I think we’ve talked about this before (maybe privately) but is there a reason you feel this way? One of the biggest things I’ve learned from Troy is that our fast picking should be the same motion we (can) use for a tremolo. The clarification needed, in my mind, is people think of “tremolo effect”, that thing almost every 80’s shredder did in a solo when they were out of ideas (i.e. relatively unmeasured and sloppy/crazy sounding), as opposed to “playing fast, even notes” in time with the music (i.e. usually 16ths, 6’s or 32nds depending on the tempo). The latter is what Troy wants us to find. Forget about “your fastest possible motion” for a second, and think of your go-to gypsy style picking. Can you sustain that, for a couple of measures, around 16ths @ 180-ish bpm??? That’s really what we’re talking about when discussing tremolo in the CtC context.
When I decided I wanted a USX motion, I found that without much work, I could do this with a rotational movement even going a little above 16ths @ 200bpm. No, I couldn’t sustain this for 30 seconds, but for my purposes I don’t care about that (i.e. personal, not at all discrediting @Jacklr approach since it obviously worked well for him). I could tell this was a drastically different motion from the elbow motion that I could easily floor to 230bpm+, and I could feel the difference easily. Now, of course there is a problem that happens when trying to introduce the fretting hand to this newly discovered speed/motion. I’d notice right away that when trying to fret notes, my rotational motion changed. I could see flexation happening and I also could feel my elbow start to engage. That’s a very separate problem to solve than finding a fast motion though. We always talk about hand sync, but we also need hand independence to make this whole thing work, just like it’s hard to brush your teeth while you comb your hair. I made progress by doing “tremolo melodies” on one string. So, intentionally measured 16ths at a high speed, only changing fretting hand fingers every beat or 2 beats. That allowed me to make my fretting hand ‘move’ while still keeping this newly learned motion on target. The next step was to change strings, so I started doing that, still with a tremolo melody so the fretting hand could be fairly easy while being able to focus on the new picking motion. Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t difficult at all. even if I’d skip strings. When you do a single escape motion properly, string changes shouldn’t feel like anything happened.
The final step is to get to 1 picked note per changing fretted note…That’s where I think the smaller fragments are helpful, so long as we’re making sure we aren’t reverting to the old motion. It helps us internalize the chunks at a higher speed. It’s been suggested that this speed begins at the point where you can’t ‘sing along’. The brain/nervous system processes these things differently at the high tempo compared to the low tempo. It’s very similar, in my mind, to speed reading where you have to train yourself to not hear every word you’re reading in your head, as if you were speaking them. Rather, you’re looking at larger groups of words and you trust your brain to process these chunks.
That’s why whether you start with speed or not, at some point you’ve got to devote some time to playing at high tempos. The way the hands and brain function on the lower speeds is just different. I got ‘ok’ results with the dogmatic approach of playing with a metronome and creeping up little by little, but it wasn’t until I started putting Troy’s principles to work that I started making noticeable progress. And it’s still a work in progress 
I feel like in ways I’m a beginner again where I’m trying to wrestle these different coordinations I’ve learned and make them rote. But the moments I have on a regular basis where I really hit high speeds and it feels good and locked in are like nothing I’ve experienced in my pre CtC days. And I wasn’t ‘slow’ then. I could do 16ths around 170 -180, but it felt like a lot of work. Now those speeds feel fine.
Sorry for the rant, I got suddenly passionate about the topic lol! @bradejensen I’m only saying this because I’ve heard you say many times that you feel like you’ve reached your limit and even 12 notes per second seems unsustainable. I really think you’ve got it in you, it might take doing something differently than what you’ve been doing though, and maybe that tremolo motion is the key to it all.
18 notes?
Enough notes in a row so that you can’t fake it and have to force yourself to experiment with new motions caused by the randomness that happens when attempting to do something you can’t currently do
