Nice playing, @Rubaan !
You’d think this would happen, but it doesn’t look like it in his case. Any “still” I grab during the runs, I never see his pick slant much beyond a slight “up” like here:
So that could be a clue. The links @kbr supplied talk about trying to get a more “zero degree” pickslant and that’s step one from that posture IMO. If you want to do slightly “up” slant I’d say checkout how Dave Grier and Molly Tuttle navigate their DBX.
I’m not great at diagnosing video but since DBX has been a pet project of mine for a while I’ve experience many of these gotchas. Choppyness can be caused by too much pick depth BUT I think more normally we see it when there’s a mismatch in the setup vs the motion somewhere. One great thing you’ve done is compare to your DSX. When DBX is right, it should feel no more effortful than well executed single escape, so keep going back to that litmus test. Tweak things till it feels easier, don’t keep doing the exact same thing and expecting it to get better. I’ve fallen into that trap too often lol
Also, I used to think breaking 120 bpm meant you were golden but I’ve heard Troy say even 140 is too slow to rule out possible inefficiency. And that’s been my experience. It’s sort of “tiered”. Breaking 120 is great and allows you to play lots of awesome stuff in this genre. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t optimizations we need. I do think the link supplied by kbr is excellent and the most recent guidance on how to get DBX going as quickly as possible. Troy’s gone through lots of iterations of teaching us how to get motions going. Seemingly, that zero degree pickslant RDT setup gives us DBX “for free”.
As I mentioned above I think you should set your sights even higher. You want to find the motion that “works” at higher speeds. In this realm I’d expect to hear/see some swipes. I’ve posted about this probably more than most people care to read, but I’ll say it again - Steve Morse and Andy Wood have tons of swiping when they get into the 150 - 160 bpm range. That’s not a knock on them, it’s just what tends to happen as the motion flattens out. They sound awesome! But the point is, doing some tests in those ranges can be illuminating because if the motion we’re using won’t go that fast, it’s inefficient on some level, maybe even just slightly.
Great work though! It’s exciting progress and sounds great. My experience with this stuff is that breaking into those next level of speeds can be challenging if we don’t keep the whole program in mind - constant honest feedback. Does the motion work at decently fast speeds (140 - 150 in this context)? If not, we’re either trying to be a little too clean and not letting the motion do it’s thing, or we’ve got to tweak the motion and change it to make it faster.
