSX and the pick is in the air, I don’t feel anything, having that thumb heel placed on the bridge/body, but with USX I’m constantly fighting to prevent the pick from falling below the plane of strings, like I lack correct anchor point or something.
I’m not trolling, I can’t go any faster than in the vid above. Forearm version is faster but still the amount of pain I get from these is far beyond normal fatigue, it’s my body telling me I’m going to fuk up my hand badly if I continue to do this. In reality I might be doing a diet version of stringhopping, adding a little extension to downstrokes to prevent my index finger from hitting the strings and a little extension to upstrokes to make the pickstroke escaped, I don’t know. The pain is not the same at all times, the moment when I’m changing strings is the worst.
@aelazary
Hi, no, I don’t have any of these issues 
.
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Honestly, I’d kill for that outside gilbert motion you are doing.
That “pronated DSX” clip is super duper awesome! It’s an ultra fantastic motion you have going there. It also doesn’t look like a pronated arm setup to me. Look at your forearm versus Molly Tuttle. You can see quite a bit of the underside of your forearm versus Molly’s technique, where not much of that part of the arm is visible:
The fleshy part of the pinky heel, on the palm, near the wrist joint, does that part of your hand contact the strings or bridge when you do your DSX motion on the high strings of the guitar? If so, then this may actually be 2:00 wrist motion, which would be Di Meola / Andy Wood style wrist motion, not really the pronated deviation variety.
Either way, it’s sort of academic because either of those arm positions and wrist motions can also be used to play double escape lines, or mixed escape lines, if that’s what you want. Have you tried doing that with this arm position that is comfortable, and what are the results?
I wouldn’t read too much into what you see on the forum as far as the one-off roll patterns lesson we did a few years back. How many bluegrass players do we have on here? Not many. For more general rock and jazz playing, where most of our users live, you’re really looking at the kind of mixing and matching of motions that you see in @spirogyro’s clips or Paul Gilbert or Andy Wood’s playing. And we actually don’t have any tutorial matieral on that yet.
Generally speaking, we know when we’ve hit the nail on the head with our tutorial material because when we do, we start seeing results. The table-top tests and case studies in our latest update are a good example of this. Players who either didn’t have fast motion, or thought they didn’t have fast motion, or didn’t know what motion they had at all, suddenly are coming up with nice tempo numbers and starting to do tremolo they thought they couldn’t do.
The recent update takes some steps to showing that simply doing a motion correctly, even on a table, is a trickier proposition for most people without clear teaching. Most people have no idea what kind of wrist motion EVH uses, or how to do it properly. Showing them with a pen that this “weird” technique is one they most likely already know how to do is a nice step forward. It gives them a tangible sense of how easy it’s supposed to feel like when done correctly, which is a practical advantage when trying this on an actual guitar.
Ditto for the Al Di Meola motion in our second wrist test. I would venture that almost nobody, even very experienced players, have any clue that this is really a diagonal wrist motion. All the complaints we get about wrist technique are “I can’t move my hand side to side”. The contorted clips we have seen on here from uninformed players trying to do it on an instrument points to the lack of clarity in how the motion should even work. Having them do this correctly on a table, and showing them they can already do it, should be a nice first step. And again, not as obvious as it looks.
In your case, I would always go with what’s working. Your DSX technique is killer and I don’t see why that couldn’t be a starting point for doing mixed escapes type alternate picking. The approach is the same. Go fast with a phrase that “shouldn’t work” because it contains mixed escapes, but focus on pain-free smoothness and ignore mistakes. What does the result look like? Test and refine from there. If any alteration is necessary to that approach, it should be pretty small and not enough to alter the feeling of comfort you already have with it.
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Really good attack and control you have in that pronated DSX clip!
When doing that I’m always resting the thumb side on the strings, pinky side doesn’t touch the bridge or strings. I think it’s pronated very lightly and even less when I’m going to high strings. You can clearly see that I’m resting on low e there.
I may actually be pronated so slightly that I’m adding some flextension to change strings clearly. I’ve tried to go even more pronated and add flexion to upstrokes to do Molly type DBX and it felt totally like stringhopping.
The results are this, merging flextension DSX and rotational USX. Same as USX, looks fine, is fast, but causes pain to the point that I can’t even practice it anymore because my body is telling me I’m going to get an injury. I can also do short bursts of DBX with these motions.
Looks like correct forearm + wrist DBX, right? You wouldn’t believe how painful playing a few arpeggios like this is for me.
