Have you tried putting your elbow lower on the guitar so your arm is parallel to the floor?
The Brendan Small interview features elbow picking and metal riffs, so there’s lots of palm muting there. That’s a good place to look.
I pick elbow and palm mute a lot. The string being muted goes on the knife edge of the palm, where the string meets the bridge, and the amount of muting can be adjusted by either the angle of the palm to the string or the spot where the hand touches the string. My forearm makes contact with the guitar.
I’ve found it very important to put the pinky on the body of the guitar as a guide for the hand because otherwise the transitions across the strings at high speed tend to result in the guitar bucking around like crazy because of that forearm contact point. The pinky anchor point maintains the stability of the guitar and guides the forearm to lift during those passages.
Here’s a video where Kerry King plays one of his faster riffs around 2:40. I think these fast Slayer riffs make great picking exercises. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-wgGY4DWUI
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Try anchor with your pinky, will give you a guide and you can have better control of how close you hover above the strings.
The point of contact of the palm mute will be somewhere around here for elbow:
I can’t totally tell if Rusty Cooley is using light palm muting or not here because everything he plays just sounds so percussive at these freak speeds
and even if he’s not palm muting here, he’s so close to the strings that it’s easy to see how you could add a little palm muting from his posture.
Each clip we see of the various “slowed down” steps are alternating between the 2 drastically different techniques/speeds he demo’s in the wide shot at the beginning. The slower one is a rotational movement and the fast one is obviously elbow.
At any rate, in an elbow mechanic the palm mute won’t be at that “karate chop side of the hand/palm” that we traditionally think of with palm muting. It’s not very compatible with the motion because it starts orienting the pick slant downward and that can cause garage spikes.
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But if you do, do downward pick slanting, it will be the karate chop side, using technical terminology 
Looking at it more i think hes using the lower palm section, the upper part is also on the strings, but the lower palm is definitely in contact? I see he’s acually using downward pickslanting.
I think he’s using both…
What do you think of this @joebegly
He’s also using forarm rotation that blends away into elbow motion. Tho this fkn guy is so fast I can’t come close to showing it lol. Damn…
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Maybe so, you may have something there. I don’t know how he’s making it work (but he obviously does) Downward pickslanting and using elbow is not a good match generally. Ask me how I know? lol! Not that I understand everything now, but back when I was clueless and first learned about Troy’s site I thought I could just slant my pick down, keep the elbow and I’d magically get USX. What I got was a fast-ish motion that was fatiguing and just felt hard. The mismatch was contributing to that.
Zakk Wylde makes DWPS work with elbow, but Troy suspects he has another joint helping out, like rotator cuff. Pure elbow DSX works best when the pickslant is slightly up or neutral.
Check out the awesome Bill Hall’s magnet shots. He switches to some palm muting and instantly changes his motion to a more laid back wrist motion. Once he gets fired up again, the elbow mechanic jumps back in and the palm muting disappears.
Bill’s an awesome player and super nice guy. I should have thought to just ask him. @Bill_hall, how do you do it??? Lol! Do you play palm muted lines paired with your elbow mechanic?
Yep that could work. I know Andy Wood says he uses that region to palm mute and sets up sort of flat on the strings. He’s a wrist player, but primarily DSX so in theory that would translate to an elbow setup
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It’s forarm rotation. Zack is a downward pickslanter, the forarm rotation facilitates the elbow.
I can’t comment on the rest, tho I notice in your playing it looks like it’s all up n down, but it’s not is it… I’m sure you feel that twist of the forarm. This is something brought up in a couple past topics, if forarm rotation is acually there. Do you feel it? Your playing is so good it visually blends into just an up down motion.
Seeing a lot of good ideas and solutions here… trying some of them out I’m finding that I’m able to get a more unconventional palm mute with the fleshy part below the thumb that works on kinda all the strings. It’s amade a little more difficult by the fact that I can keep the hand close to the bridge for the “semi-muted” sound that you can get with wrist playing, so there’s more like a delicate balance of pressure that has to be applied.
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Lol I think you and I are banned from discussing forearm rotation lol! We tend to talk ‘circles’ around each other (bad pun intended) 
I certainly wasn’t going for any rotation in those old clips I posted. I did, purposely, pursue a forearm rotation motion in efforts to get USX. This is from like a year ago. I’m better at it now, but that feels like my forearm is rotating.
