Purveyor of fine horror-metal riffage and all-around amazing player Miles Dimitri Baker joins us for a deep dive on technique, tone, and the uncanny mechanics that make his guitar playing both terrifyingly tight and endlessly fascinating.
Muting, Mechanics, and Murderous Barre Arps
Miles plays lefty, despite being a natural righty. This geometric twist provides some serendipitous but really illustrative fretting hand camera angles that make it clear how he solves certain common yet tricky mechanical challenges.
In this excerpt from the interview, Miles talks us through a classic problem in high-gain playing: how to keep multi-string arpeggios clean and tight without letting notes bleed into one another. His approach involves cycling through specific hand postures that fret each of the three strings with a different part of the index finger. This effectively turns one finger into three, and keeps each note distinct – even with murderously high gain and even over harmonic nodes:
Embedded Lessons
The really fun stuff happens when we look at more complex fretboard patterns. If you’ve watched any Cracking the Code lessons, you know that the common three-note-per-string scale conceals a difficult mechnical challenge: odd groupings. Navigating string changes with an odd number of notes on each string requires either double escape technique or two-way pickslanting, and often both. This reveals the humble scale to be far from the beginner exercise it’s often presented to be.
Miles does indeed make expert use of two-way pickslanting, but he augments this with yet a third method which the Magnet footage makes clear: displacment. This approach is both stealthy and incredibly common, ranking it among the least-understood phenomena in picking technique.
To help exlpain what’s going on, the interview includes a lesson sequence courtesy of Cracking the Code. This six-chapter, 35-minute mini course is a kind of “missing manual” for Miles’ technique, covering everything from USX motion to two-way pickslanting, displacement, and more. It’s included free with every a la cart purchase and of course available on the Cracking the Code platform as well.
What’s Inside
The full 76-minute interview includes 56 musical examples with tablature, as well as a special six-part lesson sequence from Cracking the Code featuring slow-motion footage of Miles’ picking technique. Topics include:
- Single-escape (USX) picking and how Miles expands it with two-way pickslanting and strategic string changes
- Fretting-hand muting strategies, including barre arpeggios and dampening open strings
- Finger independence, posture, and fretting-hand mechanics
- Recording tone and gear overview
- Tricky patterns in Ice Nine Kills songs
- A full playthrough of “The American Nightmare” by Ice Nine Kills
Whether you’re a horror-metal fan or just interested in clean technique that holds up even under withering live performance conditions, the conversation is packed with usable insights. It includes a range of cool topics not covered in other Cracking the Code interviews, and makes great use of our multi-camera studio setup.
Watch the Full Interview
The interview is included with a Cracking the Code membership, or you can purchase it à la carte from our store.
All purchases include lifetime streaming access to the full interview on our site — complete with timestamped musical examples linked to SoundSlice pages for interactive, slow-motion tablature playback. Perfect for studying every twist of the wrist and finger roll in close-up, slow-motion detail.