I’ve been doing that kind of “just go for it practice” since the very beginnig and it didn’t work for me when it comes to upstroke changes, that’s why I’m here. I’m currently looking at some really old clips, I was already doing the pronated-or-not-pronated DSX thing back then, basically the same way as I’m doing it now and it was more than 10 years ago. It was the time when I was completely immersed in Yngwie, Jason Becker, Marty Friedman, Steve Vai and I digested tons of their music. Everything I’ve learned back then was by flooring it and cleaning up over time. If I could figure out mixed escapes by feel I’d have done it by then, because I’d played guitar non-stop during those years. I was already conscious of the limitations of my picking hand, I just assumed I was doing something wrong. When I was 17 I worked really hard to change it by playing lots of Bach and ended up stringhopping (I didn’t know what it was called, but it clearly didn’t work for me), so I went back to DSX. Then a few years later I started studying jazz and I’ve had a really bad time transcribing anything so I decided to relearn my picking hand and ended up stringhopping again. Then I’ve found CtC and after 2 years ended up doing god knows what that looks like correct forearm USX/DBX but isn’t correct forearm USX/DBX.
That’s basically how I learned and thanks to CtC I’m not a tiniest bit ashamed of it anymore 
. Zoomed in a bit and the DSX is already there, more pronated on lower strings, less pronated on higher, same technique at 13yo and 25yo.
That forearm-wrist kind of DBX came to me when I was transcribing solo Clint Strong played over “Oleo” on his instructional DVD. That felt like something that coud work but as with everything USX/DBX related, I spent a lot of time with it and got stuck again. Seriously, if you saw how many hours I’ve spent on trying to learn this stuff in the first year after discovering CtC, you wouldn’t believe that I can’t still do it.
@Pepepicks66 @gabrielthorn
Thank you guys, I’d exchange all my DSX motions and my left nut for a functional DBX though.
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Thanks for the details. Yes, I know your form is more pronated on the lower strings, that’s why I asked about the contact points when you play on the higher strings. Your form in that second photograph looks exactly like Andy Wood and Al Di Meola. Is your pinky heel touching the bridge or the strings when you use that second photo form?
The arm position is just a clue. It doesn’t tell us what kind of wrist motion you’re making. A player with a pronated arm position could make a deviation motion, or a 2:00 motion, the results would be functionally the same — they would be DSX. But when you play on the higher strings, and you use that Andy Wood looking arm position, that narrows the possibilities. You can only be DSX with 2:00 wrist motion because deviation (3:00 motion) would trap.
Is this what you’re referring to as “adding in flextension”? Because I just call that 2:00 motion nowadays. More importantly, if you’re doing it on the upper strings, there’s the possibility that you’re doing it on all of them, regardless of arm position, even when you are more pronated. Once motions are learned, they’re pretty resistant to change, and your 13 year old clip, which is awesome, speaks to that for sure.
The more supinated attempts where you’re using some forearm look great, but if you’re saying it feels painful then I of course there’s no reason to use that form.
What happens when you use your form from the second photograph, and you just play lines where you also have upstroke string changes and you ignore those string changes? In other words, you allow mistakes to happen whenever they would happen. It shouldn’t feel any different in terms of comfort to just playing a DSX line, does it?
Because if you can do that to where it is comfortable, then you can probably clean that up and make it work for you.
I’m not sure, maybe just scratches it a little, the thumb side is the main anchor point.
For some reason I assumed that when you’re pronated you have to do pure deviation motion to play fast and thought that was what I’ve always been doing. You’re right it’s probably more or less the same deviation and flextension mix from different arm positions.
It sounds like complete swipefest, there’s more noise than actual notes or I’m adding a little painful forearm rotation on upstrokes because that’s what I’ve practiced.
Your arm looks supinated against the guitar. So to get the downstroke to escape, you can’t move deviationally because it would trap. So I think you’re doing what Al, John McLaughlin, Andy Wood, Paul Gilbert, and lots of other great wrist DSX players do, which is the 2:00 motion.
Here’s some Glen Campbell, who quite accidentally created the world’s clearest instructional videos for 2:00 wrist motion ever filmed – multiple times!
For some reason the forum doesn’t want to link to the timestamps. So, time marker 1 min 15 secs:
…and time marker 2 min 3 secs:
I’m pretty sure Glen is doing what you’re doing, which is making the pick escape by moving along a diagonal which close to deviation, but not actually deviation. Again, because with the arm turned this would have to be true.
Why does this matter? Because if you can do this motion without pain, then the only remaining question is whether you can do pure deviation without pain. That would be your upstroke escape motion. If so, then you have both of the motions needed to play mixed escape lines from the arm position you like, with no involvement from the forearm, which, for whatever reason is causing you pain.
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Can you take a sort of “tension inventory” while you do this and see if you can relax what’s causing your pain without becoming unable to do the motion, if that makes any sense?
It may not be the motion itself that is causing the pain in the first place, but the act of doing it is aggravating an existing ailment - possibly tightness of a forearm muscle, or tightness of a muscle higher up the arm that is pulling the ones lower in the arm tight too and you are feeling it with the forearm helper motion.
