Brendan wears many Code hats, including interview production, website wrangling, marketing strategy, and product design.
The design of our smartphone camera mount has taken a quantum leap of sophistication in its most recent iteration. In fact, it has matured to such an extent that we’ve been using it in our own projects here at Cracking the Code. We recently produced a series of special features spotlighting Season 2 picking techniques in various musical styles. Read More
Word of the Code has been ricocheting around the Internet, from Facebook to forums to sites like Guitar Noize. We love reading your comments and emails, and following the discussion that’s been happening around the show. Every one of you who identifies with the project validates all the work we’ve put into this. And we’ve recently gotten some pretty awesome further validation from the web server behemoths and Internet at large: we’re now on the first page of Google results for “Cracking the Code”! Read More
In Season 1 of Cracking the Code, classic video games frequently serve as analogical springboards for discussing the challenges of high-speed guitar playing.
Read More
Doesn’t it feel like just yesterday — or at least just last decade — that Cracking the Code first seeped into your consciousness, blazing riffs and whispers of picking secrets crackling across your computer screen and through your speakers? Well, with Episode 8: “Fast Forward”, we’ve hit our first big milestone and wrapped up Season 1. There’s much yet to come, but we’re proud to close the first folio of this journey and get down to business on the next steps.
Let’s go back to November 19, 1990, to a mid-size concert venue on the edge of campus in a college town on the eastern seaboard…back to one rocking night at Toad’s Place, where both Alice in Chains and Extreme took the stage, performing to a crowd of twenty-somethings, buzzed, and abuzz with excitement. While Troy remembers this night clearly — the cheering crowd, the lights, the energy, the unique sound of Alice in Chains, the picking mastery of Nuno himself — I don’t remember it at all; I was still in Seattle (and in diapers) and wouldn’t set foot in New Haven for another couple decades. If you weren’t there either, it’s hard to imagine the atmosphere and excitement that permeated the space, hard to feel the experience of being at that particular concert. But it’s an important scene to the narrative of Cracking the Code, and in the process of creating Episode 7: Licks et Veritas, we had to come up with some way to depict this event in all its glory.
Season 1 is halfway complete; we’ve released our first four episodes, and are hard at work on getting through the back nine. Back four, rather. Sorry to mix the metaphors. Episode 4 is (as of right now) live on the Season 1 page, and it just might be our best yet. (Though I also really like Episode 3. And Episode 1 will always be close to our hearts…) Suffice it to say, we’re happy with the quality of what we’ve been putting out, and hope you’re enjoying Season 1 as well. We’d love to know for sure, though, so if you have a minute, we’ve created a brief questionnaire to get your feedback and find out what we can do to make the show even better.
Retro gaming meets rock in this sneak peak of an upcoming behind-the-scenes look at our audio production process. In this sequence, from Season 1’s Episode 3, “A Pick and Hard Place”, Atari’s trackball-powered classic Centipede provides the visual analogy for an investigation of the fretboard contortions of the infamous descending fours lick. You’ve played it. You’ve cursed it. Don’t worry, we all have.
Stay tuned for the full Centipede studio feature in weeks to come.
