Do you have trouble synchronizing your hands? Is your picking slower than your fretting? Is your fretting slower than your picking? At Cracking The Code we hear these complaints daily. And our response is the same each time: How do you know? Without a rigorous plan for testing and streamlining both hands, it’s impossible to know why your playing sounds uncoordinated, or how to fix it. Until now.

Today at Cracking The Code we’re releasing Synchronicity: our comprehensive new seminar on the critical subject of hand synchronization. The seminar includes 40 carefully sequenced lesson chapters, three expertly crafted songs, 32 rudiments for easy practice pattern generation – easily over three hours of new instruction. Check out the overview here:

It’s Seminar Season

It’s becoming something of a yearly tradition at Cracking The Code to roll out a new seminar release right around the Black Friday holiday sale. Last year it was the amazing Obisidian, carefully crafted by the equally amazing John Taylor.

This year it’s Synchronicity, written and hosted by Cracking The Code instructor the esteemed professor Tommaso Tufarelli, following his stellar previous work on our Metronomic Rock DSX seminar. Synchronicity formalizes a whole segment of Cracking The Code teaching on hand synchronization encompassing literally decades of our thinking on this subject.

Our introduction of the neuroscience term “chunking” to describe the foundational process of encoding musical instrument motor skills goes all the way back to 1992 and the original Cracking the Code independent study. We addressed it again in the original 2014 Cracking The Code series, and in our subsequent seminar releases. But our understand of its centrality has grown since then, and it’s great to see it return in a fully evolved and more easily visible way in our teaching.

Order From Chaos

The crux of the course is learning to create a structured set of memorized motor skills that automatically link the hands across common fretboard shapes and picking patterns.

If you’ve never deliberately worked on synchronization the modern way, it will be eye-opening when you realize just how structured everything is. A synchronized player executing a stream of fast pickstrokes on a single fretted note is NOT just hammering away on a tremolo with no knowledge of where they are in time. Far from it.

Even free-time, accelerando, and rallentando playing is structured. These are just several cases where traditional metronome practice techniques are difficult to employ, and why you won’t actually need a click source for most of the challenges in Synchronicity.

Simply put, sychronization is not about matching your motions to an external pulse. It’s about matching them to an internal pulse, tying the hands to each other. This permits locked motions even when the tempo is changing – something that human conductors and live musicians do all the time.

Players like Yngwie Malmsteen and Eric Johnson famously float over the beat while maintaining perfect hand sync through precisely regulated fretting and picking groupings. In Synchronicity we’ll show you exactly how this is achieved.

What’s Included?

There are all kinds of cool concepts in Synchronicity that we’ve literally spent decades developing: internal vs external synchronization, synchronizing free-time and changing tempos, chunking and metachunking, constant picking speed, and more.

Given our focus on clean string-switching mechanics, it’s interesting to note that Synchronicity is escape-agnostic: most of the work happens on a single string, and the three awesome etudes that Tommo wrote and performed (Latin, Jazz, and Rock) leverage this to sound convincingly like real music while mostly avoiding fast string changes. So you can play these even if you’re not yet familiar with the escape motion you’re using, or haven’t worked on learning new ones. Nice.

But What About The Frets?

Also note that there is a ton of fretting in Synchronicity – our overhead camera gets plenty of use. But it’s not a lesson on fretting mechanics. That’s separate territory, and we wanted to carve out meaningful space for an eventual mechanics-themed seminar on actually doing fretting motions themselves.

However, even with such a seminar in place, you still need a strategy for testing the resulting shapes and linking them up with what’s going on in the picking hand. So that’s our focus here: testing what you already do, without prescribing precisely how to do those things. The same is true of picking: The Primer shows you the how, Synchronicity puts those pieces together.

Who Is Synchronicity For?

Synchronicity tackles a fundamental topic but it’s not necessarily a beginner lesson. If you’re an experienced player but you’ve never really focused on quote-unquote “fast” playing, then it’s possible and totally reasonable that you may not have focused on developing the structural scaffolding that permits synchronization at high speed. If so, then Synchronicity is definitely for you.

No matter your skill level or previous experience, there is one critical requirement related to picking motion efficiency that needs to be in place for the techniques in Synchronicity to work. Check out the second introductory chapter for details on what this is:

Black Friday Extended!

To give you a shot at grabbing a copy of Synchronicity, or any of our awesome deals, we’re extending our Black Friday deals to midnight EST on Tuesday December 9th. We’ve also added a Synchronicity and Magnet bundle so you can save on both while acquiring the instruction and the tools in one fell swoop.

Already a Masters in Mechanics subscriber? No problem! The world is already your oyster. Head over to the Synchronicity homepage and start watching now:

NOTE: Synchronicity is brand new! Several lesson groups are already up: Introduction, Core Concepts, and Chunking the Picking Hand, along with the three etudes and all the rudiments. This is already over 40 minutes of the sequence. The remaining sections will upload over the next several weeks as we edit and export. Stay tuned!