Im recent weeks I have been struggling with pinched nerves and muscle soreness on hands an wrist - hand were getting numb. All these have dramatically improved after I worked on my neck, shoulder, tricep and top of the forearm. I would have never had made any progress unless I found ‘DIY Joint Pain Relief’ on Youtube, because I cant acces the physio I was getting pre-covid. He has a couple of specific guitar related ones.
Just thought I’d through it out there…
(Just FYI: The timestamps work for me!)
I was super jealous when I saw your Gilbert string skipping runs on insta, I can’t play like that
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Thanks. I edited to use the “share” button with the “youtu.be” link format. Not sure why that works and the other format doesn’t.
Hey, thank you all for the replies.
@Troy
Yes, I know how lightly supinated wrist DBX works, I just thought I’m mainly a pronated player. To be honest I’m totally confused where pronation ends and supination starts now, I’m definitely not as supinated as Glen Campbell but stil in supination area on higher strings probably.
@Prlgmnr
Not really, it’s the motion itself and there are not that many moving parts that I can analyze like that. Forearm pain, nothing more specific.
@PickingApprentice
You may be right, one of the reasons i’m here is because 2,5 years ago I had RSI caused by playing Paganini’s Caprice 5 and 16 with stringhopping for 6 hours a day. I didn’t play for more than a month after that and it felt like it’s healed but some remains of it may be still there…
or not, because yesterday I’ve stumbled upon something that seems to be a possible solution to my USX problems.
When looking at this video which is my attempt to play wrist only USX I’ve realized something
I may actually have a problem with the range of motion. I remember the first time I’ve noticed ulnarized picking motion, it was even before CtC on a workshop with Tomasz Andrzejewski, one of the finest polish shredders. His ulnarized motion is super apparent, after realizing that I’ve looked at Oparin and Gilbert and felt like they’re doing the same thing, so what did I do? I just pulled my upper arm up a little bit and tried to place my hand in a more vertical manner on the bridge. After looking at the video yesterday and searching for answers I started to think, what can actually regulate the level of how ulnar you go and it’s basically upper arm or elbow. So instead of placing my hand in my usual manner, I started to experiment and I’ve arrived in a place where my upper arm isn’t really raised, my whole hand is placed more to the right and to make my motion ulnarized I flex my elbow more. After doing that I thought that it reminds me of qwertygitarr’s setup and he is the USX role model for me.
Started experimenting and currently I’m flipflopping all over the place, constanly re-adjusting my arm and elbow and trying different things. I’ve found some kind of wrist-elbow USX with 3 finger grip that looks super similar to Albert Lee’s and it’s way more comfortable than any kind of USX I’ve done so far. I wanted to record it today but I can’t do it lol. I’ve played a lot yesterday and at the end my hand felt better than before playing, instead of the usual forearm pain.
I’ve had these moments of “this is it!” a few times before and usually got stuck not so long after, but I’m finally feeling like I’m learning something new and it’s a good thing. I’ll try to record some vids on the weekend.
@Brendan and I encountered a similar issue previously. It appears that a stamp will work when you click “play” on the embedded video, but if you open the video in a new window, the stamp is ignored.
Ok, I’ve managed to catch them.
3 finger grip, mostly wrist with some forearm:
More or less the same thing with traditional (trigger?) grip:
They feel ten times better than the previous ones. I’ll be going for the traditional grip version for now and see what happens. Feels like I have to relearn tracking.
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These look and sound great. You’re saying you can now do this without pain? I’m not totally following what the difference is between these attempts and the earlier attempts that were painful. Is it that the wrist orientation is more ulnar, and it was the radial side of the range of motion that was painful?
If so, yeah, that sounds like injury to me. I’m not familiar with anything painful happening in any motions I know that work like this, so you may indeed have something to be wary of. If you live in a part of the world that has better health care than we do in the US (which isn’t hard), maybe some imaging with an orthopedist might reveal something.
Re: supination / pronation, I just mean the arm bones in relation to the string plane. Both of your clips in post #25 look supinated to me, in that I can see amount of the forearm’s underside — just the second clip just more so. In a strings-pronated player like Molly Tuttle, you generally can’t see any. Glen Campbell always wore long sleeves but he looks sort of minimally supinated to me, similar to you, Al Di Meola, etc.
But the arm position is really just a hint, it doesn’t tell us what joint motion you’re making and as you point out, you may be just making the same motion from various arm positions. All stuff you already know.
Anyway nice work on the sleuthing here, let’s hope you’ve put the painful phase behind you. If you want to do multi-escape phrases, I think it’s likely you can still do that from one of the arm positions you already know. Some (painless) experimentation will reveal.
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