Hi, it’s been a while! Some time ago I noticed an interesting anomaly in my technique, which I thought was just accidental. Today I read the article on secondary motion and realized that it actually seems to be more common.
I was one of the unfortunate string hopping only people before I found Troy’s YouTube channel. I consciously learned first an Yngwie style USX technique powered by forearm rotation, and later a wrist based DSX technique (which I realized I could also do with the elbow).
While my USX technique is what I’m most comfortable with, I started noticing that I was automatically using the DSX technique for some phrases. And those phrases weren’t supposed to be playable with only DSX, like the inside picking version of the Paul Gilbert lick. I realized that I had developed a secondary motion which uses forearm rotation - just like what many of the players mentioned in the article do.
There is something weird about it, though. It only works for ascending string changes. I can do an upstroke, rotate the forearm and move to a higher string. But it doesn’t work in the other direction, where the forearm rotation + tracking to a lower string pretty much guarantee that I will hit the string. Like I said, I thought this was a quirk of something I had developed kind of randomly.
But then I read the article. It starts with an example of Andy Wood doing his forearm secondary motion on ascending string changes. The next example is the Pepsi lick. Even though it is a descending scale, the string change which requires secondary motion is an ascending one.
Then there’s MAB playing the same thing in reverse, which means that he would need secondary motion on a descending string change. Presumably this is so difficult to do cleanly that he would rather start the whole pattern on an upstroke so that he can do secondary motion on the ascending string change.
The next clip is Teemu. His technique is primarily USX and he rotates his forearm in the opposite direction to achieve an escaped downstroke. This means that everything is flipped for him and his secondary motion should work on descending string changes. And sure enough, that’s what the clip shows.
In the last example, Andy Wood plays descending string changes with a different secondary motion. But he already has a forearm rotation motion, so why not use it? Is it so difficult when descending that he instead developed a whole new secondary motion to compensate?
I’m sure there will be counter examples, especially since a swipe here and there most likely isn’t too bad. But it seems too consistent to just be coincidence.
I also realized that the “difficult” string changes are the ones that can be played with sweeps, but my descending sweeping has never been great and I currently don’t have a secondary motion to complement my USX technique, so I can’t verify how well all of these things could work together.
The wrist based motion doesn’t come naturally to me, I will need to deliberately practice that. But it seems to me that your example confirms my observation as well - different motions for ascending and descending string changes.