If that’s what struggling looks like, I think I’m gonna need a new hobby 
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For real, your playing sounds really smooth and, most importantly for me, effortless. What do you feel now that your technique has been improving in your desired direction? Does it feel like you have to exercise additional physical strength or mental focus?
Haha, thanks a lot! If you go back and watch the first videos in my thread, I couldn’t even play a 16th-note tremolo at 120 BPM. Even that felt impossible because my motion was really forced, I was super tense, and my hand naturally wanted to go back to DSX.
I’ve felt a pretty big improvement after a little over a month of practicing USX intensively. A few things really helped me.
The first one sounds stupid, but just trying to keep my wrist as relaxed as possible and using more of the natural weight of the hand instead of forcing the motion with the wrist. I feel like it lets me play in a much more relaxed way, and I’ve definitely noticed an improvement in both fluidity and speed.
The second thing was using rest strokes as much as possible and basically imagining that I’m aiming for the body of the guitar when I pick. So on a downstroke, for example, I kind of think “go toward the body.” Obviously I’m not actually trying to hit it, but that mental image helps stop me from falling back into my natural DSX motion.
The third thing was the pick angle. I use a pretty strong downward pickslant, and I actually exaggerate it in my head, almost like I want the tip of the pick to point toward the ceiling. Obviously it’s nowhere near that extreme in reality, but when I get that angle right, picking feels easier.
None of this is automatic yet though. I still have to actively think about it while I’m playing, like “relax the hand, get the angle right, aim the stroke this way.” If I stop thinking about it, I can still tense up or fall back into old habits.
One thing I’m still working on is muting. With my old DSX motion, the thumb side of my hand was basically sitting on the strings all the time, so muting came very naturally. With USX, I tend to have the hand a little more pronated and sometimes slightly off the strings, which is actually more comfortable for some phrases, but it can make muting harder. I’ve seen Troy’s videos about this and I know it’s not necessarily a problem, so I’m trying to work on that too.
And for the anecdote, what really made me want to work seriously on USX was seeing Eric Johnson live in the Bay Area about three months ago. I remember coming out of the show thinking, I really need to force myself to work on this, even if it means changing my technique, because I absolutely love those cascading pentatonic lines and I want to be able to play that kind of stuff.
Funny thing is, EJ seems to pick those lines a lot less now anyway. A lot of the pentatonic cascades he plays live these days seem much more legato-heavy than pure economy picking.
Just sharing in case any of this helps someone.
I appreciate the kind response. I don’t mean to come off as abrasive… Really. 
I can just get a bit passionate about this topic!
RE: Pinky
The reason I prefer pinky resting SOMEWHERE on the guitar is for proprioception (“seeing through feeling”). If it’s not touching the guitar and I need to play passages with ringing notes (EG: Carpe Diem section from A Change of Seasons / Dream Theater), then I still have some sense in space of where my hand is above the strings. When you float without any kind of something touching the guitar, you are required to activate many muscles in the pecs/lats, shoulders, and forearm to attempt to get stabilization… This leads into the “too long of a lever for accurate control” that I allude to in my motion video (Neuroscience of Picking).
I am never exerting any kind of “force” through my pinky. It’s hanging there limp. In fact, my JP15 has a glossy worn spot where my pinky has dragged along for years. Ha!
RE: Thumb
In my technique, specify that the thumb should only be used for one thing, and that is adjusting the pick ANGLE**. Not the pick slant. Many people preach a 45 degree slant. I find that a 45 degree slant is too fluffy. Flat is problematic because the pick doesn’t slice through the strings. My recommendation is to see a middle ground. (“22.5 degrees”)
While the pick, *pick grip strength, *pick depth, *pick angle all matter a ton… We should not discount the major impact that the Amp/IR combo you use can accentuate harsh articulation.
(* = These are the elements of a concept I call the Articulation Triangle)
Start experimenting with each of the aspects I listed above with no volume or an unadulterated clean tone. Find a combination of those that produces a desirable attack, then go to whatever sound you regularly play with.
On picks - I and many of my students find that the Flow style picks work well for my recommended hand setup. I especially like the Flow picks because they come in all different sizes. I prefer JP Flow 2.0 for “shred”. I use the 0.73 for cleans. I use Dunlop Jazz III XL Max Grip w/ the rock/country-ish band I play in. The Jazz III XL is a little steeper, which is great for more articulated parts w/ string skipping.