Yep, just picking up a guitar and doing my default elbow motion, trying to add in palm muting, that’s exactly where I feel the contact
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you n bill hall seem to have the same hands as me. I honestly think there is a whole mechanical world to be explored with different hand types. My thumb is really straight relative to evh, I think there is an avenue thats not been explored that is ripe for explanation if you know what I mean. Different hand types most certainly have different effective motions. I’ve posted about this many times but it’s never been taken seriously
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Oh my thumb is pretty bendy too
Troy’s talked about how people that fit certain anatomic profiles have access to doing things different ways. So I wouldn’t say your idea hasn’t caught on, or maybe better said “wasn’t on the radar”. Any positioning thing we can do is going to have some implication on how we play. It’s how all the amazing players got to where they were. They chose comfortable setups and figured out the joint/muscle combo that worked with that. I’m sure it’s chicken/egg as to if that ended up dictating their vocabulary or if the vocabulary coaxed them towards the setup that worked with it best.
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I don’t think this is correct. Maybe there is incidental forearm rotation happening but largely the elbow joint moves back and forth
Troy did a whole chapter on this and demo’d his own version and rotation just isn’t there
Not in the ‘CtC’ context where it’s driving the motion and creating the escape. I can rotate my forearm, and I can move my forearm back and forth (from the elbow) but I cannot do both at the same time. Again, if you’re saying that it’s physically impossible to have the elbow joint hinge back and forth without a little incidental wiggle/rotation from the radius/ulna…that’s fine. It’s not likely enough to help with an upstroke escape though.
That video is a couple years old at this point and Troy’s constantly refining his understanding of things. At the time of the video he mentioned he didn’t know what he was doing to cause the escape. Maybe now he knows, but given the fact that Troy’s the owner of one of the world’s most awesome rotational mechanics and knows exactly how he makes that happen, I think it’s safe to say rotation is not something people should think about if they’re pursuing Zakk’s elbow mechanic.
I’m pretty sure it is forarm rotation, like talked about before it blends away visually, but it’s facilitating the entire thing.
If you look at this you can see it. it is small but I see it. I’ve done a lot of usx myself, certainly doesn’t make me an expert but I’m convinced the forarm needs to rotate to allow the picking to work well. When I say rotate it’s perhaps a bad way to explain it. like you know if you wiggle a wheel back n forth in a short range some people might not class that as rotating. Maybe forarm wiggle is a better definition?
I bet you if zakks bones in his forarm were locked in place with a metal bar or whatever, he wouldn’t be able to play. Or atleast it would extremely hamper him.
I can’t view the mnm material atm. I’ll have to check it out in future, perhaps I’m just talking nonsense lol. I do believe the forarm is a fundamental aspect of it tho.
lol I do apologize for bringing it up again You’re not going to convince me, I’m not going to convince you. I’m gonna go watch your transformer video again though that was AWESOME lol
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Thank you, @joebegly!
I do use muting with the elbow mechanic at times. I had to just now pick up my guitar to see what I actually do, lol.
Most of the time I use my wrist more when muting…especially when playing rhythm stuff or medium tempo lines. If I was going to play faster lines with muting I would use the elbow. I actually do it by just flattening my palm so it touches the strings while keeping my elbow motion and right hand position the same. When I use the elbow without muting…the pinky side of my palm does not touch anything, but when I am muting it does. I hope that helps!
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Cool, thanks for confirming! That’s the only way I can do it not mess up what feels natural. I’ll dig around your videos and have a look. I know you do plenty of Al Di inspired stuff and I’m sure at least some of that features palm muting. Thanks again!
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That doesn’t look like Zakk’s motion to me. Yours looks like a wrist motion that has some forearm rotation blended in.
Here’s another one
On the fast scalar stuff (which we see within the first 10 seconds), watch that big thing on his wrist…it moves in the same plane as his elbow because…that’s all that’s moving lol! Again, if you want to split hairs and say “if he were hooked up to an MRI or X-Ray or something we’d see a slight wiggle in his ulna/radius”…that’s fine. Though it’s hypothetical. The important thing with all these motions is we have to tell our bodies to do something. Plus ‘rotation’ is a very specific term in CtC nomenclature and what we see Zakk do is something other than that, entirely.
Now, this is different motion entirely:
Fast and slow examples, you can see that thing on his wrist wiggle in a rotational plane. I have no issues calling that rotational because it is. That’s similar to the gypsy technique. Maybe his technique has changed over the years?
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[quote=“joebegly, post:21, topic:67810”]
a wrist motion that has some forearm rotation blended in.
[/quote] yeah.
It’s not hypothetical its personal experience. I know my right hand… to much lol
The secondary example literally proved my argument, and I know you’re doing that on purpose lol you know it.