USX Economy

Combining USX motion, downstroke sweeping and downward pickslanting creates one of the most popular picking styles of all time.

By now we’ve examined different ways you can create USX picking motion. And we’ve also looked at the mechanics of how pickslanting and sweeping can work together. When you combine these three ingredients, you arrive at one of the most widely-used picking styles in guitar: downward pickslanting economy.

USX economy is a one-way economy picking style because it utilizes a single direction of sweeping — the downstroke sweep — to economize specific string changes. So in the USX economy style, sweeps only move in one direction, but alternate picking can move in both directions, provided the final pickstroke on each string is an upstroke.

In the core USX economy system, USX alternate picking and downstroke sweeping provide the two principal picking motions. Phrases built around these ingredients may require certain notes to be played with specific pickstrokes, left unpicked, or in some cases removed entirely to maintain efficiency at high speed. This produces structural similarities across players and musical genres.

USX Motion

In the USX economy system, USX motion supplies the primary continuous alternate picking motion. When paired with phrases that contain an even number of notes on every string, string changes are possible even at very high speed with no mechanical penalty:

This common six-note pattern is a staple of single-escape picking thanks to its even-numbered groupings. When started on a downstroke as it is in this example, each upstroke rises into the escape zone, making for easy transition to the next lower string.

Even though the first half of this phrase occurs entirely on the E string, USX motion is maintained the entire way, so escape motion is generated even though it’s technically not necessary. There is no mechanical “cost” to doing this, since single escape picking motions are already about as simple as a picking motion gets. But there is benefit in that no change to the motion itself is necessary beyond simply relocating it to the desired string.

Downstroke Sweeping

Picking pioneer Yngwie Malmsteen is remarkably consistent in applying USX economy to his vocabulary of classically-inspired scales and arpeggios, and his signature phrases offer many illustrative examples of one-way economy design at work.

While Yngwie’s use of sweeping for arpeggio playing generated immediate interest in sweep technique in rock guitar, what was less known at the time was the critical role sweeping played in Yngwie’s scalar technique. In this example from his REH instructional video, Yngwie sequences a 10-note circular pattern through successive positions on the top two strings:

Given the blazing speed of this phrase, it’s not obvious upon first listen that sweeping figures prominently in its execution. But slowing it down makes this particular economy component clearer. Let’s take a look at just the first iteration of the sequence:

Yngwie plays three notes on the B string, the third of which is actually a downstroke sweep that is also responsible for the first picked note on the E string. The sweep is necessary here because downstrokes are trapped in USX motion, and can only switch strings through sweeping — and only then when moving to a higher string. In this case, that works out conveniently, as the third downstroke of the phrase can simply push through to the next string:

So sweeping in the USX economy system isn’t just economical, it’s structural. While there is no doubt mechanical savings in allowing a trapped pickstroke to play more than one note, the real reason it’s being used here is because it is the only string switching option available. This has the significant benefit of simplifying the motions needed to play a notoriously complex sequence like a three-note-per-string scale.

In this sense, using the term “economy” to describe this approach is a little misleading, because it implies that playing these notes another way would simply require more work. But physical labor isn’t the problem — it’s complexity. We know that it’s possible to play scales efficiently with pure alternate picking, but we also know that relatively few players seem to do it well. So rather than making scales more economical, the primary benefit of Yngwie’s USX economy approach is that it makes the picking motions easier to figure out, with less trial and error.

Legato and Forced Upstrokes

The return string change highlights the specific role that unpicked or legato notes play in USX economy technique. Counting the tail end of the initial downstroke sweep, the complete picking sequence on the top string of the lick is down, up, down, up — one pickstroke short of the number of notes on the top string. So the fifth and final note on the string isn’t picked at all, but instead pulled off:

Within this picking sequence, the final note cannot be picked with an upstroke because the previous pickstroke was already an upstroke. Without changing the sequence or introducing another ingredient such as downpicking, the remaining solution is to leave the note unpicked.

Using either a pull-off or hammer-on as the final note on the string is a very common USX economy technique for ensuring the final picked note is an upstroke. In this example, the slur converts the number of pickstrokes from odd to even, allowing Yngwie to return to the lower string using an escaped upstroke. The same device can also shape articulation, as jazz players use slurs to connect accented upbeats smoothly to strong beats.

Fretboard Refactoring

Yngwie’s final mechanical tweak concerns the symmetry of the phrase itself. Specifically, the sequence ends with only two notes on the B string, omitting the middle note of the three-note fingering that he played on the way up:

Even though this results in the phrase having a metrically unusual total of ten notes, this seemingly unorthodox choice is once again grounded in mechanics. Much like his use of pulloffs, this is Yngwie’s way of forcing the final note of the sequence to be an upstroke. This ensures that the next iteration of the sequence will begin on a downstroke, maintaining the carefully constructed alignment of sweeping, pull-offs, and upstrokes that make its string changes work so efficiently even at these very high speeds.

The DDU Sequence

Another great example of these design considerations at work is a picking sequence that plays a critical role in many USX economy phrases: DDU. In the DDU sequence, a downstroke sweeps across two strings followed by an upstroke on the higher string. The DDU pattern provides a mechanically streamlined way of tackling what is ordinarly a challenging situation for alternate picking, namely a single note on a string by itself.

Fusion pioneer Eric Johnson’s famous five-note pattern, which Eric uses as a core building block in his vocabulary of pentatonic phrases, is a classic demonstration of DDU in action:

In Eric’s five-note pattern, he plays four notes with USX motion, using the upstrokes to switch strings each time. He then connects the fifth note of the pattern back to the first note with a single downstroke sweep that plays both notes:

USX escaped upstrokes take care of the fast string changes on the first two strings of the pattern, and sweeping handles the fifth note of the sequence, located on a string by itself. So the sweep not only plays the last note, but also the first note of the next iteration of the pattern. This ensures that the pattern always starts on a downstroke, setting up the proper sequence of pickstrokes to enable the upstroke string changes and sweeping to work as intended on all subsequent iterations of the pattern.

Just as it does with Yngwie’s scale pattern, USX economy solves what would otherwise be a challenging mechanical puzzle, allowing Eric to play this pattern quickly with high reliability and few errors, even at this rate of speed. In fact, it is notable that Eric’s five-note pattern is a common one among USX economy players, while it has remained uncommon in the vocabularies of even very good pure alternate players. This is not to say that the phrase can’t be played with alternate picking, but only that the challenge of figuring out the correct motions may make it less likely for pure alternate players to try. By comparison, the fact that its structure aligns well with common USX economy picking patterns may simply make it more likely to be discovered and mastered by those players, even if they didn’t specifically set out to do so.

The Primary USX Economy Style

Despite its simple mechanical vocabulary and seemingly restrictive set of requirements, USX economy is one of the most widely used mechanical approaches for picking, found among players of an array of plucked instruments including guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, oud, sarod, cuatro, and probably many others. In addition, players who use this approach seem more likely to make it their primary picking style, such that it is reasonable to think of certain players and even entire musical styles as essentially reliant on it.

This includes players like Yngwie Malmsteen and Eric Johnson, both of whom rely nearly exclusively on this picking style for fast lead playing. Metal master Marty Friedman is another famous USX economy user whose downward pickslant, vertical upstroke escapes, and clear use of downstroke sweeping are super easy to spot when viewed in slow motion: