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Highlights:

The Metronomic Rock series is an homage to a time when hair was big, string skips were bigger, and guitar heroes subdivided the beat with metronomic precision!

This first installment in the Metronomic Rock series explores one of the most popular picking styles of all time: DSX Motion. Used by everyone from picking pioneers to modern virtuosos, the DSX picking style is based on a type of “single escape” motion where downstrokes contain string-switching power, and musical phrases are designed to capitalize on this.

Legendary self-taught players like Paul Gilbert and Vinnie Moore learned to perform these technological feats subconsciously by streamlining their vocabulary to fit their mechanics. In MR|DSX, host Tommaso Tufarelli from the Cracking the Code team pulls back the curtains on this process with an array of powerful techniques and simple instructions for performing them. Along the way, you’ll learn to create stunning lines that maintain optimal efficiency and accuracy at any speed.

Topics in MR|DSX:

• An overview of DSX mechanics
• Downstroke- and upstroke-on-downbeat organization
• High-speed scale playing
• Optimizing shapes for rapid string switching
• Position-shifting strategies
• Two-string and string-skipping arpeggios
• Creating efficient pentatonic lines
• Legato and hybrid escape techniques
• Classic metronomic patterns and why they work
• Compositional tricks for generating novel phrases

The complete MR|DSX package includes:

• 39 lessons
• 157 musical examples with tablature
• Two complete songs demonstrating all techniques
• Tracks for each song, including isolated backing and lead parts
• Detailed tablature with all picking instructions notated
• Aquanet™, Spandex™, and band flyers/staple gun not included!

Prerequisite:

MR|DSX is a 200-level Cracking the Code seminar, requiring a basic operating proficiency in DSX picking motion. A good benchmark is the ability to perform a tremolo with a DSX escape path. Once you have that, MR|DSX is the lesson that takes that mechanical foundation and makes it musical.

Is MR|DSX right for you? Watch the introductory chapter below and find out!

How can you tell if your current technique — or the one you’re learning — is worth keeping?

For the most part, anything goes in picking technique, as long as you can perform the motions smoothly and effectively. And that’s the critical question. So the first thing we’ll do in this section is learn how to evaluate the efficiency of your picking motion, so you can make informed decisions about your progress.

We’ll also outline the minimum requirements of the deceptively tricky process of attempting to learn a specific technique, one used by a particular player or musical style. As part of this, we’ll take a look at the mechanical conventions that do and don’t exist in different musical genres, from metal to bluegrass to classical.

A motion mechanic is the joint or combination of joints you use to generate the picking motion itself.

Despite the seemingly endless variety of ways you can physically move a pick, the most common approaches actually fall into a few simple categories. In this section, we’ll take an in-depth look at how these important joints function. We’ll also provide some tips for learning to recognize them when you’re using them. This isn’t as simple as you might think!

The most fundamental techniques in picking all use a repeated sequence of motions to play notes or chords.

Some of these techniques, like downstrokes, can create sound only once per repetition. Others, like alternate picking and strumming, can play notes using both directions of the motion for greater efficiency. And some common picking motions, even though they move back and forth, are actually not very efficient at all. Let’s take a look at how they work.

One of the most common inefficient motions in picking technique is stringhopping, a picking motion in which the muscle usage doesn’t actually alternate.

Not all picking motions which appear to move back and forth actually alternate their muscle usage. Stringhopping is a family of wrist joint motions in which the muscles used to produce the escape are the same on both the downstroke and the upstroke:

In this stringhopping example, the muscles responsible for the side-to-side motion are alternating, but the muscles responsible for the up-and-down bounce do not. Those muscles, the flexors and extensors, are used on every pickstroke, and quickly tire out.

Vertical Appearance

Stringhopping is often noted for the vertical appearance of its escape path, in which the pick escapes nearly perpendicular to the plane of the strings. When stringhopping is performed quickly, the technique exhibits a bouncy appearance which is often easily visible even without slow motion video.

In itself, this vertical escape path is not the primary source of stringhopping inefficiency, and not all motions which create a visible U-shaped trajectory are inefficient. Instead, it is the fact of the muscle reuse which does not permit a complete cycle of recovery, and requires each of the muscles in the joint’s antagonistic pair to work on every pickstroke.