** - The only other place I use my thumb in technique is some final, slight adjustment when doing sweep picking to help maintain the angle…
(It also comes up in 1NPS stuff… But this is a totally different animal than sustained shred.)
RE: Middle finger
I recommend “stacking” the middle finger onto the index finger.
This is because when it hangs loose and you’re playing on low strings, it risks bumping top strings. This works for some players, but it takes effort. Sometimes, when I’m playing 7 string, sure… My middle finger does come off a little bit. I’m not a robot.
If you use the “fist” style grip, I find that for many players (myself included), the last joint of the middle finger sticks out bumping the strings. Players compensate in all kinds of ways:
This CAN depend on individual hand geometry, but closing the fist entirely MAY compromise the availability of other motions.
A fist grip with the pick rest ON or past the last joint in the index finger also compromises a helpful degree of motion to be had with index finger+thumb movement… Again, only for slight final positioning of the pick and NOT the primary picking motion.
RE: Biomechanical optimization
I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue that any particular grip offers a particular advantage with the same degree of exactitude that one may argue any particular picking motion may provide a benefit…
This is because the grip is the final moment at which our hand interacts with the instrument. The instrument was not made for our hands. It was made for the strings!
So, unlike picking motion (which may be affected in a variety of ways), pick grip is a place where we must consider how to conform to the guitar not with “the best grip”, but one that offers the least amount of drawbacks.
Hope this clears things up!
A side note: there’s a thread floating around somewhere where a former member of the board (sadly passed away) detailed how to pick every note of EJ cascading pentatonic fives with DSX. It’s actually doable! Point is moot now, though, since your USX is sounding great
I’ve seen that, awesome video. But the EJ songs are so naturally wrote for USX, if you want to play Cliffs Of Dover DSX, it’s a complicated path to write back everything to match this motion (incorporate hybrid, and even swybryd from Marshall Harrison help).
For years, I considered this song litteraly impossible to play for me, I couldn’t even think about reaching that intro speed, now I feel I will be able to play it someday (with a tremendous amount of work, and I mean “play” it, no “master” it of course). 
First, I want to clarify my tone here: none of this is meant as hostility. I’m simply trying to be truthful, direct, and precise about the claims being made.
RE: Anton:
I have never ever signed up for any lessons or training with Anton. Anton’s YouTube videos reveal relatively little about his technique. It would only make sense that we arrived upon similar conclusions because both Anton and I developed our techniques by reading science and not by observation of players.
I’ve also had multiple students come through my course and experience positive results after previously training with Anton. Both of the players which come to mind were NOT slow players or newbies. They were already pretty fast. Like at least 160 bpm 16ths fast. I think that’s relevant when comparing the approaches.
RE: Troy References
“A lot” is inaccurate. The entire series is just under 2 hours long with me talking about Troy for a handful of sentences. This makes up well under 2% of what I talk about.
The only references to Troy in my work are in video 1, where I point out correctly and with multiple scientific sources to say that trying things immediately at speed is of little value. This is further reinforced in my second video with abundant scientific resources going back over 200 years.
The second overt reference to Troy in my work is in video 2, where again, I point out that the motion of the body is not the same as the pick. Describing a picking motion as “USX” or “DSX” describes the motion of the pick, but it doesn’t describe the motion of the body. I then immediately show in the video how the only 5 different fundamental motions our body can offer us can all achieve what is known as “double escape picking”.
Troy is aware of my work and we chatted in the following thread, where I clarified both my mistakes, as well as my intent. It’s even in the replies of the pinned comment of my practicing for speed video, basically as visibly as I could put it!
RE: Universal technique / "People shouldn’t just copy you"
All of the understanding in the world of “what motion is best” does nothing for you if you cannot get your body to do it. This is what I have figured out. It’s why all of my students develop technique which is virtually the exact same as mine… And why they can develop that technique in a matter of 2-4 weeks.
This should ultimately be seen not as “universal” *, but rather as a starting place and a training ground that eliminates the flaws encountered with many other approaches. I am even planning to create a video here soon called “Convergence and Divergence” which goes over how people who follow my method’s technique will become very similar to mine, and then they can create small modifications based on what they need. But usually, modifications aren’t needed because the technique is so capable… Which is also why I have students who benefit from my training methods even though they come in playing faster than me or become faster than me. I had a guy yesterday working on 140 bpm sextuplets multi string.
I’m always open to kind, substantiated discussion, but I’d ask that people bring evidence to the table as I have. Across this series, I reference more than 30 scientific sources, along with endorsements and commentary from motor-learning scientists, psychologists, and other relevant experts beneath the videos. Not to mention the consistent student outcomes.
