The Rusty Cooley Collection is a painstakingly remastered release of three classic meetings featuring hours of new footage and hundreds of musical examples. This massive new release offers a close-up look at one of the most fascinating techniques we’ve filmed. It’s also a document of the history of musical technique investigation itself.
A Timeline Of Technology
A chance meeting with the amazing Rusty Cooley in June of 2003 made clear how much we didn’t know. We filmed a collection of six short clips with my handheld pocket camera which, for the time, were stunning in their clarity… and frustrating in their opacity. Even in slow motion, they revealed nothing about what motions he was actually making to enable his high-speed string navigation. The quest for a better solution had begun.
Over the next two years, I assembled a working rig based on a new class of imaging device: a FireWire camera. The digital camcorder revolution had made it possible to power a small-yet-sophisticated camera like the Basler a602fc with a single FireWire cable attached to a consumer computer. Mounted with a contraption of repurposed lighting gear, and triggered by an Objective-C Mac app that I wrote, the small CMOS camera was capable of hundreds of frames per second, in color, with a global shutter no less. A daylong session at Rusty’s house was punctuated by numerous software crashes and dead batteries. But what emerged was a stunning glimpse of high-speed picking motion in unprecdented detail.
Eight years later, Apple released the iPhone 5s, infusing a consumer device with the kind of high-speed video capability previously limited to research scientists and professional broadcasters. Eight months after that, we were back to Rusty with a prototype of what would eventually become the Magnet. The four-hour session was again stymied by numerous technical mishaps. But the sheer freedom of recording continuously without the need for brief timed takes was liberating. And the quality of the footage was far beyond anything that had been achieved before in the study of picking technique. The future of investigative musical interviews had arrived.
Rusty Cooley Remastered
Over the past several months we went back to the original files and tapes, some now over 20 years old, to remaster this seminal series of interviews. This was a massive undertaking: tracking down video tape hardware long out of production, navigating dropouts, and synchronizing footage that drifts apart with no timecode. There were many long days, but the result was worth it.
This complete collection includes hours of new footage and musical examples:
- Rusty Cooley 2014 – Test driving the Magnet prototype. A 1.5-hour discussion distilled from the original four-hour session and featuring a massive 150 musical examples
- Rusty Cooley 2005 – A 1-hour discussion pulled from our original day-long session debugging the ShredCam in August of 2005, with 48 musical examples
- Rusty Cooley 2003 – The six original pocket camera recordings that began the story. If you hit our web site back in the mid 2000s you may remember a few of these classic clips, re-synchronized and color graded here for maximum quality.
How To Watch
The complete collection is two and a half hours of interview time and over 190 musical examples with tablature. It’s available right now on the Cracking the Code platform for subscribers.
It’s also available as a free upgrade to previous purchasers of the original “Rusty Cooley Code Archive” on Gumroad. The upgrade is automatic – just log into your Cracking The Code account here on the site. Note that if you are an OG viewer, and you have never logged into troygrady.com before, you may not actually have an account here. That’s ok – just make a free account, and use the same email address you used on Gumroad. You will then have free streaming and download access to the new Rusty interviews, immediately.
For everyone else, now’s a great time to buy an a la carte copy in the store, or to sign up for a Cracking The Code membership. Try out your hyperpicking chops alongside Rusty. And if you get stuck, remember that comprehensive feedback from the instructor team – which includes me – is included as part of every membership.
Thanks for watching Cracking the Code!
We just finished this massive update of Rusty’s interviews. The OG viewers may remember that we released Rusty’s footage as abbreviated collections of musical examples way back in the day. But we never assembled them as complete interviews, mainly because it wasn’t obvious how to do so.
These were not traditional interviews so much as test sessions with new camera and computer gear. There were tons of starts and stops, camera and audio dropouts, computer crashes, and dead batteries, to name but a few of the technical snafus. Filling in the gaps of all the downtime was much improvisational noodling and random tangential conversation. In other words, normal stuff!
This time around we were able to leave much of that in, while trimming out the dead time and false starts. This was a massive undertaking that involved weeks of tracking down old hardware to reimport tapes, and tricky synchronizing of drifting footage filled with dropouts. But I think the result was worth it.
What we have is a supremely watchable document the early days of our slow-motion interviews: one stop in the ShredCam era, and the second in the Magnet/IOS era. And as a bonus, we’ve included the six pocket camera clips I filmed in 2003 (!) when I first met Rusty.
