If I understand things correctly the following has some great RDT based rhythm chops on display:
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Probably! Hard to tell with the long sleeves, some of this could be forearm-wrist. But then again the wrist component of forearm wrist is also reverse dart.
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Yeah, I wasn’t 100% on this but this is definitely a very common looking DM setup. My RDT assumption was based on the general hand setup and look (especially on the gallops)
I would post better examples but apparently, I still can’t embed videos 
Suffocation, Long Island’s own!
This song has LOTS of USX, so I don’t think it’s just wrist RDT.
Yes, Terrence is a big inspiration!
Definitely not exclusively RDT as you’ve correctly noted, but I feel it’s a component. Despite the clear USX in a lot of this, if you follow the path of the pick and the hand setup it has an RDT look to my eyes.
some more great clips with (I think) RDT to some extent:
FYI to embed videos don’t use the button just paste the link, one per line.
Note that you can still do USX with RDT. I have an example of this in one of the lessons. You tilt the arm a small amount to create the pickslant. In addition, there is a slightly different direction of the wrist that you can engage. The whole thing still looks supinated though, and there is not obvious forearm involved. It doesn’t feel as fast as the DSX one which is why I think it’s a slightly different joint motion. But it does look like wrist.
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\m/ \m/
This is the kind of stuff I used to pick the edges of my desk with in jr high and high school. Still so much fun to play. I was told by a teacher that I phrase like a saxophonist when I solo, but I never let go of this kind of riffage!!
Yeah, I did see that in the lesson and therefore now I’m looking at things a bit more critically rather than just USX or DSX (IMO) it’s a bit more nuanced than that.
Re imbedding: just the standard YT address (like above) or the specific imbedded link? (via share > imbedded)
Here’s a pretty good video with closeups of Terrence’s picking hand. He tends to stay pretty far on the side of flexion.
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This concert has some great footage of TH’s right hand, anyone have any insights on this kind of tremolo motion?
It’s hard to say in all cases, but I would say this motion here in this clip looks very much like RDT wrist, because the whole hand is moving back and forth relative to the arm:
So it’s definitely in there. Only question is does he switch to elbow at some point when he starts to get tired. That’s possible, since it’s also DSX and should work for the same lines. The elbow doesn’t care what form your wrist takes, so you can have a flexed Marty Friedman-type posture and still do elbow joint motion. I think that’s why you might see some of these death metal players flip flopping between these two joints.
Edit: I also do see finger joint motion on some lines, the slower ones that involve more complicated riffing. That’s common, John Taylor does that as well.
What I’m not seeing is any forearm joint rotation in his technique so I think we can rule that out.
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What do you think about the “arm pumping” motion he has going on in the initial linked vid (reposted and cued to the particular spot)? This part is all USX, a gallop with 2 notes on A and one on E. Is it as simple as the slightly different form to obtain USX you mentioned before, or does this extra shoulder/rotator cuff/whatever motion aid the escape?
I don’t know, and the sweatshirt makes it impossible to see what’s going on. I do something similar with index grip where there’s a very small amount of forearm sometimes. I’ve posted this before:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9AQ849n8VK/
You can definitely lift the whole arm up with shoulder / upper arm action, so that’s also a possibility as you say.
I always take it back to the practical, beacuse most of the time we wonder these things because we’re trying to learn the techniques, not because we work in a science lab and we really need to know what is actually happening. Although that can be useful, of course, for other reasons.
For the wrist stuff, regardless of what is actually happening, I just think about the hand going really fast and making a tapping-style motion along a diagonal. Whatever else happens, happens. It has to feel super easy and reach the target tempo. If it doesn’t, then I just assume it’s not useful and not going to improve, and I need to keep trying until I find the easy way.
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Here’s a couple of contributions to the CtC RDT METAL!! cannon. These are almost 20 years old and it took a lot of work to hunt them down, haha. I pulled them up in iMovie, added a black background and uploaded them for this. Like I said in a different thread, it’s not Death Metal, but we had sections that hit similar speeds. It was significantly faster live, which did not help my burgeoning hand issues…
This was before “Djent” and “Deathcore” were things, and though we weren’t necessarily in those genres, it was close enough. I don’t really know what the hell we were specifically because these are just 2 of the 10 we recorded (we weren’t around very long), and they’re just as all over the place as these 2. We didn’t do the whole “verse-chorus” thing. More like chapter 1, chapter 2 and on. They’re basically glorified demos. Drums and guitar were tracked live in one take (minus maybe 2 obvious guitar bits), the bass and vox were overdubbed. By “glorified” I mean that they were recorded at MI’s Studio A that I got for free because I taught in RIT. We had 1 night to do it, so we did what we could. Its not album quality but it sounds decent for what it was. We also used Virgil Donati’s drum set but he doesn’t know that, hahaa. It’s not blazing fast throughout, but its got some moments that hurt my picking hand thinking about. I don’t remember the tempos but due to our style, they’re all over the place anyway, lol.
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