Hope this clears things up!
What is your opinion on the Warp 3 video? In fact I feel like I saw you discuss it with Troy on forum at some point 
This is an important distinction to make but I would point out Troy also makes that distinction and has done for years, the problem is people who watch a little bit of Troy’s work and miss this
You also seem to recommend people away from the trailing edge grip? Troy wasn’t able to hit Shawn Lane speeds until he experimented with it:
I’m not sure this is true, as far as actual licks go (not talking about the super vertical quasi-tapping motion). If you clock the fast playing in the Still of the Night and Shawn 4s and 5s vids, it’s almost exactly the same speed as what Troy did at the start of this video with typical leading edge grip, from what I believe is 20+ years ago. It’s all somewhere around sextuplets at 140, 16ths at 210.
https://youtu.be/YKUhlsc5fEI?si=YN3mwhckkZxDUc2t
That said, if anyone likes the feel of trailing edge, by all means, enjoy! I just don’t think it confers any actual magic ability boost unless leading edge is uncomfortable due to reasons of hand geometry.
Okay fair enough, maybe those were bad examples. I linked the video here at some 250bpm 16ths (RDT this time):
What about all the stuff in the RDT video about metal players using trailing edge for high speeds? I thought the whole point was the wrist movement used with a trailing edge grip is closer aligned to the true RDT path the hand can make etc.
Maybe this is a boost in performance, but it’s hard to say. The amp shopping vid intro is 10-11 seconds straight of 16ths @ approximately 210, and it all looks pretty easy. The 250 vid is just one measure at a time… Troy might’ve been able to burst that out back in the day, as well, had he tried.
I’ll preface my response by saying that I think Troy is absolutely the man, and has had an incredibly massive impact on how we even think about technique. I’ve been following his work since before Cracking the Code was even officially a thing. But, you’ll see qualifiers like “in theory” thrown around a lot when talking about extreme RDT, and I know several long-time members here don’t get any performance boost from tall mouse over small mouse.
As for the trailing edge extreme metal guys, I still think this is just an outlier and they pick that way only because leading edge feels weird to them for whatever reason. For every one Dean Lamb from Archspire, there are multiple Dallas Toler-Wades and the guys from Suffocation.
Personal anecdote: a couple of years ago I had a student, and we developed a trailing edge technique for him. But this was clearly due to anatomical reasons - despite being relatively tall at around 6’1", he had proportionately short thumbs compared to the rest of his fingers. So, for him, trailing edge led to improved performance, but only because leading edge performance was basically impossible without discomfort.
Yeah, put me in this bag too. I’ve tried it, I’ve gotten it to work, I think I can go just as fast with leading edge (though it likely involves throwing in a little elbow).
Unlikely. I don’t think I could have just “tried more” with whatever technique I was using. I was already trying. The speed you see - whatever it was, I never measured it - is simply what ‘fast’ was with that technique.
I’m sure I and plenty of other people serendipitously used very fast motions in everyday life while knocking on doors or tapping on tables. And for obvious reasons we never thought to calculate their equivalent alternate picking speeds while doing the dishes.
But on an actual guitar, the posture that allows those motions to actually play a string creates obvious garage spikes with most ways you would normally think of to hold a pick. This prevents you from getting through the string and forces you to stop. This is the gating factor: discoverability. The combinations that work are simply not obvious.
There’s a really great old Dallas Toler-Wade video where he switches from obvious RDT to obvious DT in the 240+ range. When switching to the DT motion he even says “Sometimes I gotta break out this table…” I assume he means, like resting on the body like a table. As best we can tell, these are basically the two forms that will align the fastest axes with the strings. A regular person is not very likely to accidentally figure out these two rather uncommon guitar postures and motions. That’s why these players are so cool:
Elbow is probably the most easily discoverable ‘fast’ motion. Miles Dimitri Baker does it in his interview and easily gets near 300bpm while laughing about it, like a one-off “here’s a funny thing I can do”:
Notably I can’t do it, although I haven’t spent huge amounts of time trying. Elbow may be the obvious one for a lot of people but even that is not a universal rule. There are “can’t figure out elbow” players too, and I am one of them.
My point is just that discoverability and execution are really big problems with all these motions. There is some combination of overall form that aligns the joint motion with the strings in a way that could actually play a note. Then there is some feeling of producing the right muscle activation that causes the joint to move.
