About Cracking The Code
Cracking the Code uses evidence-based methods to understand guitar technique and turn that knowledge into practical instruction. We pioneered many of the concepts players now use to understand and improve picking motion.
We made picking technique visible.
The investigation began with an independent-study paper at Yale in 1991, continued with our first close-up camera experiments in 2004, and reached a wider audience with the public Cracking the Code series in 2014. The common goal was to understand the movements expert players use to change strings at high speed—movements usually learned by feel and described as talent, practice, or personal style.
Along the way, we introduced terms including escape motion, pickslanting, stringhopping, edge picking, swiping, and more. That shared language made techniques that were once largely subconscious easier to see, discuss, test, and teach.
Details that once looked like personal quirks suddenly made mechanical sense—why Yngwie Malmsteen favors certain string changes, or why John McLaughlin so often finishes a string with a downstroke.
The people and the story.
Cracking the Code is the work of players, teachers, researchers, filmmakers, and builders. Meet the team—or see how a homemade camera rig became a new way of understanding guitar technique.
Team
Meet the people behind the work.
Our team combines high-level playing, mechanical analysis, research, production, and years of experience helping guitarists solve real technique problems.
History
Two decades of investigation.
The project began with a question, a collection of VHS tapes, and a computer-controlled camera rig. The answers eventually changed how guitarists talk about picking.
Research into practice
The research is only useful if players can use it.
Research
We film exceptional players and researchers in close-up slow motion, often revealing movements the players themselves did not know they were making.
Instruction
The Pickslanting Primer and our focused seminars turn those observations into a practical way to learn, test, and refine technique.
Feedback
Technique Critique applies the same observational method to an individual player, using real video to identify the problem and what to try next.
We build what the work requires.
Our first slow-motion camera rig was a computer-controlled contraption of mounting arms and wires. When smartphones gained slow-motion capability, we designed the Magnet because existing hardware could not reliably capture the picking-hand view we needed. What began as an interview tool became a practical way for any player to film and examine their own technique.
The common thread is simple: observe carefully, test assumptions, and turn what we learn into tools players can actually use.