There is tons of really cool stuff in here. Rusty is an endless font of clever picking and fretting patterns applied to interesting harmonines of every sort, from major to lydian to altered dominants and whole tones.
His technique is one of the most interesting and unique we’ve filmed. It’s fast, yes. At one point I ask him to use his hyperpicking technique but do it a “comfortable” speed, which turns out to be about 235 bpm sixteenth notes. His typical cruising speed is more like 240-255. And all-out he gets up around 270-280 bpm.
The motion is not strictly elbow technique. It’s a really interesting blend of wrist and elbow, which we can tell from the slow motion footage. We can also tell due to the fact that the escape appears to vary based on the ratio of wrist and elbow, with some phrases appearing more obviously DSX and others appearing to switch escapes, presumably due to the wrist changing its axis of motion. It’s very cool and raises questions about what each of these joints is doing to facilitate the technique.
Of course Rusty also plays actual coordinated lines at these speeds, while making subtle adjustments to the picking motion to avoid tricky inside picking scenarios even when the motion is trapped. This includes his interesting solution to the Paul Gilbert lick, which technically involves unpicked notes, even though the picking hand never actually stops picking. How is that possible? You’ll have to watch the interviews to find out.
We talk about this in the 2005 interview, where I’ve overlaid the footage we’re discussing as we discuss it. The ShredCam was driven by a laptop and allowed instant playback, so we were able to watch the footage right after we recorded it. This is actually something we can’t do as easily in the Magnet era since the Magnet usually never stops recording. We do stop the Magnet a few times in the 2014 meeting, so you’ll see some overlays and off-screen discussion there too. Also very cool.
Anyway, tons of great stuff here and despite the massive headaches of putting this together, I’ve enjoyed watching the conversations. It’s a real blast from the past that sheds light on all kinds of interesting questions that are still relevant to the interviews we do today.
We’re still working on transcriptions - those should be up over the next week or so.
Yes! Exactly. The 2014 meeting has even clearer footage of this, again with the “ghost pickstrokes” technique where he picks air on the displaced note to avoid having to do different escapes. It’s particularly obvious on the string skips version. Sounds really good too:
This is not traditional legato since the picking hand never stops picking - it just makes a super tiny pickstroke that doesn’t reach the string he’s aiming for. I think this is because it’s mechanically more efficient than actually trying to completely start and stop the hyperpicking motion for the unpicked notes. So the solution, amazingly, is to keep picking but just try not to hit anything.
This a great example of a technique which I think it would be almost impossible to reproduce slow. If you try to deliberately make a pickstroke that is smaller than all the others, I can’t even do it. Rusty doesn’t even know he’s doing it. I think this is just something you have to learn by feel when the hyperpicking motion is active.
Ironically, my experience is similar. He was one of the first people I spoke to but he was in hindsight a very tough first interview since nothing he does is super literal “pick all the notes” with alternate picking using an obvious escape. How are you doing descending sixes without 2wps? Why does the pickslant look like “not-UWPS” yet he plays DSX phrases? And so on. All questions I wouldn’t be able to answer yet.
Someone like Batio was much more straightforward. Everything I thought he was doing, he was doing, exactly as I predicted. Rusty is a puzzle we’re still figuring out.
Yes that’s the most interesting part of this. Despite what I do for a living, I’m actually not that interested in genetic freaks going fast just because they’re “built different”. I’ll never be Usain Bolt. But if you tell me someone figured out a cool technique that I might also be able to learn myself? Now you have my attention.
When you look at Rusty’s technique with modern knowledge, it’s really pretty unusual. The wrist joint still moves independently of the elbow, which he discusses in the 2014 interview. I gave you some slow motion at that point to highlight this. But even in the wide camera at normal speed, he does not look like a traditional Vinnie Moore-style elbow player. And the escape has all kinds of unusual variation that an elbow player could not produce. That’s the tipoff that he’s doing something different – something that regular people might be able to learn with enough experimentation.
If you get a moment to tool around with the bulging brachioradialis that he points out, give that a shot. I really want to know how easy it is to activate this elbow-wrist fusion thing that he does, for seemingly tireless 250+ bpm motion.
Yes he does! He still uses wrist motion, just not with the middle finger grip any more. But I’ve seen this older clip and it’s great. Rusty has all the technique you would want.