And after all that, if your pick grip is such that the orientation will not get through the strings, garage spikes will feel like resistance and you may be forced to stop. And the same grip does not necessarily produce the same results with all players, even when the rest of the form looks basically the same. This is obvious from Magnet footage. It looks like relative differences in finger lengths or maybe hand shape are the reason, though we can’t yet point to any obvious “you have DWPS thumb length” factors.
We have a healthy respect for just how difficult it is to: “know” what the correct technique is, know that your particular body type can actually achieve the necessary posture and grip, and then to actually trick yourself into making the muscles do the thing. None of this is a given!
I’m very much convinced there’s some Star Trek VI – Undiscovered Country here, by the by. I recently made some instant progress by changing where on the thumb I was holding the pick. I’d thought I had short thumbs, turns out maybe not so much 
Progress in terms of what? There are relatively few small-picture changes which produce super obvious big-picture results. But when they exist, it’s usually things like, this small change allows me to use different posture B, or different joint motoin C, and that is now the thing which works a lot better. That kind of thing.
I wasn’t going to bug you with details , but the tl;dr is:
I’m a wrist RDT player (Tom can confirm that I’m not hallucinating this). Moving the pick a little ways down the thumb (toward the… DIP joint?) made a big difference (think contemporary Rusty Cooley or Andy Wood rather than “minimal effort”).
I think it has more to do with pickslant than anything else; it enables slight wrapping without pain, and I could almost instantly perform what feels like wrist DBX with much less 2WPS than I had been using before.
Sure, anything is possible. This is a “needs more video” situation which I’d be happy to look at on the platform.
In general, I’m not wedded to any particular pick grip and wil will soon replace the current lesson with a very brief overview of the categories players use. The goal is just to allow new players to say, “Aha, that’s what George Benson is doing” but not to make any specific recommendation about what people should do.
Then the “do this” instructions will live in a series of very short hands-on videos with instructions for recreating various motions. The current “wrist-forearm” lesson sequence is a good example. It completely ignores the pick grip lesson and shows you what is essentially the only possible pick grip given the form this technique uses.
This format is probably more to the point. It avoids trying to systematize “how grips work” and instead uses the more immediate “do this”. If it doesn’t work given someone’s hand geometry then it doesn’t work. But it gets there much more quickly.
I’d be curious to see how fast 2nps ideas are with the tall RDT or elbow form, as well as swiping and pick displacement ideas. Also I wonder if pick displacement and swiping can be deliberately practiced like everything else.
You mention in your post that you came to your conclusions by reading science. Fair enough, but you’ve come to erroneous conclusions.
Your biggest issue is that you’ve made a mistake with regards to the wrist. If you look at the musculature of the forearm (which are the muscles that allow for the articulation of the wrist joint) you’ll notice that forearm is very asymmetrical; you can’t break wrist motion down into two pure categories of movement like flexion/extension and deviation the way you do. The muscles interact in complex ways to create those two movements; deviation is a compound movement.
Troy introduced the concept of dart thrower motion (and reverse dart thrower motion) to the vocabulary of guitar technique by collaborating with physiologists who have indicated that the motion that the wrists are basically evolved to do most efficiently is the dart thrower motion. Troy noticed that a lot of guitarists use a motion that’s a mirror symmetry of the dart thrower motion and coined the term reverse dart thrower.
You also reference the “degrees of freedom problem” in basically the opposite of how Nikolai Bernstein observed it, by the way: he noted that learners early in the process of becoming skillful in a motion reduced the amount of variables by freezing all the wider degrees of freedom and that as they improved, those degrees became looser as the brain learned how to recreate the same motion outcome with variability in the exact motions moved. The brain does not fix on “the first workable motion” it finds; it is instead constantly optimising the motion over time.
I highly suggest you look into the Ecological Dynamics Approach to motor control and read the works of Rob Gray (How We Learn To Move and Learning To Optimise Movement) because while I don’t think you’ve come up with a bad system, the ways you are trying to explain and justify said system don’t agree with all the literature available and, in cases, outright contradicts it.
Still working on EJ cascading licks. I’m trying different picks and also trying to push the speed a bit (sorry, the playing is far from clean or perfect, no edits).
Is my right-hand position okay? I feel more comfortable like that, but it may not be the most academic.
I’m also still hesitating between playing with a Jazz III or a triangle 356. I’m using a BlueChip TAD60 and a primetone triangle here. I love the glide of the triangle, but the Jazz III feels more precise on the high strings. When I try one type I feel that this is it, I find the right one… until I try the other type, and again and again