Fatigue and Speed Limitations

Even though stringhopping looks like alternate picking in terms of the reciprocating direction of the pick’s motion, it isn’t a true alternate picking motion at the level of the muscle usage. Players who inadvertently learn stringhopping as a primary motion instead of a true alternate picking technique typically complain of a feeling of pronounced muscle tension, rapid onset of fatigue, and an inability to play fast.

In common practice, stringhopping techniques reach a speed ceiling in the range of approximately 110 to 130 beats per minute sixteenth notes, with notable fatigue onset occurring within seconds of initiating the motion. This is far below the speed ceiling we observe in table tap tests of efficient alternating joint motion, anywhere from 180 to 220 beats per minute sixteenth notes. With training, such motions can typically be performed continuously for a minute or more, especially at the lower end of this speed range, since the rest period is more evenly matched to the exertion.

The tendency toward primary motion is broadly consistent across musical vocabulary, but players do appear to change it — and often even their musical vocabulary — at different tempos.

Double Escape to Single Escape Switching

One such change which we have observed nearly universally in our interviews is the switch from single escape to double escape motions as tempos increase. This change is most notable when the phrase in question can be played with simpler motions without negatively impacting the end result, such as single-string or tremolo playing.

For example, bluegrass great David Grier’s DBX wrist motion is the one he relies on at medium speeds:

But at elevated tempos, he switches to a mix of motions, both double and single escape, in which DSX actually appears to be the new primary:

Interestingly, this is still wrist motion, and still performed using the same pronated forearm setup that David uses for medium-speed playing. He’s just changed the type of wrist motion he’s making, from double escape to downstroke escape.

Multi-instrumentalist Andy Wood also changes his primary in a similar fashion, choosing a wrist-driven DBX motion at medium speeds:

Like David, Andy switches to a DSX primary for faster playing. This motion is still provided by the wrist — it’s just a different wrist motion:

Andy is also a world-class mandolinist, and it’s interesting to note that he maintains this same primary shift on that instrument as well. In this fascinating excerpt from his acoustic interview, he discusses what it feels like to switch between these two motions:

Speed-Dependent Musical Vocabulary

When David and Andy switch primary motions, they also make subtle changes to their arrangements to accommodate the specific needs of DSX motion: inserting legato notes, or rearranging phrases on the fretboard, so that downstrokes are more often the final note on the string. They sometimes introduce form shifts or helper motions to make certain phrases playable that might not work with DSX alone. This is actually complicated work, and when done consciously or deliberately, requires a fair amount of knowledge about picking technique of the sort you’re presumably learning right now!

But in trying to imagine how the motor system could do this on its own, primarily by the feel of physical feedback, we can think again in terms of probability. Just as with a beginning metal player, it may be that when you tell a bluegrass player to go fast, single-escape joint motions are the first ones they discover that can do that. And once they have those, it’s easy to imagine that a really good player like David Grier would experiment with different fretboard phrases until he found a few of them that happened to feel really smooth at that speed. And just like that, a slightly different high-speed vocabulary is born.

In other words, we’re not saying that DBX motions are slower than USX and DSX motions. We don’t know that for sure, and the answer probably depends a lot on which joints you’re using anyway. But what we do know is that single escape motions are often simpler, relying on a single joint moving in a single axis of its operation. Again, the elbow is a great example of that. So when speed is introduced as the main requirement, it may just be that “go fast” leads you to those motions first. And since time is money, even for your motor system, the first good solution you discover may very well be the one you decide to stick with.

One factor which we think exerts a strong influence on the choice of primary motion is the musical style you’re trying to play when you’re first learning.

Evidence suggests that familiarity and recency is what guides the motor system’s choices about which motions to learn and retain in long-term memory. The first motion you discover which is capable of successfully playing a particular phrase is the one you’re likely to retain, even if more experimentation could eventually locate other motions capable of accomplishing the same goal.

What this is means is that choosing a musical style can influence the process of learning core motions if that choice changes the technical requirements of the phrases you’re working on.

Single Escape Primary Motion

For example, when we film players who initially learned picking technique while trying to play faster styles like rock and jazz, we notice that their primary motions are frequently single-escape motions like USX and DSX. The use of Elbow motion for tremolo is a common example of this — here’s Brendon Small’s awesome elbow technique:

When your goal is playing really fast metal tremolo, elbow motion is an effective way of doing that. It’s also a simple joint that pretty much only moves one way. If we’re thinking in terms of degrees of freedom, it’s easy to imagine how a self-taught beginner who is proceeding by experimentation might be able to figure out this technique sooner than other more complicated techniques.

