Ha! I really haven’t spent huge amounts of time looking at Eric. The few times I have, what I noticed is that you can find examples that look more “wristy” and you can find examples that look more “fingery”, and everything in between. So I was annoyed that the “famous” guy wasn’t the best poster example for wrist technique for watever lesson we were working on. Add to the fact that he seems to have morphed over the years.
Off the top of my head I can’t remember which ones I looked at that were really fingery. But I’m looking at the 1997 House of Blues performance right now, because it’s the first later one I could think of, and his form at this point in time has more finger action. He looks almost like Rick Graham, with the relatively flat hand position and the thumb seemingly involved for the alternate motion and the downstroke sweeps:
It’s not like his playing is any worse here, it’s still the same level of Eric. It just looks like the technique has morphed a little.
I have no doubt that you’re right, that when there’s more obvious wrist motion, it’s probably some type of flat reverse dart motion. From a practical perspective, the reason why I don’t think he’s a super great example to show people is because of the idiosyncratic variation. If we want to show someone what “wrist motion” looks like, there are much simpler, more textbook examples we can use for “player with only sideways hand motion” — like Bonamassa or Stern.
Also, as an aside, people that do this finger stuff seem to have a hard time turning it off, especially when the technique they want to learn is similar in overall form, i.e. interference. Martin Miller for example, I’ve talked to him, and he was like, hey how can I do wrist motion? Anything even vaguely deviation-y, his finger thing starts up. Nothing wrong with that, it’s great, as we all know. But because he’s a teacher himself, he just wanted to know how to do these other motions.
Turns out, Martin also has a Gypsy-style arm position that he uses, which I didn’t know about because he doesn’t really use it. When he switches to that, he has a Marchbank-type all-wrist motion that he can do at 240, and he can play synchronized USX, all-evens lines that way. It’s super fast and easy for him, and obviously wrist. It’s just different enough from his other technique that it lives in a separate mental box.
Sorry, I didn’t answer this one. Yes our new teaching replaces the old teaching — we totally removed all the older wrist section videos. We’ll continue updating this new section to make sure we cover all the bases.
However, this doesn’t really change the end result as much as you might think. Someone following our current teaching can see results that look like Di Meola, and they can see results that look like the clip I posted above. It’s just a simpler way of teaching this family of techniques, with a better explanation of the “why” and they “how” of what you’re trying to achieve.
Once again, I would only worry about this if you don’t think your current technique is optimal in some way. If it sounds good and feels good, then keep on keepin’ on.