That’s our hypothesis, and it’s backed up by teaching experience where we ask new players to try moving as fast as they can without thinking too much about it. When we do this simple test, single escape motions like elbow, forearm, or single-axis wrist motion are usually the ones players discover, even if we don’t give them any other hints beyond the simple instruction to “go fast”.

Double Escape Primary Motion

By comparison, when you look at players who learned their techniques while playing bluegrass, you start to see a lot more primary double escape players. Here’s Winfield champion Carl Miner’s DBX pickstroke:

Expert flat pickers like Carl, Molly Tuttle, and David Grier learned picking technique in a style of music where straight-line speed wasn’t the first thing they were told to achieve. Instead, they played Bluegrass standards — short songs driven mainly by melodies where all the notes are typically picked.

While musically simple, bluegrass melodies don’t often follow regular patterns of upstroke or downstroke string changes, so it’s actually tricky to figure out how to play them with single escape motions. Doing so involves inserting legato notes like pull-offs and hammer-ons, or rearranging phrases on the fretboard, to change the number of picked notes per string. Bluegrass repertoire also includes roll patterns, which are one-note-per-string arpeggio phrases that actually require double escape motion when performed with alternate picking. So those phrases are hard bottlenecks that really can’t be done with single escape, at least not if alternate picking is the approach you’re using.

When you take all these requirements into consideration, it’s easy to imagine that the first motion a beginner hits upon that can actually satisfy them all is a double escape motion, even if learning it might not be as obvious as simply moving the elbow back and forth.

The tendency to choose one joint motion as a default starting point for all phrases is one of the most fundamental characteristics of picking technique.

With nearly infinite possibilities for generating complex joint motion, how does the motor system tackle the challenge of matching motions to tasks? Not only that, but how does it accomplish this feat in real time, during rapid activities like playing a musical instrument? In this section we’ll take a look at the fascinating tendency we call primary motion, how and why it develops, and which forms it can take.

A primary motion is a subconscious attempt to choose a generic default picking motion that is easy to learn, easy to perform, and works for as many of the lines you want to play as possible. If so, this probably explains why, among players we’ve filmed, most primary motions tend to be escape motions.

If you know you’re going to have to switch strings eventually, it only makes sense to choose a primary motion that can do that. We’ve already looked at Andy Wood’s DSX motion, which can switch strings using downstrokes. But there are plenty of others, like Joe Stump’s forearm USX motion which switches on upstrokes:

So when we refer to a player’s primary escape, we’re talking about which type of escape is created by their default joint motion. Andy is primary DSX; Joe is primary USX.

Another reason why primary motions are frequently escaped is that there are more escape motions than non-escape motions. Just because of the way we hold the guitar, some joints like the elbow automatically create an escape motion. Short of tilting the guitar’s body, there’s really no way for it not to. The same is true for the forearm joint, which almost always creates USX motion. So even if you were to choose a primary motion totally at random, you’d be at least somewhat likely to end up with an escape motion as a result.

It’s also worth noting that there is no mechanical “cost” to choosing a primary motion that escapes. Anatomically speaking, an escape motion isn’t really a different type of joint motion. We just use this term as a way of describing how a joint moves relative to the guitar you’re holding. But the motions themselves are just joint motions. Andy’s escape motion is the simplest kind of wrist motion you can make, just the hand moving back and forth. Joe’s escape motion is similarly simple, just the forearm rotating — precisely what it was designed to do. There really isn’t a way to ask these two joints to move that is simpler or easier than the way these players are already moving them.

Trapped Primary Motion

One example of a player who does not have an escaped primary motion is Jorge Strunz. Interestingly, Jorge’s primary motion is actually a trapped wrist-elbow blend:

Jorge’s use of a trapped motion starts to make a little more sense when we realize that his primary string switching method isn’t actually escape motion, but swiping, or playing through muted strings. This is another solution to the degrees of freedom problem. The motor system wants fewer variables, not more. Rather than having to learn a new motion for every type of string change, Jorge just uses this motion the whole time and plays through the strings that are in the way.

In other words, Jorge uses a trapped motion because he’s also using swiping. These two solutions go together because this results in the fewest number of motions to coordinate. By comparison, when we film players who use escape motion for string changes, those players are almost always primary escape players too, because that results in the fewest motions for them to manage.